Catherine Bernard (1663-1712) was a widely celebrated author and playwright in her own time. Yet after her death, she was gradually erased and forgotten.
A rising star
Catherine was born into a Protestant bourgeois family in Rouen. She made her literary debut at seventeen with her novel Frédéric de Sicile. This highly subversive tale follows a princess who is raised and presented as a man due to the absence of a male heir. So convincing is her performance that she seduces four different women and becomes entangled in numerous romantic intrigues.
The novel received immediate acclaim and soon made its way into Parisian literary circles. Two years later, it was translated into English. Catherine then published an epistolary novel, Le Commerce galant. Once again, she played with established perceptions and power dynamics. In this work, an older libertine begins a literary exchange with a young woman to teach her about letters and love. Yet with her superior wit, the young Iris quickly gains the upper hand, bending him to her every whim.
In 1685, following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Catherine converted to Catholicism. She then moved to Paris, where her career took on a whole new dimension.
The invincible Calliope
In 1689, at the age of twenty-six, Catherine became the first woman to have a play staged at the Comédie-Française with her tragedy Laodamie, Reine d’Épire (Laodamia, Queen of Epirus). Drawing on a true story, she explored the challenges faced by a woman in power in a male-dominated world. The play was a success and was staged twenty-six times. Catherine then wrote another tragedy, Brutus, which was performed forty-three times and received highly positive reviews.
Catherine enjoyed the support of a powerful patron, Marie de Pontchartrain, and maintained close ties with other women writers of her era. Nicknamed “The invincible Calliope,” she met with constant success. She won the Académie Française’s poetry prize three times, as well as three awards at the Floral Games of Toulouse, and was admitted to Padua’s Accademia Galileiana.
Her work also included fairy tales, among them the first known version of Riquet à la Houppe, on which Charles Perrault would later heavily rely. True to her own life choices—she remained single all her life—Catherine often offered a deeply pessimistic view of love.
Disappearance and erasure
Catherine published her final work at the age of thirty-five and then withdrew from public life. She lived quietly until her death in 1712. Afterward, her contributions were gradually erased, beginning with Voltaire’s plagiarism of her tragedy Brutus. When confronted, Voltaire claimed that the original play had been written by the playwright Fontenelle. He preferred to pretend he had plagiarized a man rather than admit to stealing a woman’s ideas.
This pattern continued, with Catherine’s works being obscured and linked to male authors with whom she had no connection. Fortunately, modern scholarship is restoring her legacy, shedding new light on a woman who was one of the major writers of her time.
If you enjoy this blog, consider supporting me on Ko-fi!
Further reading:
Catherine Bernard - Bibliographie sélective - BNF
Evain Aurore, Préface de Frédéric de Sicile, Inès de Cordoue et le Commerce Galant
Frappier Louise, “Ethos royal et pouvoir féminin : Laodamie, reine d’Épire (1689) de Catherine Bernard”
Catherine Bernard’s other fairytale: The Rosebush Prince
When undergoing my little study of Riquet with the tuft, I made a post about the literary fairytale that preceeded Perrault’s version - and in fact, the fairytale to which Perrault was answering with his own Riquet. It was Catherine Bernard’s own “Riquet with the tuft”. And Catherine Bernard was a prominent woman of letters in these times, who notably had an influence over Perrault fairytales... Though she actually barely published any fairytales at all. She only published two of them to my knowledge, both included inside her novel “Inès de Cordoue” (1696) - and since I have looked at one of the two, Riquet with the tuft, here, I thought, why not finish the package deal and take a look at the other fairytale of Catherine Bernard: Le Prince Rosier, The Rosebush Prince.
Here is the story:
Once upon a time, there was a queen who ruled over a kingdom you cannot find on any maps. She was the widow of a king she dearly loved, but hopefully her pain was balanced by their only daughter, named Florinde. However one day, as all the queen and all her handmaidens were in the bedroom of the little princess, a little ivory chariot arrived, dragged by six butterflies of a thousand colors, and on it there was a woman just as small as the chariots and the butterflies. People “suspected” that she was a fairy, and before disappearing she left them with a written note saying: “Florinde is born with a great beauty, but her misfortune will be extreme, if she ever loves one day the lover she will not see.”
