SOURCE: Zuerner, Adrienne E. “Reflections on the Monarchy in d'Aulnoy's Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné.” In Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, edited by Nancy L. Canepa, pp. 194-217. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

[In this essay, Zuerner considers d'Aulnoy's depiction of masculinity, focusing on the story of a cross-dressed girl in Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné.]

One of the principal creators of the literary fairy tale in seventeenth-century France, Mme d'Aulnoy was one of the most read and appreciated writers during her lifetime.¹ Author of an impressive corpus of fairy tales, novels, and pseudomemoirs, admired and celebrated in the salon society of her day, the countess d'Aulnoy remained popular into the eighteenth century when numerous reprints of her tales appeared.² Relegated to critical obscurity for almost three centuries, d'Aulnoy's work now garners scholarly attention and serious appraisal. Yet critics remain divided over the extent to which d'Aulnoy's fairy tales constitute an imaginary reconception of prevailing notions of “femininity.” While some scholars minimize the import of her critique of gender roles, others argue for d'Aulnoy's feminocentric representation of female desire and sexuality.³ Focusing primarily on inscriptions of female subjectivity, few of these critics have examined d'Aulnoy's portrayals of masculinity.⁴

Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné [Gorgeous or the Fortunate Knight; 1698] constitutes a compelling instance of d'Aulnoy's challenge to gender orthodoxy.⁵ In this tale, d'Aulnoy reprises the theme of cross-dressing featured briefly in her popular first novel, Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas [The Story of Hippolyte, the Count of Duglas; 1690]. Like other transvestite narratives of this period, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné emphasizes the textual construction of gender and reveals how the female author's awareness of gender is reflected in fiction. Apposing the “real” and the “unreal,” an apposition that underlies the fantastic mode,⁶Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné represents a fantasy of feminine power: cross-dressed, the heroine vanquishes evil, travels, and achieves public renown precluded by the norms of female decorum. The privileged place accorded to cross-dressing situates the fairy tale within the tradition of literary transvestism revived at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Honoré d'Urfé's popular and influential pastoral novel, L'Astrée. But unlike d'Urfé's romance novel, in which the principal narrative of male transvestism buttresses dominant gender ideology, d'Aulnoy's fairy tale assesses the limits of the category “Woman” and, more striking, deconstructs the “unmarked” gender—“Man.” Moreover, d'Aulnoy targets the seventeenth century's ideal masculine subject, the king. In Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, d'Aulnoy weaves into the basic narrative framework of her tale a penetrating and unsparing portrait of the monarchy during the last years of the reign of Louis XIV.

The fairy tale traces the adventures and peripeteia of its eponymous heroine, Belle-Belle, the youngest daughter of an impoverished provincial nobleman. Upon his defeat at the hands of the emperor Matapa, the vanquished king issues a call to arms to all the knights of the realm. Unable to pay the tithe the king exacts from those families who cannot send a son, Belle-Belle's elderly and infirm father reluctantly allows his two oldest daughters to disguise as knights in order to answer the king's summons. When they are unmasked by a fairy, both daughters return home in shame. Belle-Belle, however, earns the favor of the good fairy. Aided by the fairy and seven magical men, the disguised Belle-Belle, known as Fortuné, combats a dragon and the hostile emperor, restores the king's property, saves his honor and that of her father, and in the tale's closure, marries the king after a dramatic revelation scene. Embedded in the fairy tale is a story of unrequited love and violent passion: powerfully drawn to the handsome young knight Fortuné, the spurned queen repeatedly yet unsuccessfully seeks his death and finally falsely accuses him of attempted rape. Poisoned by her lady-in-waiting, she dies in the end, thus preparing the tale's conventional moral: reward awaits the virtuous, albeit cross-dressed heroine, while punishment befalls her nemesis, the queen.

That d'Aulnoy was concerned with rescripting gender roles and plots emerges clearly from a study of the ways in which she adapted the master-tale type. In the standard catalog of French folktales, Le Conte populaire français, authors Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze identify Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné as a variant of the master-tale type #513, Le Bateau qui va sur terre comme sur mer or Les Doués (AT “The Land and Water Ship” or “The Extraordinary Companions”).⁷ The French catalog further indicates that the ending of Belle-Belle corresponds to the Aarne and Thompson master-tale type #884A, “A Girl Disguised as a Man Is Wooed by the Queen.”⁸ Surprisingly, in their description of d'Aulnoy's version of the folktale, Delarue and Tenèze refer only once to the heroine's cross-dressing, and they make no mention of the mutual affection shared by the king and his intimate friend, Fortuné. But in d'Aulnoy's fairy tale both of these elements occupy a prominent place in the narrative. Additionally, d'Aulnoy modifies the androcentric plot of master-tale type #513, in which the king promises his daughter's hand to the man who can build the extraordinary ship. Rather than underscore the exchange of women between men, d'Aulnoy opens her tale with a scene of masculine lack—the despoliation of the king at the hands of a conquering emperor—thereby inaugurating the text's interrogation of masculinity.

D'Aulnoy's deployment of cross-dressing suggests her interest in “ce qu'il y a d'inné ou d'acquis dans la polarisation sexuelle” [what is innate or acquired in sexual polarization],⁹ a preoccupation shared by writers throughout the seventeenth century. Some scholars have directly linked the fairy-tale genre to d'Urfé's transvestite novel;¹⁰ yet unlike the principal narrative of L'Astrée, in which the male protagonist cross-dresses, most seventeenth-century transvestite narratives feature female cross-dressers. Préchac, Villedieu, fellow fairy-tale writer L'Héritier, and even Lafayette, were among the writers who depicted cross-dressed heroines in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.¹¹ As in the works of Villedieu and L'Héritier, cross-dressing in Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné at once inscribes prevailing norms of female bienséance [decorum, propriety] and challenges those norms by envisioning a larger sphere of activity and endeavor for women.

