Funestine and Other Adventures in Romancia Read online

  Funestine

  and Other Adventures in Romancia

  Edited, introduced and translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  THREE CONTES DE FÉES ATTRIBUTED TO CATHERINE DE LINTOT 14

  TIMANDRE AND BLEUETTE 14

  PRINCE SINCERE 37

  TENDREBRUN AND CONSTANCE 61

  GUILLAUME-HYACINTHE BOUGÉANT: THE MARVELOUS VOYAGE OF PRINCE FAN-FÉRÉDIN TO ROMANCIA 99

  PIERRE-FRANÇOIS GODARD DE BEAUCHAMPS: FUNESTINE 198

  PART ONE 198

  PART TWO 228

  PART THREE 266

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 301

  Introduction

  The first three stories in this anthology appeared in 1735 a small volume entitled Trois nouveaux contes de fées, avec une préface qui n’est pas moins sérieuse. When Charles Mayer reprinted the three stories in his Cabinet des fées in 1786 he identified their author as Catherine de Lintot, who had been previously identified as the author of Histoire de Mademoiselle de Salens (1740), but he added to that attribution the remark that the author was now fifty-eight years-old. As that would imply that she had written the collection at the age of seven, either “fifty-eight” must be a misprint or the attribution must be incorrect.1 That did not prevent many subsequent sources copying the paradoxical claim, although the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue put a dutiful question mark after the suggested birth date of 1728. Some later sources added a death-date of 1816, although the BN catalogue does not. Joseph de La Porte had previously included Madame de Lintot in his Histoire littéraire des femme françoises (1769) as the author of the 1740 novel, but he had not attributed the collection of contes de fées to her and he did not offer a date of birth or any other biographical information. The attribution must therefore be reckoned dubious.

  The apologetic preface to the 1735 collection, which is not reproduced here, was attributed by some later commentators to the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost, but that is equally speculative. If it were correct, however, it would provide a second link to the first of the two long novellas also translated in the present volume, in addition to the fact that it, too, appeared in 1735, and thus helps to provide a valuable insight into the context in which the first three contes de fées appeared. Although Abbé Prévost is not named in Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie (tr. as “The Marvelous Voyage of Prince Fan-Férédin in Romancia”), he is a significant presence therein.

  Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie was written by the Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougéant in direct response to a scholarly essay, De l’usage des romans, où l’on fait voir leur utilité et leur differens caractères, avec une bibliothèque des romans [On the Usage of Romances, which shows their utility and their different characteristics, with a library of romances], illicitly published in two volumes in 1734, allegedly in Amsterdam, with the by-line “M. le C. Gordon de Percel,” although it was actually by Abbé Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy. The second volume constitutes a bibliography of “romances,” categorized into different types. Lenglet Du Fresnoy went on to become a significant bibliographer of works on occult science and apparitions as well as further essays on romans.

  By the term roman Lenglet Du Fresnoy clearly meant “romances” rather than “novels” in the modern sense of the term, although the word was already shifting its customary meaning in French and several of the cardinal examples brought into focus by Bougéant, including those by Prévost, would nowadays be seen as early novels, and contrasted with the more fantastic stories that provide the basic material of his parody. Bougéant recognizes the nascent differentiation himself in observing that Romancie has already been geographically divided into Haut Romancie [Higher Romancia] and Bas Romancie [Lower Romancia].

  Bougéant’s work provides a striking allegory of the situation of fiction in Paris in 1735, symbolizing the world of publishing in one episode as a “city” in which the various annalists of Romancia each have their own street and shop-signs, according to their particular character, in a classification system markedly different from the one employed by Lenglet Du Fresnoy. Bougéant’s discriminates enfileurs (threaders) from souffleurs (blowers—as of soap bubbles), brodeurs (embroiderers) and others, including lanterniers ou faiseurs de lanternes-magiques (manufacturers of magic lanterns), which last category, includes writers of contes de fées, the contemporary scarcity of which is noted, but not explained.

  Although two fays are featured among the population of Romancia, the protagonist does not actually get to meet them, even in the somewhat cursory fashion in which he encounters centaurs, hippogriffs and all manner of other fantastic creatures and phenomena. The genre is tacitly regarded as something already consigned to the remoter annals—Bougéant obviously had not had an opportunity to see Trois nouveaux contes de fées before writing his own text, and no characters from contes de fées obtain the privilege granted to those in several more recent works, who are permitted to take their creators to task for their ill-treatment before a stern imaginary tribunal.