This surprised and confused everyone, as you can expect, and the queen understanding that she had to face the “whims of love and fate united”, decided to protect her daughter the best she could - to avoid the prophecy, long before Florinde was “in age to love”, she made her know the face and identity of all the neighboring princes she could ever marry one day. All... except one, who was actually hidden to the world. This prince was the son of a widow king, who had dreadfully suffered when his wife was alive because she made him terribly jealous. So, to avoid such a rocky marriage again, when he took a second wife he took one that he was sure would never make him jealous in any ways... But unfortunately for him he found himself in the position situation, as SHE was the massively jealous one. After knowing both extremes of the passion that was love, the king decided that marriage was an awful thing, and sought to prevent his son from ever knowing such a horror -he had his son the prince raised in a castle far away from the world and from any women. The prince had there all the entertainments he needed, and he was taught in all the sciences - as long as they didn’t brought him to the topic of women or love ; but still the portrait of Florinde reached him one day. “By fairy means” the narrative precises, the portrait ended up one day “under his feet” - as in he literaly was walking around when he found the portrait lying on the road before him. Looking at it, the prince felt love for the first time, which was a very unusual thing for him as he was used in physical sports and intellectual thinking, and not to anything closely resembling feelings/attraction.
So the prince decides to find to whom belongs this portrait, and suddenly feels that this isolated palace where he had been always happy is now a prison. He leaves secretely without informing anyone, but as soon as he starts his journey the fairy of the opening scene appears and warns him that if he continues, he will suffers misfortunes and a bad fate from which people tried to shield him from.
We cut back to Florinde, whose mother organized a huge tournament with all the princes of the kingdoms nearby, in hope she will pick one of them as her husband, but Florinde doesn’t choose any. On one side she doesn’t feel love for any of them, though she admires their beauty and talent ; on the other side she notices that they all have a big crush on her, and she fears of making “many people miserable by making one happy”. The queen/mother then had the princes return to their kingdoms, and started to worry - her daughter did not love any of the princes she had seen... meaning the prophecy could still be realized.
Florinde, tired with the court, is allowed to go rest on her own in a countryside house, and as she was walking around one day, in the garden, she noticed a rosebush that was greener and more flowery than others - and its branches shivered and moves as she approached, as if to bow to her. The princess was amazed and touched by this gesture - she returned several times in the garden, and each time the rose-bush bowed to her. The princess tried to pick up a red rose, but she pricked her finger badly. The following day the rose-bush bowed even more, so much the princess forgot the incident of the thorn - but as she go close to it, she entangled herself in its branches. She tried to free herself, while the rose-bush tried to hold her, and when she finally escapes the branches she heard sighs and sighing coming from the plants’ leaves. And, much to her amazement, the rose-bush starts to speak with a masculine voice, telling her she gave him the power to speak, and revealing his tale...
We understand as the story begins that this prince is the same we were described in the beginning - and we pick up after the abrupt narrative cut. As it turns out, the fairy turned him into a rose-bush, and said he will stay under this form until he will be loved by the most beautiful person in the world. At this revelation something “more serious” replaces in her heart the joy of seeing the bush bow, and she suddenly finds him audacious to have tried to take her in his branches like that, So she leaves the bush with a feeling of pity for him, and anger at him just suddenly trying to force her to love. But she ultimately decides to forgive because “how can one be mad at a rose-bush?” (I didn’t make it obvious yet, but the story is quite humoristic in tone, with little throw-away jokes like that scattered around, poking fun at the bizarre supernatural of the tale).
The princess returned to the garden day after day. At first she just listened to its complaints without getting close to it ; then she started to talk to him but only to comfort him about his metamorphosis, and nothing else. Seeing that the weather could damage the plant, she had a small marble cabinet built around it. She started to visualize and imagine the rose-bush as a good looking human prince in her mind, and she talked more and more with him. She got more open about talking of love, because she thought that the words of a rose-bush could ultimately do no harm ; meanwhile the rose-bush was so eloquent he convinced Florinde of his great love for her. Slowly, the bush became all she could think about, and where she went to by force of habit - but the prediction of the fairy kept haunting her, and she feared of “loving what she hasn’t seen”. She was split, sometimes not wanting to return the bush to its human form, and sometimes wanting it.