From the opening of the tale, the heroine is coded as the epitome of filial devotion and unselfish kindness. Her father's favorite daughter, Belle-Belle endures uncomplainingly her meager existence, worries about her father's honor, and without hesitation volunteers to abandon her feminine garb for that of a soldier. She emblematizes the ideal of civility espoused by salon society of this period, as seen in her skillful recruitment of the seven helpers.¹² The narrator prefaces Fortuné's encounter with l'Impétueux by affirming that Fortuné “savoit tout engager dès qu'il paroissoit ou qu'il parloit” [knew how to engage everyone as soon as he appeared or spoke (21)].¹³ To be sure, the marvelous plays a role in these episodes inasmuch as Fortuné's speaking horse, Camarade, identifies each helper and encourages Fortuné to recruit him. Nevertheless, the fairy-tale narrator emphasizes that Fortuné's elegant discourse and “natural grace” finally persuade each helper to join him (18). Although cross-dressing violated biblical and social codes, the text reiterates that Belle-Belle disguises only to serve the crown and thereby recuperates transvestism for an indisputably worthy cause. Thus on the one hand, the heroine is the picture of female decorum, and as such she poses no threat to the established order. D'Aulnoy's transvestite heroine was at once familiar and reassuring to seventeenth-century readers. On the other hand, the representation of female transvestism is at odds with conventional understandings of man and woman in seventeenth-century France. Fortuné successfully accomplishes a series of tasks thought to be exclusively “masculine” enterprises. She traverses freely the countryside, assumes a position of authority over seven men, acts as the king's official ambassador, vanquishes a violent aggressor (the dragon), and restores to the king his wealth and honor. The narrator describes Belle-Belle/Fortuné as “la fleur de toute la chevalerie” [the finest cavalier of all knighthood (56)], and the king lauds his/her martial prowess: “vous avez tant d'adresse dans toutes les choses que vous faites et particuliérement [sic] aux armes” [you demonstrate so much skill in all you do, and especially in wielding arms (40)]. So accomplished is the cross-dressed Belle-Belle that her seven helpers never suspect her disguise; they address her as maître and Seigneur throughout. This depiction of the transvestite heroine thus balances “feminine” and “masculine” traits (kindness and military acumen, artful discourse and physical and moral courage, filial loyalty and skillful diplomacy). By virtue of the fact that Belle-Belle's masculine garb and activities fail to compromise her feminine nature and that no conflict or contradiction arises between her “masculine” pursuits and her “feminine” graces, the text suggests a far more nuanced understanding of gender and underscores the instability of gender classifications, rather than their immutability and incommensurability.

Paradoxically, if the fairy tale credits a woman with saving the kingdom, it simultaneously affirms woman's potential power to destroy it. The dowager queen embodies this destructive capacity and fulfills the conventional role of foil to the “good” heroine. The queen incarnates the worst defects of woman: “fière, violente, & d'un assez difficile accès” [proud, violent, and rather difficult to approach (1-2)], she is the antithesis of the ideal woman, distinguished by her modesty, docility, and complaisance. Extremely jealous and rejected by Fortuné, the queen conspires to send him on what she hopes will be fatal missions, since “elle aimoit mieux le voir mort, que de le voir indifférent” [she preferred to see him dead rather than indifferent (47)]. Fortuné's loyal horse Camarade equates the queen with a “monster” and warns Fortuné that she is more dragonlike than the dragon he overcame (51). Although Renaissance writers revised the Aristotelian notion of woman as monstrous and affirmed her full humanity (though she was still considered inferior to man), the assumption of power by women was nevertheless considered “unnatural,” and hence monstrous, inasmuch as a powerful woman deviated from her “naturally” subordinate role. In this respect, Camarade rightfully calls the queen a monster since she has intruded into the exclusive sphere of male prerogative, political power. The queen's confidante and rival for Fortuné's affections, Florine, tells Fortuné about the “mauvais usage qu'elle faisoit du suprême pouvoir qu'elle avoit usurpé dans le royaume” [her misuse of the supreme power she had usurped in the kingdom (29)]. The accuracy of Florine's appraisal of her rival would be dubious at best if it were not repeated almost word for word by a far more credible source, the king. When the queen clamors for the execution of Fortuné, her violence surprises even the king: “la manière dont elle parloit étonna le roi, il la connoissoit pour la plus violente femme du monde; elle avoit du pouvoir, & elle étoit capable de bouleverser le royaume” [her manner of speaking surprised the king, he knew her as the most violent woman in the world; she had power and was capable of turning the kingdom upside down (72)]. The narrator, then, draws a direct connection between a woman with power and upheaval in the kingdom. In fact, this last phrase is reminiscent of Richelieu's denigration of female rule: “le gouvernement des femmes est d'ordinaire le malheur des états” [the rule of women is usually a calamity for the state], a view Louis XIV later echoed in his Mémoires.¹⁴

Dorothy Thelander suggests that the evil queen regents of literary fairy tales evoke “the unpopular queens who had ruled France during the minorities of their sons during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Catherine de Medicis, Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria.”¹⁵ Certain elements of d'Aulnoy's tale could be cited to support such a reading. More interesting, however, are the ways in which this unflattering representation of woman functions in the tale. One might argue that the text merely reiterates the early modern association of woman and evil. Considered weak in mind and body, women were thought to be more susceptible to the influence of the devil and hence were seen as fomenters of evil. That such stereotypes inform d'Aulnoy's fairy tale is to be expected, since, as numerous latter-day theorists have emphasized, there is no position “outside” the system of power.¹⁶ Alternatively, the unruly life and, more important, the ultimate demise of the queen may represent a necessary concession to royal censors. Wielding illegitimate power (since it was “usurped”), the evil queen of the fairy tale may have figured the monarchy's vulnerability during the Fronde.¹⁷ But the queen's violent death acts as a kind of narrative “punishment” and symbolizes the triumph of monarchical absolutism. No doubt both of these factors—the inscription of prevailing stereotypes and the necessary acquiescence to royal censorship—as well as fairy-tale convention, are at work in the text and explain the negative portrayal of the queen. More significant, however, in terms of the textual construction of gender, the juxtaposition of the queen and the valiant heroine generates a signifying contradiction between two “opposing” images of woman, a contradiction that is regularly obscured by prevailing seventeenth-century gender doxa.¹⁸ This contradiction produces in turn dissident knowledge about the perceived stability of the category of woman, in particular, and, more generally, about the underlying tension and ambivalence regarding gender in the seventeenth century.

What makes the tale's challenge to seventeenth-century gender ideologies all the more incisive is its systematic unraveling of normative myths of masculinity. Seventeenth-century representations of female cross-dressing implicitly call into question the “essence” of masculinity since the heroine regularly abandons the timidity, passivity, and physical weakness inherent in her feminine “nature” and adopts the aggressivity, martial prowess, and mental and physical strength considered masculine attributes.¹⁹ Far more rare, however, given the patriarchal symbolic of this period, are representations of male characters that deviate explicitly and remarkably from seventeenth-century norms of masculinity.²⁰ From the outset, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné marks its divergence from such norms. In the opening paragraph, d'Aulnoy suppresses the conventional fairy-tale formula—“il étoit une fois un roi et une reine” or “il étoit une fois un roi fort riche en terres” [once upon a time there was a king and a queen; once upon a time there was a king who owned a great quantity of land]—and begins with a portrait of a vanquished monarch who has barely eluded capture by his stronger enemy:

Il étoit une fois un roi fort aimable, fort doux, & fort puissant; mais l'empereur Matapa, son voisin, étoit encore plus puissant que lui. Ils avoient eu de grandes guerres l'un contre l'autre; dans la dernière, l'empereur gagna une bataille considérable, & après avoir tué ou fait prisonniers la plupart des capitaines & des soldats du roi, il vint assiéger sa ville capitale, & la prit; de sorte qu'il se rendit maître de tous les trésors qui étoient dedans. Le roi eut à peine le loisir de se sauver avec la reine douairière sa soeur.