  Bougéant judged too soon, however; contes de fées were not dead, but had merely been consigned to an enchanted torpor, like his Prince Zazaraph. Not only were several of the collections that had received royal prerogatives in 1697-99, before new contributions to the genre was effectively banned from licit publication, still available and still popular, but they were still influential, about to prompt a new generation of writers to take up their literary quest—particularly the developments pioneered in competition by Madame d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat—and to carry forward the evolution that they had begun before being cut off in their prime.2 That renaissance was permitted and provided with a economic context by the paradoxical circumstances eloquently illustrated by Bougéant’s allegory, and it began in the same year as the publication of his own work with the illicit publication of Trois nouveaux contes de fées and an anthology, Nouveaux contes de fées allégoriques, similarly illicit and anonymous, although the longest story it contained, reprinted separately as Boca, ou vertu recompensée (tr. as “Boca; or Virtue Recompensed”) was eventually attributed to Françoise Le Marchand, who—according to Joseph de La Porte—paid for the publication.3

  The two 1735 collections were soon followed by two longer and more robust, albeit fugitive works, published in 1737, the long novellas Tecserion, and Funestine. The former was eventually attributed to Mademoiselle de Lubert, who went on to publish numerous works of a similar nature, all issued illicitly, a selection of which, including “Tecserion,” can be found in the Black Coat Press collection Princess Camion.4 The latter, which concludes the present anthology, was attributed to the dramatist Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps (1689-1761), whose principal literary work was a licensed four-volume history of the French theater, Recherches sur les théâtres de France depuis 1161 jusqu’à présent (1735). Other illicit publications speculatively attributed to him included contributions to the genre of “libertine fiction” that began to flourish in the 1730s—much to Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougéant’s disapproval—but he was also part of the “petite cour” of the Duchesse du Maine, a princess of the blood, who might have been peripherally involved in the initial fad for contes de fées in the 1690s. The Duchesse hosted literary salons of her own at the Château de Sceaux, and is also said to have obliged her courtiers to make up stories for her during frequent periods of insomnia; it is possible that Funestine owed its origin to that practice.

  It is difficult to give an accurate account of the renaissance of contes de fées spearhe
aded by the two 1735 volumes, not only because all the illicitly-published volumes were necessarily anonymous but because the people involved maintained a careful discretion in their other writings, carefully not revealing what they knew about who had done what, when and why. Fragments of circumstantial evidence suggest, however, that Françoise Le Marchand’s salon might well have been the most significant crucible in which the renaissance of the genre was nurtured. The internal evidence of the Trois nouveaux contes de fées suggests that their primary influence was the work of Baronne d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat, which were also the principal influence on the other major writers involved in the renaissance, but if one juxtaposes the work credited to Lintot and Le Marchand with the generic works published over the following decade by such writers as Mademoiselle de Lubert, Madame de Villeneuve and the Comte de Caylus it is tempting to infer that the writers must have been closely aware of one another’s endeavors, and consciously working in a common cause, perhaps with a element of tacit competition.

  Caylus, in an apologetic preface to the final brace of his contes de fées, written in 1760 or thereabouts but not published until 1775,5 states that he was urged to write his first such tales by members of the “companies” that he frequented in the late 1730s, and although he was careful not to name any names, the probability is that he was referring to Françoise Le Marchand’s salon, among others, and implying very strongly that there was a cabal of female writers there consciously recapitulating what Mademoiselle L’Héritier, Mademoiselle de La Force, the Comtesse de Murat and Baronne d’Aulnoy had done forty years earlier. If that is the case, then the author of Trois nouveaux contes de fées was surely a member of that group, and probably one of the most important in providing new exemplars for the others to follow. However, Caylus was also a prominent member of the Duchesse du Maine’s petty court, and was undoubtedly acquainted with Beauchamps. Caylus’ mother, who was brought up by Madame de Maintenon, had known the Princesses de Conti, and Caylus had known the Duchesse du Maine since they were children; he too might have begun improvising some of his tales in order to help soothe her insomnia.

  The first three stories herein translated do not add up a vast body of work by any means, but they are nevertheless remarkable. They show a very marked evolution, each story being more substantial, more complicated, and more imaginatively innovative than its predecessor. Although, to a large extent, they clearly attempt to take up where Baronne d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat had been forced to leave off, in terms of their imaginative extravagance, their use of metamorphoses and their quirky employment of allegory, they do so in a robust manner that is certainly not merely imitative. In particular, they show a marked further development in the direction of the calculatedly absurd and the surreal. Although it is arguable that the very multiplicity of those trends make the stories rather untidy and imagistically overloaded, there is certainly more virtue in striving to do too much than settling for barely doing enough. The hectic pace and bizarre imagery of “Le Prince Sincer” (tr. as “Prince Sincere”) and “Tendrebrun et Constance” (tr. as “Tendrebrun and Constance”), in particular, gives the stories a peculiar charm that might have remained unique had not Beauchamps, Lubert and Caylus taken up the thread, surely deliberately, and with an awareness of those models.

  If Madame de Lintot really did write the three stories translated herein, it is perhaps regrettable, in retrospect, that her subsequent publications appear to have been far more conventional and pedestrian, and that she left it to others to carry on what she had started, but it has to be remembered that all the people involved were operating outside the umbrella of law. Bougéant’s satire includes a sequence in which new books are likened to ships arriving in port, and notes that although only some of them carry an official seal of approval, the remainder presumably carrying “contraband,” it seems to make very little difference to their reception. Indeed, by 1735 the number of illicit publication printed in Paris probably exceeded the number equipped with royal privileges, and the police had already adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to most of them, in order to concentrate their attempts at active suppression on those they considered genuinely pernicious. There is, however, a considerable difference between tacit toleration and safety; any book about which someone in a position of authority cared to make a complaint, on any grounds, was likely to become a target, exposing its printer and author—if they could be identified—to prosecution and severe punishment. It was not a risk that anyone would take without a strong motivation, and as such books could only be sold, so to speak, “under the counter” the possibility of them generating any substantial financial return was remote.