But the queen wanted to see her daughter back, and gave her the order to return to the palace. Upon realizing she had to leave the rose-bush and be separated from him, the princess became “like thunderstuck”, and started crying over the plants’ leaves - she cried so much and so sincerely that the spell was broken, and the rose-bush disappeared, replaced by a “charming prince”. (We even have a funny line pointing out how due to his immense surprise and happiness he loses temporarily the usage of his senses, and in a paradoxical way, while he just regained his human attributes, his great joy makes him return to an immobility that looks almost like a leftover of his previous plant form). Florinde, upon seeing the prince in his true form, feels her love grow stronger, but bashfulness/decency prevents her from revealing anymore, and she even regrets that by the breaking of the spell her feelings were openly revealed.
The princess returned to the court with the prince, and the queen (who didn’t know anything about the rose-bush story) allows him to try and win the hand of her daughter, but as it turns out, it becomes much more difficult... The prince regrets his plant form because now he can only talk and try to seduce the princess in public, constantly surrounded by an audience, and while obeying numerous complicated conventions and a full etiquette. Florinde, meanwhile, is scared of the whole situation because she constantly has “the oracle of the fairy” in her mind, so while the prince pushes forward the wedding plans, she tries to push them back... Florinde ends up asking her mother for help to “put the prince to the test” (in truth she just wants to buy time) - she wants to get away from him for a while, to test his faithfulness and “constancy”, see if he will flirt with anybody else meanwhile. Florinde is a bit more honest with the prince: she tells him that she does love him, but that she fears too much the upcoming misfortunes to be with him ; she recognizes that the best solution for her would be to break up and never see him again, but due to her loving him she cannot reject him entirely - so, to clear things up, she wants to put him to the test. She explains to him that she wants to make sure his love is real, and not just a superficial feeling born out of the whole bizarre situation. She asks him to go to the Island of Youth, until he will be called back to the court - so that far away from each other, their love can reveal its true nature. The prince thinks being separated from Florinde will be like the death of him, and he cries in pain ; Florinde, recognizing by these tears that he truly loves her, in turn also cries and runs in her bedroom, telling the prince to just go and return when he is called.
The Prince leaves for the Island of Youth, sick of an heartache, but when he arrives the beautiful, fresh air, and the smell of the spring flowers heal him. He is welcome by little Cupids flying everywhere, throwing roses or orange-tree-flowers at him ; and he is brought to the throneroom of the queen of the island. She is just a fourteen year old girl, beautiful, naive and joyful, surrounded by a thousand little Cupids - and this island and its queen are so beautiful and joyful the narration recognizes it is a good way to put the prince’s love to the test. The Queen of Youth is unwed, because she only wants a husband of her age who is gallant - and unfortunately she never found such a boy up until now. The prince was 24 years old, so deemed much too old by the Queen (in the Island of Youth, the prince was treated the same way middle-aged men are treated in the “normal” world). However, despite that, the Queen suddenly starts to look “favorably” at the prince, thinking that his beauty and talents are enough to make one forget just how OLD he is (it is to the point that for the maidens of the island, ten years is equivalent to a century). The Queen started to throw him seducing looks, meaningful words, little gifts here and there - that the prince pretended not to see. But soon she became more upfront, asked for a wedding with him, and offered him all the pleasures and graces of the world, as well as the greatest and most precious wealths of the universe. She worked her seduction so well the prince slowly started to forget Florinde...
But what was Florinde doing meanwhile? She was doing badly. After just one day without her prince, she felt “the horror of living without the one you love”. She however fought her own feelings. She thought: “I have fallen in love without seeing - do you really want to marry without knowing?”, hence why she needs to put the prince to the test... But days after days, the suffering of absence mixed itself with fear and jealousy, so she ultimately sent a letter to the prince asking him to return because she is “too afraid” of losing him, she imagines he must be in the same pains as her, and she begs him to come back. And this letter arrives precisely when he was starting to forget Florinde. Hopefully for the princess, the prince had received an “austere education” and hadn’t been “spoiled by the world”, so he thinks a lover should not be unfaithful - and despite his attraction for the Queen of Youth, he leaves her island to return to the court. But as he is leaving the island he notices papers everywhere... The Queen of Youth had published throughout her island a “WANTED” poster - she promises all she had promised the prince (riches, pleasures, graces) to anyone that can be bring her the prince... dead or alive. Immediately the prince “heals” from his attraction to the Queen and flees from the island, returning to Florinde.