(1)²¹

[Once upon a time, there was a very kind, gentle, and powerful king; but the Emperor Matapa, his neighbor, was even more powerful than he was. They had fought many great wars against each other; in the last war, the emperor won an important battle, and after having killed or taken as prisoners the majority of the king's captains and soldiers, he came to lay siege to the capital and took it, such that he became master of all the riches therein. The king scarcely had time to escape with his sister the dowager queen.]

Structurally, this opening constitutes a paradigmatic scenario of disorder or “lack” that will be rectified in the tale's closure, when a conventional “happy ending” (the marriage of Belle-Belle and the king) reestablishes order and liquidates lack.²² On a symbolic level, however, this passage performs a transgressive dismemberment of the king's “double body” and undermines the ideal masculine subject incarnated by the monarch. According to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, the concept of the king's double body reflects an understanding of the king as a private individual and as the embodiment of the state. Apostolidès cites the late-sixteenth-century writer Guy Coquille to argue that this concept lies at the crux of political theory in the early modern period: “Le roi est le chef et le peuple des trois ordres sont les membres; et tous ensemble sont le corps politique et mystique dont la liaison et l'union est indivisé et inséparable” [The king is the head and the members of the three orders are the limbs; all together they from the mystical body politic the connection and union of which is undivided and inseparable].²³ Both the “head” of state and its populace body are integral and essential to the viability of the nation/king. The opening of Belle-Belle, then, recounts more than an isolated defeat. Rather, the imprisonment of the king's men deprives the nation of its “body” and compromises the integrity of the king. As though to emphasize the susceptibility of the king, rather than his divine and immutable essence, the narrator iterates this metaphorical sunderance:

L'empereur transporta toutes les pierreries & meubles du roi dans son palais: il emmena un nombre extraordinaire de soldats, de filles, de chevaux, & de toutes les autres choses qui pouvoient lui être utiles ou agréables: quand il eut dépeuplé la plus grande partie du royaume, il revient triomphant dans le sien.

(2)

[The emperor transported to his palace all of the king's crown jewels and furniture: he led away an extraordinary number of soldiers, young women, horses, and all the other objects that might be useful or pleasing to him; when he emptied [depopulated] the great majority of the kingdom, he returned triumphant to his own.]

Deprived of the people (soldiers and young women)—that which the king governs and without which he cannot by definition be king—the body politic ceases to exist. In this paragraph, the narrator also reveals that the king's purloined treasures include the crown jewels (“pierreries”) and palace furnishings. In other words, the king has lost the outward signs of his power and magnificence, a loss rendered even more explicit when the narrator refers to “le roi dépouillé” [the stripped [despoiled] king] in the third paragraph (2). The radical implications of this passage are twofold: the words “pierreries” and “dépouillé” evoke images of both castration and rape. The stripping of the king's “jewels” emphasizes the king's “feminine” vulnerability.²⁴ The adjective “dépouillé” reiterates this phallic loss, which symbolically transforms the king into a woman, who is “ravished” by the conquering male emperor. The “feminization” of the king at once causes a loss of power (the king is unable to defend his kingdom and must flee) and signals this loss.

The transgressive nature of these passages may also be understood within the cultural context of the “status” or “prestige” consumption that characterized court society of the seventeenth century. As Norbert Elias explains, over the course of the century, French noblemen lost real status and autonomy with respect to the king.²⁵ The monarchy gradually reduced the traditional markers of their social rank and personal identity, and in their absence, the aristocrat's social identity inhered in the ritualized display of prestige:

An elaborate cultivation of outward appearances as an instrument of social differentiation, the display of rank through outward form, is characteristic not only of the houses but of the whole shaping of court life. … In a society in which every outward manifestation of a person has special significance, expenditure on prestige and display is for the upper classes a necessity which they cannot avoid. They are an indispensable instrument in maintaining their social position, especially when—as is actually the case in this court society—all members of the society are involved in a ceaseless struggle for status and prestige.²⁶

Both male aristocrats and the king himself, as the chief nobleman, were implicated in this system. When the financier Fouquet outfitted a more sumptuous palace and hosted more lavish parties than those of the king, Louis XIV had him imprisoned for life, an act that testifies to the pressure exerted on the king to surpass his noblemen in extravagant self-display. Within the context of prestige consumption, then, Belle-Belle destabilizes the fixed image of the king, for in losing his palace furnishings and the crown jewels, the king of d'Aulnoy's tale is robbed of those signs that constitute and differentiate him as the king. Far from inviolable, the king's double body is subject to violation and despoliation, contrary to the image propagated by royal image-makers. From its opening pages, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné “dethrones” the epitome of masculine subjectivity, the king.

D'Aulnoy further develops this portrait of royal vincibility by high-lighting the relationship between the king and Fortuné and by exposing the monarch's dependence on his courtiers. In fact, d'Aulnoy's fairy tale inscribes a keen awareness of the complex system of interdependences that organized and sustained the court of Louis XIV and subtended the monarch's power. By exploiting the homoerotic possibilities of the king's predilection for his handsome and courageous courtier, the disguised Belle-Belle, the tale focuses on the ways in which the monarch's dependence renders him vulnerable and complicates the distinction, as Apostolidès puts it, between “le monarque en tant qu'individu privé et le monarque comme persona ficta, incarnation de l'Etat” [the monarch as private individual and as persona ficta, incarnation of the State].²⁷

Jacques Barchilon identifies the erotic complexities of Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné when he writes that d'Aulnoy “s'aventure courageusement dans une forêt de sentiments de plus en plus complexes et de plus en plus équivoques” [ventures bravely into a forest of more and more complex and ambiguous feelings].²⁸ Indeed, early modern transvestite narratives regularly exploit the erotic ramifications of cross-dressing to please and titillate readers, who are cast as voyeuristic observers of forbidden, homoerotic behavior. Transgressive pairings are formed, for instance, when a female character becomes enamored of a woman disguised as a man or, as in L'Héritier's L'Amazone françoise, when the prince, Cloderic, is tortured by the forbidden desire he feels for his male courtier, Marmoisan, the disguised Léonore.²⁹ Here the ostensible couple (Cloderic-Marmoisan) is “deviant” while the actual couple (Cloderic-Léonore) is reassuringly heterosexual.³⁰

A similar plot emerges in Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, for the text infuses the king's speech with conventions of amorous discourse common to seventeenth-century novels; yet because it occurs in the context of two reputedly male characters, this discourse engenders a homoerotic subtext. Upon first meeting Fortuné, the king informs him, “je me sens une affection particulière pour vous” [I feel a special affection for you (25)]. As Fortuné leaves to slay the dragon, a mission orchestrated by the queen, the king cannot conceal his distress: “aussitôt que le roi l'apperçut, il s'écria: quoi! vous êtes prêt à partir?” [as soon as the king saw him, he cried out: what! you are ready to leave? (41)]. Here both the punctuation and the lexicon signal the king's emotion as does his “profonde tristesse” [profound sadness (53)] when the queen once again seeks to endanger Fortuné, this time by sending him to confront the emperor Matapa. Far from the dispassionate agent of his superior (male) reason, the king is overcome by his (female) emotions. When the king chides Fortuné for confiding more readily in the queen than in him, his words resemble those of a jealous lover: “il me semble, dit le roi en souriant, que vous êtes assez bien dans ses bonnes grâces, & c'est à elle que vous ouvrez votre coeur préférablement à moi” [it seems to me, said the king smiling, that you are very much in her good graces, and that you open your heart more readily to her than to me (51)]. Usually found in the context of heterosexual lovers, these words lend a sexual undertone to the exchange between the king and his favorite. Another such double entendre occurs at the end of the text, when the distraught king contemplates the approaching execution of Fortuné:

Mais, hélas! sur qui cette vengeance devoit-elle être exercée? sur un chevalier, qui s'étoit exposé aux plus grands périls pour son service, auquel il étoit redevable de son repos & et de tous ses trésors, qu'il aimoit d'une inclination particulière: il auroit donné la moitié de sa vie pour sauver ce cher Favori.