  Although Bougéant’s satire is a flamboyant fantasy itself, its attitude to the fantastic in fiction—the principal stock-in-trade of his lanterniers—is curiously ambiguous. He clearly regrets the decline of Haut Romancie, but for largely nostalgic reasons, regarding it as charming but essentially obsolete. As a satirist, he is naturally unable to take the chimerical seriously, but he is not insensitive to the esthetics of the absurd, as developed by the author of Trois nouveaux contes de fées. Indeed, it is arguable that the depiction of the two fays of whom Prince Zazaraph gives a brief account to Prince Fan-Férédin celebrates that esthetic with an appropriate irony. Given the historical point that French fiction, seen in broad panorama, had reached in 1735, Bougéant was undoubtedly right to reserve his most careful attention and his most scathing criticism for romans carefully purged of the supernatural, and the trend-setting works of the Abbé Prévost in particular, but whether or not Prévost actually wrote the preface to Trois nouveaux contes de fées, there is still a connection between his melodramatic but de-supernaturalized fiction and that of the authors of the new wave of contes de fées that was about to flourish. Bougéant’s careful analysis of the strange formalities of Romancian amour is very clearly reflected in the three tales preceding his satire in the present collection, as well as the novella succeeding it.

  It is worth noting in this context that although Bougéant has obvious doubts about the utility and moral value of much recent prose, he has none at all about François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, (written before 1697; first published 1699; reprinted and much more widely read in 1716) although that work, whose content seemed treasonous to Louis XIV on the part of the tutor to the potential heir to the throne,6 might have played a key role in bringing fantastic fiction into bad odor with the royal censors. Bougéant clearly considers Télémaque to be a towering achievement, and it obviously played a considerable role in inspiring his own endeavor. Although clearly on the side of the angels, therefore—as befits a loyal Jesuit—Bougéant can also be considered as tacit ally of the fays, and perhaps as useful to their cause, in his own fashion, as the heroic author who might or might not have been Madame de Lintot.

  As to whether Pierre-François Beauchamps read Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie, we can only speculate, but in spite of their very obvious differences of style and ideology, that work and Funestine have a certain amount in common, in their interest in and attitude to the historical development of “romance” and its brief flirtation with contes de fées. The allegorical intrusion in Funestine in which the renegade fay Imagination describes her love affair with Extreme, the brother of Fabulous, and his betrayal of her amour with the flamboyant Chimera, can be read as a commentary on that episode, and the climax of the story surely has La Tyranie des fées détruite (1703 as by “Comtesse D.L.”)7 and the sad fate of the 1690s genre in mind, in providing a much more violent end to that “tyranny.” Like Madame d’Aulnoy in her later work, Beauchamps expresses explicit contempt for himself for stooping so low as to write a conte de fées, but he is clearly being deliberately disingenuous. He was not to know when he wrote the story that he was in the forefront of an outlaw renaissance, and does not seem to have been tempted to repeat the adventure, but he must surely have been delighted to discover, as time passed, that he had, in fact, bee
n a pioneer of sorts.

  Like many of the key works in the under-the-counter generic resurrection, Funestine rapidly became scarce, and because it was by a male writer it was not documented by Joseph de La Porte. It was added to Mayer’s Cabinet slightly belatedly, in volume thirty-one—then intended as the last, although Mayer eventually added another ten in dribs and drabs, as more material was brought to his attention—and within the context of the Cabinet it seems decidedly anomalous, although its mock-allegorical pretentions, its deliberate inversions of convention, and its reckless narrative disorder all have notable precedents. It is, however, a remarkable work, exploiting the license for excess tacitly granted by the genre’s conventions in a blithely casual and conscientiously idiosyncratic fashion. It is not the only work of the period to extrapolate its licensed disorder to the chaotic brink of surrealism, but it does so more self-consciously than most, and its tongue-in-cheek comments on its own procedure are thought-provoking, all the more so in juxtaposition with Bougéant’s commentary and the exemplars provided by the first three stories in the anthology. Although by no means a coherent set, therefore, the materials gathered herein do provide an intriguing kaleidoscopic pattern, and can justly be reckoned to be more than the sum of their parts.

  The translation of the three stories attributed to Madame de Lintot was made from volume 14 of the version of the Nouveau Cabinet des Fées reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website, which is the facsimile reprint published in 1978 by Slatkine. The translation of Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie was made from the version contained in volume 26 of Charles Garnier’s collection Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions, et des romans cabalistiques reproduced on gallica. As well as reproducing the author’s footnotes from the original, Garnier added a few of his own; I have distinguished the two sets in the translation as “Author’s note” or “Editor’s note” as appropriate, with additional comments outside the quotation marks; the remainder of the notes are entirely mine. The translation of Funestine was made from the version of volume 31 of the Cabinet des fées reproduced on gallica.