The prince and Florinde married, and the prince soon became king due to the death of his father. He took his wife in his own kingdom, where they lived happily... for a short while. The narration points out that if they had stayed into an “honest indifference” they would have been happy, but “people in love are not as reasonable as other people”, which is why “the worst couples are those used to love”. What does the narrator mea by that? Well... the Prince makes a mistake. “Out of laziness”, he tells to Florinde his “light weakness” for the Queen of Youth. Florinde became angry and got into a feud with him so bed “it looked like she wasn’t his wife naymore”. The king was shocked and disturbed by this, so she complained of it and sought comfort with ladies of his court. Florinde spied on her husband, and discovering her husband’s activities, she insulted him. The king, so tired of being “harassed by her fury”, asked the fairies to be transformed back into a rose-bush, and the fairies obliged. Florinde, still jealous, couldn’t stand anymore the smell of the roses - because this smell was sure to re-ignite and re-create her love. “And it is since this day that the smell of roses make people faint.”
The end.
~~~~~~~~~~
Yep! It was a parody-fairytale all along! Though “parody” might be too anachronistic of a word, since the fairy tale genre wasn’t even named yet, and Catherine Bernard’s works were one of the earliest literary fairytales in the history of French literature (not the first one, but close to it). Which truly highlights the point that many people ended up forgetting (even the French writers of the time who tried to imitate the “first generation” storytellers) - the first French literary fairytales were filled with humor. A dark humor, but humor nonetheless.
It is quite interesting, when comparing this with Bernard’s other fairytale, to see that for her the typical idea of a fairytale was one without a happy ending. We find all the other key elements - the main love story, the fantastical transformations, the presence of fairies and gnomes... But in both tales, the main love story ends up badly and there is no happy ending, just bitterness. A true case of “love only brings misery”.
Fly tender Zephyrs, Let spring, once again,
Waft on your gentle breath midst summers heat;
Make our fields bud with blooms replete
Deserving of my fair Climène.
What? You would not give ear unto my prayer?
Alas, my sighs, rebuffed, needs must despair;
For her hard heart deals such a share of woe,
That I must moan her thankless cruelty.
Oh, might I be transformed and straightaway be
Turned to a flower, better to trick her so.
Bouquet by Catherine Bernard (Translated by Norman Shapiro)
"Madam," he said, "it's not difficult to see that I'm more distasteful to you than when I first appeared before you. I myself am bewildered by what has happened in giving you a mind. But in the last analysis, you're free to make a choice: marry me or return to your former condition."
from Catherine Bernard’s salon fairy tale “Riquet with the Tuft”, translated by Jack Zipes
The protagonist of the story, called Mama, is a princess who was born incredibly beautiful but also incredibly stupid. She is given the gift of intelligence by Riquet, who is himself highly intelligent but deformed. The condition of this gift is that she marry Riquet in a year’s time. In this scene, he gives her two options--marry him or return to her former lack of intelligence. Obviously this is not a choice at all. In Charles Perrault’s version of the story, the princess marries Riquet more or less willingly (she’s enchanted so as not to see his deformity any longer). Zipes refers to Bernard’s version as taking “a more critical view of forced marriages and depicted the quandary many women felt when they were obliged to enter into contractual marriages.” Which, sure, okay, but really it would be far more direct to say that Riquet is a Nice Guy(TM) and Bernard is calling out Nice Guy(TM) bullshit.
This tale does not have a happy ending for Mama, perhaps because the society Bernard belonged to could not support one.