(73)

[But alas, from whom should this vengeance be exacted? From a knight who had exposed himself to the greatest perils on his behalf, to whom he was indebted for his peace of mind and all his wealth, whom he loved with an exceptional love: he would have given half his life to save this dear favorite.]

On one level, this passage reflects feudal notions of loyalty and service that structured the relationship of lord and vassal, ideas that still informed seventeenth-century mentalités, long after feudal structures ceased to obtain in court society. But on another level, the king's emphatic emotional response to the imminent death of Fortuné and his willingness to sacrifice himself for his knight intimate a bond of a different order. The word “inclination” is particularly suggestive in this regard, for it was synonymous with the word “love” in the seventeenth century.³¹ This passage and those cited above challenge seventeenth-century norms of masculinity: male homoeroticism and the attendant attribution of the “female” role to one of the partners necessarily denaturalize masculinity since man is seen to abandon his “naturally” superior position.³² Even more, Luce Irigaray contends that male homosexuality represents a subversive threat to patriarchy: “Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power.”³³ From this point of view, the presence of homoeroticism tends to implicate royal power as well, by undermining its masculinist basis. To be sure, the text appears to conform to normative heterosexuality since the reader knows that Fortuné is really a woman; therefore the king's affection for Belle-Belle/Fortuné can be read as “normal.” Yet even the narrator's reference to Belle-Belle's female identity and (heterosexual) love for the king fail to nullify the suggestion of homoeroticism evoked in these passages.³⁴

D'Aulnoy also exploits this ambiguous relationship to further challenge the conflation of the private individual of the king with the abstract notion of the state, for the king's inclination for Fortuné eventually leads him to imperil his very kingdom. Although the king has summoned his knights, including Fortuné, for the sole purpose of engaging in battle with the emperor, the king refuses to let Fortuné endanger his life and retains him as his stable master:

Le roi lui dit après la revue, qu'il craignoit que la guerre ne fût sanglante, & qu'il avoit résolu de l'attacher à sa personne. La reine douairière qui étoit présente, s'écria qu'elle avoit eu la même pensée, qu'il ne falloit point l'exposer au péril d'une longue campagne; que la charge de premier maître d'hôtel étoit vacante dans sa maison, qu'elle la lui donnoit. Non, dit le roi, j'en veux faire mon grand écuyer.

(27)

[After the military review, the king said that he feared the war might be bloody and that he had resolved to engage him [Fortuné] for his personal service; the dowager queen, who was present, exclaimed that she had had the same thought, that it wasn't necessary to expose him to the danger of a long campaign, that the position of head butler in her house was vacant. No, said the king, I want to make him my stable master.]

In this first instance of his “separation anxiety,” the king insists that Fortuné remain by his side (“non, dit le roi”). The well-being of the kingdom, threatened by the loss of the peuple and the king's material wealth, is subordinated to gratify the king's desire for the company of his courtier. This scenario occurs in two other episodes when the king, ready to sacrifice more lives, reiterates his ardent desire to retain his favorite and only reluctantly sends Fortuné to confront the dragon and the emperor. Conceding to the queen's request, the king laments, “je consens à ce que vous voulez … je vous avoue, malgré cela, que j'y ai de la répugnance” [I consent to what you want … I confess, nonetheless, that I loathe your wish (39)]. The text, then, underscores the king's ambivalence and moral weakness. Consequently it unmasks the reputedly rational masculine subject, immune to untoward passions, and constructs a fallible and desiring male subject. While the royal symbolic stressed the statesman, d'Aulnoy's fairy tale stresses the very human foibles of the fictional monarch and the potential for national mishap when his devotion to his favori (“favorite”) holds sway over the interests of the state. The tale suggests that the mutual dependency existing between the king and courtiers may compromise the king since personal whims and private considerations dictate the direction of national decisions.³⁵Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné thus reprises implicitly the “demythification” of official history produced explicitly by Lafayette and Villedieu. Both of these writers insist that amorous intrigues, rather than great reasons of state, lie at the heart of political decision making.³⁶ D'Aulnoy's text is perhaps more audacious than those of Villedieu and Lafayette insofar as its love interest involves homoerotic desire. Ultimately, however, the fairy tale redeems the king and elides the potential danger inhering in his obligations toward Fortuné; finally, albeit reluctantly, the king allows Fortuné to confront the dragon and the enemy emperor, thereby privileging national interests at the expense of his personal desire. While the text thus skirts an inflammatory portrait of the king and his favorite (like those devoted to Henri III and his minions), even the king's recuperation does not completely overshadow the perils of royal dependency implied throughout the fairy tale.³⁷

Even more, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné includes numerous details that point to a direct correlation between the fictional court of the fairy tale and the court of Louis XIV during the sunset years of his reign.³⁸ Lamenting Fortuné's frigid response to her numerous sexual advances, the queen composes a love poem and has it set to music by Lully, an overt reference to Louis XIV's preferred composer of court ballets (36). The narrator also describes a palace gallery ornamented with statues, perhaps an allusion to the Galérie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at Versailles (70). More telling is the narrator's description of the king and his courtiers: “le roi y vint avec la reine douairière sa soeur et toute leur cour; elle ne laissait pas d'être pompeuse, malgré les malheurs que étoient arrivés à l'état” [the king came there [to the parade ground] with his sister the dowager queen and the entire court, which was unfailingly magnificent, despite the misfortunes that had beset the state (25); emphasis added]. Although Louis's image-makers strove to dissimulate France's waning glory, the latter years of Louis XIV's reign were, in fact, plagued by economic and religious crises. In his study of the “fabrication” of Louis XIV, Peter Burke speculates that the political difficulties of the latter years of the reign, including the defeats of French armies and serious financial problems, account in part for the French government's increased production of medals, statues, and tapestries, all designed to obscure the grim reality of the sunset years.³⁹ The loss of the fictional king's trésors may allude not only to the financial straits of the nation but to a spiritual bankruptcy as well, as famine ravaged the French peasantry, aggravating its already impoverished condition; as the increased persecution of French Protestants signaled the king's moral weaknesses; and as military defeats overshadowed the enchanted and triumphant spirit of the monarchy during the early years of Louis XIV's personal reign. Furthermore, the tale calls into question the military prowess of the French monarch himself, since the fictional king never directly engages in battle against the dragon or Matapa. This detail may reflect the contemporary state of armed conflict when the king, “unaccustomed to physical warfare,” did not lead his troops and when armies comprised large numbers of mercenaries and a few generals.⁴⁰ But the fictional king's absence from the battlefront may also constitute a trenchant, yet no less compelling and dangerous, criticism of Louis XIV. In reality, numerous anonymous pamphlets of the era portrayed Louis XIV as “battle-shy” and castigated him for the defeats of French troops.⁴¹ In a direct attack on the king's courage, the anonymous writer of Le Marquis de Louvois sur la selette [The Marquis of Louvois on the Hot Seat (lit. saddle); 1695] sarcastically queries, “Dis-moi, pourquoi Louis qu'on nomme l'Immortel / Ne vient-il pas en Flandre attaquer un mortel? / Pourquoi ce fainéant demeure en son royaume / A-t-il peur des esprits?” [Why doesn't Louis the Immortal / Come to Flanders to attack a mortal? / Why does this loafer remain in his kingdom / Is he afraid of ghosts?]⁴² All too human, fearful of men and ghosts alike, according to the pamphleteer, Louis XIV oafishly and cowardly remains behind, while his troops labor to defend his empire.

Indeed, the accumulation of unflattering, even derogatory, allusions to the king suggests that d'Aulnoy's fairy tale can be read, and probably was read by some, as part of a larger wave of texts criticizing Louis XIV in the last decade of the century.⁴³ In her extensive study of the literary image of Louis XIV, Ferrier-Caverivière notes that after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, repealing the religious and civil rights of French Protestants, Louis's detractors “se font à la fois plus nombreux et plus éloquents” [became at once more numerous and more eloquent (331)]. While certain seventeenth-century fairy tales, such as Préchac's allegorical Sans Parangon [Nonpareil; 1698], represent hyperbolic panegyrics of the king, Teresa di Scanno points out that “le merveilleux semble avoir servi souvent de masque à des allusions satiriques” [the marvelous seems to have masked satirical allusions].⁴⁴ Di Scanno identifies in d'Aulnoy's work vulgar caricatures of court habitués yet does not mention that these satirical sketches implicated the monarch as well.⁴⁵ The notion that Belle-Belle contains a veiled critique of the monarch is buttressed by the fact that several satiric historical novels were attributed to, among others, Mme d'Aulnoy. Specifically, Ferrier-Caverivière hypothesizes that d'Aulnoy was the author of Le Grand Alcandre frustré ou les derniers efforts de l'amour et de la vertu [The Frustrated Great Alcandre or the Final Efforts of Love and Virtue], an anonymous satirical novel targeting the king's sexual weaknesses.⁴⁶ D'Aulnoy's fairy tale therefore diverges from those of Murat, which, according to Apostolidès, depicted Louis's court not as it existed during the vogue of fairy tales but as it was during the early, glorious years of his personal rule.⁴⁷ Instead, d'Aulnoy targets the court during the sunset years of the reign. Her portrait of a timorous, vulnerable, and castrated monarch and a deteriorating court contravenes the image fabricated by Louis XIV's “propaganda” machine. Indeed, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné prefigures the parodic and licentious tales of the eighteenth century, described by Raymonde Robert as caustically ironic and subversive in spirit.⁴⁸

How did this veiled, nonetheless discernible, demythification pass unnoticed through royal censors? First of all, the concessions to prevailing norms and the conventional fairy tale ending shift attention away from the artful critique of the king. The supernatural denouement, in which the fairy suddenly reappears as a “second sun” leading Belle-Belle's family in a jewel-encrusted chariot, restores order and crowns both the heroine and the king in dazzling glory. Even the title of the tale, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, distracts from the unconventional (re)vision of masculinity and femininity elaborated throughout the tale: the word “or” affirms the incommensurability (either/or) of male and female and thus reflects dominant gender norms. Moreover, along with Michèle Farrell, I would suggest that the fairy-tale genre itself and the “marginality” of the conteuses enabled this tale to escape the close scrutiny brought to bear on other genres.⁴⁹ “Free of the censure of official esthetic restraints,” writes Farrell, women fairy-tale writers “can point to the common people from whom their stories come as indicators of those stories' powerlessness and harmlessness, and as signifiers of the frivolity of their enterprise. Their activity in no way threatens the status quo and is not to be taken seriously.”⁵⁰ Given this perception of the innocuousness of literary fairy tales, it is unsurprising that d'Aulnoy's narrative “passed” as inconsequential and unthreatening, arousing little interest or suspicion among those charged with creating and maintaining the image of the king's magnificence. Yet since it was never wholly divorced from historical reality, the imaginary realm of the fairy tale provided a discursive space in which “official” reality and prevailing gender norms could be challenged. Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné illustrates the capacity of the literary fantastic to trace, as Rosemary Jackson puts it, “the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent.’”⁵¹ D'Aulnoy's fairy tale discloses what the official myth of the king silenced and occulted—the fallibility and vulnerability of the monarch and the potential menace posed to the integrity of the nation/king by the complex network of interdependence that bound the king to his courtiers.⁵²

By making visible what royal mythology sought to obscure, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné constitutes an example of oppositional discourse, which becomes all the more apparent when considering the fairy-tale genre in relation to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Dating from the sixteenth century, this polemic opposed, on the one hand, those who viewed classical texts as perfect models to be imitated and, on the other hand, those who attributed to French artistic and literary production a preeminence that rivaled and surpassed that of antiquity. In defense of the moderns, Charles Perrault privileged the French fairy tale over the fables of antiquity.⁵³ More recently, Marc Fumaroli posits a direct connection between the tenets of the moderns and the fairy-tale genre: the genre, he writes, “naît de la Querelle et dans la Querelle, pour soutenir les théories, par ailleurs très défendables, des ‘modernes’” [was born of and in the Quarrel in order to support the “moderns'” theories, which were, moreover, very tenable].⁵⁴ The product of a distinctly French, as opposed to classical, tradition and shaped by the stylistic norms refined by seventeenth-century salon society, the fairy tale was, in a sense, the quintessential modern genre. And as the title of Perrault's poem cum modernist treatise, “Le siècle de Louis le Grand” (1687), indicates, the king was aligned with the modernist side of the Quarrel. For the monarch was the patron of modern arts and letters: the artistic and literary excellence achieved during Louis's reign was at once the product and the reflection of the king's grandeur. According to René Demoris, the very figure of the sun king emblematizes the relationship between the king and writing: “le pouvoir politique entend faire des écrivains son émanation et les faire servir à son illustration” [political power intends to make writers its product and to have them exemplify its glory].⁵⁵ Seen in this light, d'Aulnoy seems to resist cooptation: she appropriates the quintessentially modern genre, the fairy tale, and infuses it with meanings at variance with those “intended” by the moderns. Rather than exalt the king's image, the fairy tale tarnishes it by feminizing the fictional king and undermining his claims to authority. Within the framework of the fairy tale's sanctioned discursive space, d'Aulnoy censures the very person the genre purports to celebrate. D'Aulnoy's fairy tale constitutes an oppositional discourse because it indicates the contradictions inhering in seventeenth-century myths of monarchical absolutism. Just as the juxtaposition of the evil queen and the transvestite heroine destabilizes gender norms, so the contradiction between the fictional monarch of the fairy tale and the representation of the historical monarch challenges the “truth” of the latter. Indeed, in examining Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, the pertinent question is not “if” the text is oppositional but rather to what degree it is oppositional and how it negotiates the delicate balance between subversion and the reinscription of prevailing doxa. The dialectic between these two potentialities confirms the role of literature in the production of social meaning and sexual difference.