(Note: all illustrations actually come from Perrault’s Riquet with the tuft, not Bernard’s)
As I said in my post about Charles Perrault’s Riquet with the tuft, the tale of the Academician was actually an answer to a previous fairytale written by Catherine Bernard - and reading her version of “Riquet with the tuft” helps a lot understand Perrault’s. Now, while Catherine Bernard is part of the “first fairytale tellers” of France, and was very influential in the birth of the fairy tale genre (after all, she influenced Perrault’s tales), she isn’t often talked about... It is because, unlike other writers of the “first generations”, she didn’t create a lot of fairytales - merely two. “Le prince rosier” (the rose-bush tree) and her Riquet with the tuft, both inserted in a novel called “Inès de Cordoue”. This, as you will learn by following this blog, was actually quite usual when the fairytale genre appeared: fairytales weren’t considered enough to exist “by their own” and so were often inserted as “stories-within-stories” in realistic narratives.
Mind you, when I say Catherine Bernard wasn’t “talked much about”, I mean in terms of fairytales nowadays - outside of this, she was actually one of the famous French women of the second half of the 17th century. Also called “mademoiselle Bernard”, she was a poetess, a novelist and a playwright, and one of the first women part of the Académie Française. Much more importantly: she was the first women who got a theater play written by her (a tragédie) to be played by the Comédie Française! (If you don’t know about France at this time, this was huge, l’Académie Française was the official cultural institution of France, and the Comédie Française the most famous and respectable official theater of France).
All that being said, let’s see what’s her take on the “Riquet” story...
Once upon a time, there was a rich lord of Granada [note: Given the novel the story is inserted in takes place in Spain, of course the fairytale has a Spanish flavor to it] who had only one sorrow: his only daughter, despite being very beautiful, was very stupid. Her actions ruined her grace, and despite her splendid body, she lacked a “soul”. She was named Mama, and she was too stupid to know that she was actually stupid (well, “lacking spirit” as mademoiselle Bernard puts it), but she felt that she was disdained and isolated from others, though she couldn’t tell why. One day, as she was walking alone near her house, a man so hideous he could be a monster appeared out of the ground. She was ready to flee when he talked to her, saying he had bad news to tell her, but also pleasant things to promise. He begins with the cruel part: he reveals to her that the reason don’t like is because she is lacking “in thoughts”, and because she never thinks she is far inferior to him, even though he is a monster in body. (There is a funny line where he adds “But given you empty your eyes are right now, I realized I over-estimated you when I thought my words would offend you.”) The monstrous man offers Mama to give her spirit - but to do so, she needs to love him, Riquet with the Tuft, and in one year she will have to marry him. He lets Mama think about it as long as she likes, and while waiting she just has to repeat a little magical poem to gain the thoughts and cleverness she misses (it is a little poem about love).
The girl immediately does so, and becomes fast in thought and shining in spirit. Back at the court, she amazes everyone with her newfound spirituality, she is now surrounded by friends and lovers at her balls and promenades, soon people become jealous of her and everybody talks about her. And regularly she repeats the magical love-poem of Riquet, to keep her bright spirit... But unfortunately, while these words do create a feeling of love in her heart, it is for somebody else: for the most good-lovers of her suitors. There’s just one problem: this suitor is not rich or wealthy in any way, he is “without fortune”. The girl’s parents, realizing the mistake they made by wishing for her to have spirit, try to compensate it by teaching her all sorts of warnings about love - but it is useless to fight love in the heart of a young and pretty girl, and so Mama became madly in love with the handsome but poor suitor, Arada.
Now, Mama had revealed to no one the true cause of her “spiritual metamorphosis” - she was so vain she refused to admit she didn’t grow a complex thought on her own. But as the year came to a close she started to despair and realize that she shouldn’t have used Riquet’s gift so much - she needed to escape her fateful wedding to the monstrous man, while also keeping the gift he had offered her... One day, as she thought about her plan alone, she heard a great noise and songs from under the ground - songs singing the poem of love Riquet taught her. Mama, terrified, sees the ground open up before her, and Riquet with the tuft appears surrounded by men as deformed him. She could only cry before such a sight. Riquet understood what was going on, and was sad to realize she disliked him even more than before, but he told her: you can still back up. I gave you one year to think over, you can refuse my wedding proposition, as long as you return to me the gift of spirit I gave you. However, if she marries him, she will become the Queen of the Gnomes (for Riquet himself reveals to be the King of the Gnomes), and he will offer her all the treasures buried under the earth (which are his property). He concludes: “If someone is unhappy with both gold and spirit, it is that they deserve to be.”