Notes

1. Mary Elizabeth Storer, La Mode des contes de fées, 1685-1700 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), 22. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise indicated. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, countess, baroness d'Aulnoy (1650/51-1705), issued from a noble Norman family. Married at age fifteen or sixteen to a baron considerably older than she, d'Aulnoy eventually gave birth to six children during her loveless marriage. Implicated in a scandal involving an accusation of lèse-majesté against her husband, d'Aulnoy went to prison and afterward disappeared from Paris for approximately twenty years. Little is known of this part of her life, yet based on her extensive writings on England and Spain, Barchilon hypothesizes that she traveled and perhaps lived for a time in both of these countries. Jacques Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux français de 1690 à 1790 (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1975), 38. In 1690 she resurfaced in Paris where she lived in semiretreat, presided over a salon, and began her writing career. Excluded from her husband's will, d'Aulnoy died in Paris in 1705.

2. Reeditions of d'Aulnoy's tales appeared in 1710, 1711, 1715, 1725, and 1742, and her work was included in the forty-one-volume Cabinet des fées published in 1785. Raymonde Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe siècle à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 313, 316.

3. In her discussion of cross-dressing in female-authored fairy tales, Catherine Velay-Vallantin acknowledges that sexual inversion reveals the commensurability of masculine and feminine roles and is, therefore, a form of protest in tales by women. Yet at the same time, she seems to dismiss the significance of this symbolic scrutiny of gender, for her position reflects an adherence to the containment theory of oppositional discourses, whereby any oppositional discourse is already recuperated or “contained” by the ideological network in which it is inscribed and thus merely serves to uphold the hierarchy it purports to challenge through inversion. These tales, Velay-Vallantin writes, “participent du phénomène bien connu des conduites contestatrices qui confortent l'ordre établi en faisant semblant de le critiquer, malgré la sincérité évidente de leurs auteurs” [participate in the well-known phenomenon of contestatory acts that reassure the established order while seeming to criticize it, despite the evident sincerity of their authors]. Catherine Velay-Vallantin, La fille en garçon (Carcassonne: Editions G.A.R.A.E./Hésiode, 1992), 11-12. See note 18 below for an alternative reading of containment theory. For analyses of the feminocentric vein in d'Aulnoy's tales, see Michèle L. Farrell, “Celebration and Repression of Feminine Desire in Mme d'Aulnoy's Fairy Tale: La Chatte blanche,” L'Esprit créateur 29, no. 3 (1989): 52-64; Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Marcelle Maistre Welch, “Rébellion et résignation dans les contes de fée de Mme d'Aulnoy et Mme de Murat,” Cahiers du Dix-Septième 3, no. 2 (1989): 131-42, and “Le Devenir de la jeune fille dans les contes de fée de Madame d'Aulnoy,” Cahiers du Dix-Septième 1, no. 1 (1987): 53-62. See also Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 49.

4. Seifert, Nostalgic Utopias, chapter 5.

5. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, countess d'Aulnoy, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, in Les Contes de fées, 4 vols. (Paris, 1697-98). Rpt. in vol. 5 of Nouveau Cabinet de fées (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1978); subsequently cited in the text.

6. See Rosemary Jackson's study of the fantastic where she writes: “telling implies using the language of the dominant order. … Since this excursion into disorder begins … within the dominant cultural order, literary fantasy is a telling index of the limits of that order. Its introduction of the ‘unreal’ is set against the category of the ‘real’—a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference.” Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1981), 4.

7. Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français. Catalogue raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française d'outre-mer, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Maisonneuve et Larose, 1976), 283.

8. Ibid., 291.

9. Michèle Perret, “Travesties et transexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine,” Romance Notes 25, no. 3 (1985): 329.

10. Teresa Di Scanno traces the presence of the marvelous in fairy tales to L'Astrée, which she credits with having rejuvenated enchanters, sorcerers, and druids. Di Scanno, Les Contes de fées à l'époque classique (Napoli: Liguori Editori, 1975), 35. Jane Tucker Mitchell contends that the literary fairy tale's focus on love and happy endings derives from allegorical novels of the early part of the century, including L'Astrée. Mitchell, A Thematic Analysis of Mme d'Aulnoy's Contes de Fées (University, Mississippi: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1978), 88. In Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné, intertextual references suggest that d'Aulnoy had in mind d'Urfé's pastoral novel. Toward the end of the fairy tale, the narrator describes a “fontaine des lions; il y en avoit sept en marbre, qui jetoient par la gueule des torrens d'eau, dont il se formoit une rivière sur laquelle on traversoit la ville en gondole” [fountain of seven marble lions that spouted jets of water which formed a river enabling one to cross the city in a gondola (60)]. This passage points most immediately to bassin d'Apollon, the ornamental pond and fountain at Versailles, yet it is also reminiscent of L'Astrée's Fontaine de la Vérité d'Amour, surrounded by unicorns and lions. D'Aulnoy also exploits the dilemma of the cross-dressed character who relishes intimacy with a beloved confidante but risks losing the object of affection were his or her disguise exposed. Fortuné's lament, “quelle est ma destinée? … j'aime un grand roi, sans pouvoir jamais espérer qu'il m'aime, ni qu'il tienne compte de ce que je souffre” [what is my fate?. … I love a great king, without hope that he will ever love me, nor that he'll ever know what I've suffered (28)], echos that of Céladon: “combien de fois faillit-elle, cette feinte druide [Céladon/Alexis] de laisser le personnage de fille pour reprendre celuy de berger et combien de fois se reprit-elle de cette outrecuidance!” [how many times did this false druidess almost abandon her female persona in order to embrace that of a shepherd and how many times did she prevent herself from such impertinence!]. Honoré d'Urfé, L'Astrée, ed. Hugues Vaganay (Lyons: Pierre Masson), 3:549. Like many seventeenth-century readers, d'Aulnoy was probably quite familiar with d'Urfé's pastoral. And it is conceivable that, like other writers later in the century, she saw in the topos of cross-dressing a means to explore notions of masculinity and femininity.