Riquet takes Mama in his underground kingdom and his somptuous, luxury apartments, where ugly female Gnomes serve her every whim and desires. He leaves her two days to see what he has to offer to help her make her choice, and she has all sorts of gnome-entertainments - balls and theater plays - but all she can see is the grotesque appearance of everyone. Now, to flee this hideous husband, she was ready to return to stupidity... But she had a lover now, and this changed everything. She didn’t want to lose Arada, so she wanted to keep her spirit, but by doing so she condemned herself to life forever underground cut from him...
After two days, she realized she fear too much to return to Arada in a thoughtless state, and decided to marry Riquet nonetheless, to keep her spirit. Through this wedding, Mama’s spirit became even bigger and stronger than before, but this made her regret even more the decision she took of marrying a monster that disgusted her constantly. Riquet realized the hatred of his wife, and he grew hurt - he started to curse his own curiosity that led him outside of his underground realm, he cursed all these seductive womens and his dreams of marriages, and in his bitter state he left Mama more and more alone. Without the King of the Gnomes around, Mama decided to bring Arada into her underground realm: after all, she entered, couldn’t he? She was also worried of how brutally and unexpectedly the Gnome had ravished her - fearing what people might say and claim back at the surface. Mama had a Gnome servant bring a letter to Arada, who was despaired by the disappearance of his lover, and as soon as he learned where she was, he joined her - gaining access with her help to her underground chambers. Exchanging sweet words, Arada decided to abandon the human world to live with Mama under the earth.
Arada thus started to live with Mama hidden in Riquet’s palace - but Riquet noticed that his wife was suddenly much more joyful and happy than usual. Worse: he noticed she made an effort to dress up nicely, put on jewels and look pretty, even when she was supposed to be completely alone. He was too clever to believe she somehow had grown to like him - and he guessed a human lover must have sneaked to her. He wanted to punish her, for using the intelligence he had gifted her against him - but he couldn’t remove all of it, because she had obeyed his law and held his promise... So he decided to split the spell: she would only be intelligent at night, as she slept with him, and return to begin stupid by day, when he left her alone.
Unfortunately for Riquet, while during the day Mama was lethargic with stupidity, by night the rush of ideas kept waking her up, and she stole a magical herb that, placed under Riquet’s nose, would make him sleep deeply as long as she liked. Like thus, she could leave her drugged husband to spend the night at her lover’s hiding place, without worrying about a thing. This went on from quite some times - she spent all her nights with her lovers, and by the morning removed the herbs, and spent her lonely, stupid days sleeping.
But things couldn’t last forever... The magical leaves that placed Riquet to sleep also made him snore. A Gnome servant, who was half awakened half asleep, misunderstood one of the snores as an order and rushed into the bedroom of his master: seeing the herb, he thought they were bothering him, and removed them. Riquet found himself all alone. Looking for his wife, he discovered her making vows of eternal love to Arada. Riquet didn’t say anything, but took a wand and touched with it Arada, who became identical in body to Riquet. Days passing by, Mama lost the ability to distinguish between the two, and merely found herself with two husbands: she didn’t know to which she could confess her sorrows, and from which she should fear the wrath.
Mademoiselle Bernard to conclude: “But maybe she didn’t lose that much. With time, all lovers become husbands.” THE END
As you can see, this story has a quite distinct tone. We have here a more irreverencious, humoristic, darker tale where no one is really a good guy - it is a classic “unfortunate extra-marital love story” so typical of the time. The female protagonist, Mama, is clearly designed to not be a good heroine - she is told to be vain, cunning, deceiving, and to use her intelligence for bad things... But at the same time, it is said that she only follows her heart, and that she stays true to her love despite what everybody else says. In a similar way, Arada could be seen as an antagonist, given his position in the tale, but the truth is that he is just a good-hearted man in love, and who stays true and loyal for his soul-mate, even abandoning the human world for her.
It is a strange and bizarre tale without clear morals here, a muddle grey story where nothing is black-and-white, and whose only purpose is to explore the clash between “love” and “marriage”. We have here the traditional topos of a loveless wedding to a hideous and hated husband - but who, in a twist, is not a bad, cruel or lecherous one, as Riquet is shown to be understanding of his wife’s feeling, to be wise, to leave her a full choice to marry him or not... He only punishes her when she does break their marital bonds, and even then his punishments are not truly cruel. In fact, this breaking of the cliche and stereotypes of the romance novels reaches a culminating point with the last sentence of the tale: “All lovers become husbands”, which literaly happens as Mama finds Arada turned into a twin of Riquet. Catherine Bernard seems here to try to prove the absurdity of the very topoi romance of her time relied on, this sort of clear-cut divide between the charming, heroic, extra-marital lovers and the wicked husbands, by pointing out how one can become the other and reverse: the real thrill of Mama (and of all typical romance protagonist) is the thrill of an extra-marital relationship with a young and beautiful person. But if we imagine that their love for the dashing youths lead them to marry them... Then it means love is gone, as they are now one of those hated husbands the romance-heroine has to flee from in another man’s arms. A very superficial way of thinking that Bernard takes a great joy playing with here - especially by highlighting how everything bad that happened to Mama happened because of her vanity, her refusal to reveal where she got her intelligence from, her refusal to appear stupid in front of the man she loved (or thought she loved). The fact that, in the end, when one’s appearance is changed, she cannot distinguish between the two, actually proves that her feelings were entirely superficial, and that deep down, Riquet and Arada are the same in spirit...
Of course, reading this full, original version also allows one to understand the strange gaps and holes in Perrault’s story. The whole passage of Riquet having an underground kitchen popping out of nowhere makes not much sense in his tale (since Riquet is there a human prince) - but it is a nod to Bernard’ version where Riquet is a gnome ruling over an underground nation. Similarly, the mention of the dashing rival opposing Riquet in Perrault’s is a leftover of Arada, a nod to the original tale that is quickly gotten rid of as the Academician rather chooses to make his story one about the power of love, with a happy ending, rather than a pathetic comedy like Bernard’s. In fact, Perrault’s ending is purposefully designed to be the reverse of Bernard, with the ugly dwarf becoming the handsome prince, instead of the reverse - and the ambiguity at the end of Bernard’s tale (Mama unable to recognize Arada from Riquet) is displaced to the princess of Perrault unable to know if Riquet was truly transformed, or if simply her look of him changed.
To this, I’ll add some notes taken not from my mind, but from an article written by Monique Vincent, comparing the two versions of the tale:
Perrault’s story is one fundamentally optimistic. In his tale, the character of the fairy is here to soothe and balance the disasters of natural birth: to the ugly Riquet she gives spirit, and to the stupid girl she gives the power to make people beautiful. These two different characters are soul-mates made for each other, gifted with complementary gifts, that end up making the happiness of one another. But Bernard’s tale is pessimistic. There is no fairy, only Riquet can give a gift (a gift which causes his own unhappiness, and is used/abused against him), and the “marvelous” of the tale is only present in Riquet who, while just an extravagant but charming prince in Perrault’s, is here a grotesque and frightening being ruling over an underground realm of ugliness. Perrault’s protagonist are charming - the stupidity of the princess being tied to everyday things such as clumsiness, and Riquet having his cute little tuft of hair at his birth ; Bernard’s characters are self-destructive, such as Mama who keeps accumulating miseries and miseries driven by the wrong choices.
The whole struggle of Mama is one of fatality: to keep her newfound love and reputation, she is forced to tie herself forever to somebody she does not love, but to be able to live fully and happily her live and emotions, she needs to become a betrayer and an oath-breaker. She understands and knows that there is no right way for her, and that she is doomed either way, but still drags herself and her lover into dangerous situations out of pure vanity. And Bernard’s character of Riquet is one we can only feel pity for, the same way he felt pity for Mama - as his fate is to be humiliated by a cheating wife, and to end up in self-hatred due to Mama’s constant disgust (it is noted that due to her dislike of him, he ends up cursing his own appearance). Perrault’s narrative is fast, light-hearted, talkative and “shining” with wonders ; Bernard’s narrative is a deeply human story of anxiety and emotions, taking us into the depths of the heart and the earth. This is a clear opposition of what liked to call “le merveilleux blanc” and “le merveilleux noir”, the white marvelous and the black marvelous. In fact, Perrault’s story is much closer to the traditional fairytale, where Bernard’s story is still ingrained in the logic of the novel.