11. Jean Préchac, L'Héroïne mousquetaire [The Musketeer Heroine; 1679]; Villedieu, Mémoires de la vie d'Henriette-Sylvie de Molière [Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière; 1672-74]; L'Héritier, Marmoisan ou l'innocente tromperie [Marmoisan or the Innocent Deception; 1695], reprinted in 1718 as L'Amazone françoise [The French Amazon]; and Lafayette, Histoire espagnole [Spanish Story, manuscript published 1909]. In 1678, Jean-Marie de Vernon published L'Amazone chrétienne ou les aventures de Madame de St Balmon [The Christian Amazon or the Adventures of Madame de St Balmon] a fictionalized biography of an actual female cross-dresser. Cross-dressed figures predominate in memoirs as well, notably those of Madame de la Guette (1681) and la Grande Mademoiselle, Princesse de Montpensier (1718).

12. The sisters are the antithesis of this ideal. When the fairy reveals herself to Belle-Belle, she relates her encounters with the older sisters: “elles m'ont paru si dures, & leur procédé avec moi a été si peu gracieux, que j'ai trouvé le moyen d'interrompre leur voyage” [they seemed to me so harsh, and their behavior toward me was so ungracious, that I found a way to interrupt their voyage (9)]. The text emphasizes that their selfishness, rather than a telltale “feminine” behavior, reveals their identity and disqualifies them from the good graces of the fairy. Implicitly, then, this episode disavows the notion of an innate and self-evident feminine “nature.”

13. The text insists on this verbal acumen elsewhere. Welcomed by a provincial governor while traveling to the king, Fortuné/Belle-Belle “ne disoit rien qui ne fît plaisir à entendre” [didn't say anything that was not pleasing to hear (15)].

14. Richelieu cited in Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France (London: Macmillan, 1989), 167. Louis XIV cautions the Dauphin that the only sure way to prevent women from ruining a ruler's reputation is “de ne leur donner la liberté de parler d'aucune chose que celles qui sont purement de plaisir, et de nous préparer avec étude à ne les croire en rien de ce qui peut concerner nos affaires ou les personnes de ceux qui nous servent” [to allow them to speak of nothing but purely pleasurable subjects and to prepare ourselves systematically to believe nothing they tell us that bears any relation to our affairs or to those who serve us]. Louis XIV, Mémoires (Paris: Tallendier, 1978), 260.

15. Dorothy R. Thelander, “Mother Goose and Her Goslings: The France of Louis XIV as Seen through the Fairy Tale,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 474.

16. See for example, Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire (Paris: 10/18, 1980); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); and Jean-François Lyotard, “Sur la force des faibles,” L'Arc 64 (1976): 4-14.

17. The series of civil wars known as the Fronde (1648-52) took place during the minority of Louis XIV, when Anne of Austria was regent. The Fronde comprised parliamentary and agrarian factions, and some noblewomen took part in the aristocratic Fronde, although in a limited fashion.

18. Jonathan Dollimore writes eloquently about the workings of ideology and the limits of containment theory. He points out that “ideology typically fixes meaning, naturalizing or eternalizing its prevailing forms by putting them beyond question, and thereby also effacing the contradictions and conflicts of the social domain.” The critique of ideology, he writes, “identifies the contingency of the social (it could always be otherwise), and its potential instability (ruling groups doubly contested from without and within), but does not underestimate the difficulty of change (existing social arrangements are powerfully invested and or not easily made otherwise).” Sexual Dissidence: From Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 87. Dollimore makes a crucial distinction that redresses one of the problems of containment theory, which posits that “resistance is only ever an effect of power” and thus “doomed to replicate internally the strategies, structures, and even the values of the dominant” (84, 81). He asserts that subversion and transgression “necessarily presuppose the law, but they do not thereby necessarily ratify the law” (85).

19. See Ian Maclean's The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) for a thorough discussion of this subject.

20. There is a marked asymmetry between female and male transvestism in seventeenth-century texts. Lyons's study of 244 plays featuring mistaken identity or disguise reveals that only 14 include male cross-dressers. John D. Lyons, A Theatre of Disguise: Studies in French Baroque Drama, 1630-1660 (Columbia, S.C.: French Literature Publications Company, 1978), 81. Pollock notes a similar asymmetry in the Baroque novel (Mordeca Jane Pollock, “Transvestites in French Baroque Prose Fiction: The Psychological Structure of Femininity,” Degré Second 3 [1979]: 62), and this extends as well to transvestite fiction of the last twenty-five years of the century. The relative dearth of male cross-dressing suggests that it was far more threatening to the status quo, hence more disturbing than female transvestism. Zuerner, “(Re)Constructing Gender: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century French Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 15-16.

21. Although d'Aulnoy's La Grenouille bienfaisante opens with the description of a warring king, Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné is the only one of her fairy tales to begin with, and thus foreground, such an unfavorable image of a king, even though he is one of the tale's protagonists. The risks involved in contravening the king's official mythmakers may account for the singularity of this tale.

22. Alan Dundes's terms “lack/lack liquidated” refer to the general structure of fairy tales, in which narrative movement advances from minus to plus, or from lack to the fulfillment of lack. Max Lüthi, The Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 54-55.

23. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1981), 11 and 13.

24. In Le Parnasse satirique (1622), Théophile de Viau's collection of burlesque poetry, the euphemism “trésor” is used to refer to female sex organs. The use of the term “jewels” to refer to male genitalia probably derives from the highly decorative codpieces worn by men in the Renaissance. See Patricia Simons, “Alert and Erect: Masculinity in Some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,” in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 169-72.

25. Compelled to live at court, rather than on their provincial estates, deprived of the governmental functions they had previously held and thus beholden to the king for their livelihood, forced to respect an elaborate system of etiquette, which alone determined their social identity, and prohibited from dueling, once the exclusive privilege of the noblesse d'épée, French aristocrats underwent a gradual “feminization” over the course of the seventeenth century. The eclipsing of noble prerogative first began under Richelieu, who encouraged Louis XIII to prohibit dueling, and was refined under Louis XIV, who sequestered his nobles at Versailles and, on the battlefront, replaced them with mercenaries. On this latter point, see Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 149; and Apostolidès, Roi-machine, 45-46. Apostolidès refers to Versailles as “l'espace permanent du renfermement de la noblesse après 1682” [the permanent space for the confinement of the nobility after 1682 (112)].

26. Elias, Court Society, 62-63.

27. Apostolidès, Roi-machine, 11.

28. Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux, 40.

29. “Le prince ne sçavoit plus où il en étoit; toutes les paroles & toutes les actions de Marmoisan le charmoient, il ne pouvoit vivre sans lui, & il sentoit bien, que si tout le mérite qu'il lui voyoit se trouver dans une fille, elle deviendroit pour lui le sujet d'un amour violent” [The prince no longer knew whether he was coming or going; all the words and actions of Marmoisan charmed him, he couldn't live without him, and he felt strongly that if a young woman possessed all the merits of Marmoisan, she would become the object of his violent passion]. Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, L'Amazone françoise, in Les Caprices du destin, ou recueil d'histoires singulieres et amusantes arrivées de nos jours (Paris: Chez Pierre Michel Huart, 1718), 268-69.

30. The differentiation Michèle Perret makes between ostensible and actual couples provides a useful construct for analyzing the erotic complexities of cross-dressing. Perret refers to “rapports en apparence hétérosexuels, mais, en fait, potentiellement homosexuels” [relations that are ostensibly heterosexual but potentially homosexual] as opposed to “rapports apparemment homosexuels, mais hétérosexuels en réalité” [relations ostensibly homosexual but heterosexual in reality (Perret, “Travesties et transexuelles,” 329)]. By varying the degree of emphasis on the apparent or ostensible couple, texts amplify or block a homoerotic subtext, and variations in emphasis can occur in a single text.

31. According to the heroine of Madeline de Scudéry's Célinte, l'inclination “est plustost un effet d'un jugement exquis & caché, qui agit sans que nous le sçachions” [is rather the effect of an exquisite and hidden judgment, that acts without our knowing]. Scudéry, Célinte, Nouvelle première, ed. Alain Niderst (Paris: Nizet, 1979), 75. This word is used interchangeably with the word amour in Scudéry's text.

32. The threat of male homoeroticism, and all that it implies for the notions of essential masculinity, explains in part why male transvestism was so rare in seventeenth-century literature and drama. Male transvestism gave rise much more readily to homoerotic pairings, since the cross-dressed (male) character was likely to arouse desire in an unwitting male character.

33. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 193.

34. “Fortuné ne pouvoit s'empêcher de jeter les yeux de tems en tems sur le roi: c'étoit le prince du monde le mieux fait, toutes ses manières étoient prévenantes. Belle-Belle qui n'avoit point renoncé à son sexe, en prenant un habit qui le cachoit, ressentoit un véritable attachement pour lui” [Fortuné could not stop himself from glancing at the king from time to time: he was the most distinguished prince in the world, all his manners were kind and attentive. Belle-Belle, who had not renounced her sex upon donning an outfit that hid it, felt a veritable affection for him (17)]. The presence of the masculine name, Fortuné, and the name Belle-Belle in two consecutive sentences is a recurrent semantic pattern in disguise narratives of this period.

35. The text alludes to this mutual dependence when the narrator describes the king's “obligations infinies” (76) toward Fortuné/Belle-Belle.

36. In both La Princesse de Clèves and La Princesse de Montpensier, Lafayette stresses that the disorders of love provoke political dissension and upheaval. Villedieu shares a similar understanding of history. The very title of Les Annales galantes [Gallant Annals] attests to Villedieu's conviction that love and history intersect. The narrator of the Annale entitled La Religieuse [The Nun] affirms “les Histoires sont si fertiles en incidens amoureux, qu'elles nous fourniront de toutes les especes [sic]” [History books are so rich in amorous intrigues that they will provide us with all kinds of examples (38)]. Marie-Catherine Desjardins, Madame de Villedieu, Les Annales galantes, vol. 2 of Œuvres complètes (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 38. Later in the same Annale, the narrator signals the misinformation purveyed by general history: “Rome pillée, le Pape contraint d'abonner le S. Siege … : Tout cela … ont été les fruits funestes d'un amour si fatal: Mais de tant d'incidens fameux qui sont rapportez par les histoires, peu de gens se sont avisez d'en attribuer la cause à l'amour” [Rome plundered, the Pope forced to abandon the Holy See … : All that was the disastrous consequence of a fateful love: So many famous events recounted by history books but few people dared to attribute their cause to love (45)]. See Domna C. Stanton for a study of Villedieu's “oppositional” revalidation of the novelistic form. Stanton, “The Demystification of History and Fiction in Les Annales galantes,” Biblio 17, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 37 (1987): 339-60.

37. De Thou, L'Estoile, and d'Aubigné all described caustically the relationship between Henri III and his favorites. According to l'Estoile, “le nom de Mignons commença, en ce temps [juillet 1576], à trotter par la bouche du peuple, auquel ils estoient fort odieux, tant pour leurs façons de faire qui estoient badines et hautaines, que pour leurs fards et accoustrements efféminés et impudiques, mais surtout pour les dons immenses et libéralités que leur faisoit le Roy” [during this time [July 1576], the name “Minions” began to issue from the mouths of the people who considered them [the minions] truly hateful, as much for their jocular and haughty ways as for their shameless feminine rouge and getup, but especially for the immense endowments and generous gifts they king gave them]. Cited in Agrippa d'Aubigné, Histoire universelle, vol. 4, ed. André Thierry (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1987), 335.

38. In general, scholars concur that fairy tales are inflected by the specific socio-historical context of their authors, but critics may perceive or define differently the nature of this dimension of fairy tales. Writing about folk and fairy tales, Zipes asserts that “tales are reflections of the social order in a given historical epoch” and that they form “alternative configurations in a critical and imaginative reflection of the dominant social norms.” Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magical Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 5, 18. Raymonde Robert affirms that textual references to historical context are essential for the fairy tale's efficacy: “mais dans la mesure où son objectif est d'abord le plaisir du lecteur, elle [toute littérature merveilleuse] doit s'inscrire, en contrecoup et si étroitement, dans la réalité historique que celle-ci l'informe entièrement, en lui assurant le maximum d'efficacité” [but to the extent that its objective is, first of all, the reader's pleasure, it [marvelous literature] must follow historical reality indirectly and so closely that the latter informs it entirely, thus assuring it maximum effectiveness (Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire, 456)]. Finally, Barchilon declares that d'Aulnoy's tales contain several political allusions, in addition to “innumerable” references to contemporary mores (Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux, 47, 38).

39. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 132.

40. Elias, Court Society, 149.

41. Burke, Fabrication, 142.

42. Nicole Ferrier-Caverivère, L'Image de Louis XIV dans la littérature française de 1660-1715 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 345-46.

43. Both Burke and Ferrier-Caverivière discuss the literature critical of the king during this period.

44. Di Scanno, Contes de fées à l'époque classique, 21.

45. Ibid., 123.

46. Ferrier-Caverivière, L'image de Louis XIV, 342-43.

47. Apostolidès, Roi-machine, 142.

48. Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire, 231.

49. Farrell, “Celebration and Repression,” 53.

50. Ibid., 52-53.

51. Jackson, Fantasy, 4.

52. A telling historical instance of this vulnerability is seen in the controversy surrounding Louis XIV's succession: Louis's will, naming his illegitimate son, the Duc de Maine, his successor, was contested and eventually overturned.

53. Jacques Barchilon and Peter Flinders, Charles Perrault (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 81.

54. Marc Fumaroli, “Les Fées de Charles Perrault ou de la littérature,” in Le Statut de la littérature. Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1982), 160.

55. René Demoris, “Le corps royal et l'imaginaire au XVIIe siècle: Le portrait du Roy par Félibien,” Revue des sciences humaines 172 (1978): 11.

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