A common point in those two tales is that both explore aspects of the modern world the authors live in, but each author has its different angle. Perrault’s tale is about life in society: it is about learning to be entertaining at parties, it is how to get the art of “shining” by your conversation, it is the story of a young princess becoming the jewel of a court, and it ends with the social event that is a wedding feast. Mademoiselle Bernard rather turns herself towards the familial life: Mama is the young girl that cannot be with the one she is in love with due to her parents’ disapproval, while only being able to grow as a person through the love of someone else ; it is the story of a husband who tries to make his wife happy through riches and entertainments, but fails as she flees to find something else he cannot offer. This is the story of a girl who follows her love despite the social and familial norms, which only leads her to becoming an unhappy criminal. This is the full horror of the “black marvelous”.
But both tale share a noticeable “twist” and “leaning” towards the real world, somehow announcing the disappearance of the world of the supernatural and the wonders, replaced by reality. In Perrault’s, it is the refutation of the fairy’s spell through psychological explanations ; in Bernard’s, it is the depressing conclusion of what looks like a banal, sad case of love affair and cheated husbands - that “all lovers become husbands”, a heavy truth that crushes the marvels of the world of the gnomes, reducing it to a mere caricature of our own world. Bernard’s tale is a tragedy, Perrault’s a comedy.
[I would personaly nuance that there is more humor than what Monique Vincent claims in Bernard’s story - there are several jokes cracked up here and there, the whole situation is indeed a grotesque caricature of romance stories, and the final conclusion, while pretty sad or heavy, can also be read as a sort of dark joke.]
So this story opens with a really pretty, really ugly princess being born, much like Perrault’s. Now I said in the last Riquet post that Perrault ripped off this version, but we’re not actually totally sure which story was first. Anyway. Our princess here is named Mama. She’s too stupid to even realize she’s stupid, until she meets a super ugly dude named Riquet, who informs her of the problem, and then says he can fix it if she agrees to marry him at the end of a year. (Too stupid to know she’s stupid, btw, makes her more stupid than the Perrault version, who was just smart enough to realize she was stupid.)
She agrees. A year passes, she becomes smarter and smarter, and she falls in love with another man, named Arada. And then the time comes for her to marry Riquet, who in this version is the king of the gnomes.
Mama doesn’t want to marry him anymore, and he says that’s fine, she doesn’t have to, but she can’t keep on being smart unless she does. Mama figures she’ll lose her boyfriend Arada either way—obviously if she marries someone else, but he wouldn’t like her anymore if she was stupid again, so she still couldn’t be with him if she rejected Riquet.
She elects to lose her boyfriend and keep her mind by marrying Riquet. But he’s ugly, and all the other gnomes are ugly, and she hates everything about being with him. She sends out a message to Arada, letting him know what’s happened, and he comes to join her in gnome land.
For a while Mama and Arada are happy sneaking around together, but eventually Riquet catches them. Now, he doesn’t want his wife cheating on him, but he also doesn’t want a stupid wife, so his main method of managing the situation is gone. He decides to take away her intelligence during the day, so she’s only smart when they’re together at night.
She retaliates by drugging him every night, and hanging with Arada while she’s smart and Riquet’s sleeping. But of course, they get caught again.
This time, Riquet puts a spell on Arada, so that he looks just like Riquet. Mama gets to keep her brains, but instead of a hot boyfriend and an ugly husband, she has two identically ugly husbands, and everyone is miserable forever.
Which is probably why I prefer Perrault—not a big fan of unhappy endings.
Viewpoints: Decision Time – Why I Can't Support Either Candidate in the HD80 Special Election Runoff
Viewpoints: Decision Time – Why I Can’t Support Either Candidate in the HD80 Special Election Runoff
Catherine Bernard. File Photo Brookhaven, GA, August 10, 2015 – by Catherine Bernard, Viewpoints – “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” -George Washington Dear friends, Everyone agrees that there’s a truth deficit in politics. But how to fix that? The answer seems obvious – we should all just be honest. But politics is made up of all sorts of incentives to encourage…
