SOURCE: Day, Shirley Jones. “Tracing Out New Paths: Madame d'Aulnoy.” In The Search for Lyonnesse: Women's Fiction in France, 1670-1703, pp. 169-239. Bern, Germany: Peter Lang, 1999.

[In this excerpt, Day studies d'Aulnoy's first novel, Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte du Duglas, in the context of women's fiction after Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, author of the influential novel La princess de Clèves (1678).]

The case of Mme d'Aulnoy is perhaps the most perplexing of the three women novelists, followers of Mme de Lafayette, who are studied here. Her life, with its supposed scandals, was the object of a serious biographical study published over seventy years ago.¹ Born in about 1650, she is credited with having led an adventurous existence during the early part of her life. It is claimed that she had false charges of treason laid against her husband, a brutal bully thirty years older than herself. She apparently spent some time in exile, perhaps in England, where she was possibly employed as a spy. Her years of literary success were spent in Paris, where she died in 1705.

Her contes de fées have received critical attention.² But whereas scholars have examined and assessed Mlle Bernard's novels, and a scholarly edition of her complete works is currently appearing, Mme d'Aulnoy's fiction remains in limbo. In some respects her case is analogous with that of George Sand in the nineteenth century. Long familiar to the public for what society deemed to be the notoriety of her private life, known as a novelist for a handful of works which are not representative of her œuvre as a whole, the true character of Sand's works have only of recent years become apparent to the public. The George Sand of La petite Fadette and La Mare au diable is not necessarily the same George Sand as that of Indiana or André. Similarly, only a part of Mme d'Aulnoy's work is known to students of literature. She is recognized simply as a brilliant exponent of the genre of the conte de fées.³ However, a knowledge of novels like the Histoire d'Hypolite would give us deeper insight into the patterns of meaning of her contes de fées. It would also help us see this literature as part of a wider tradition of women's writing which has suffered critical neglect.

HISTOIRE D'HYPOLITE, COMTE DE DUGLAS (1690)

Mme d'Aulnoy's first work of fiction, Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas,⁴ was to become a best seller, a work whose significance can be measured in terms of its appeal to a large number of readers and of its possible influence over a period of time.⁵

The theme explored in the novel is that of the conflict between society and the individual, the collective morality of the Old Order, defending collective values, and the New Order, championing the rights of the individual, expressed in terms of the right to love. The passion that formed the mute yet constant background to La Princesse de Clèves now comes to the fore as the supreme expression of an individual as opposed to a collective identity. Other related themes devolve from this principal one.

The title, Histoire d'Hypolite, Hypolite's story, is significant in that it suggests that the writer proposes to add an element missing from the Bernard text, promising us not only the heroine's text, but that of the hero as well. Indeed, each of Mme d'Aulnoy's three novels has the name of the hero in its title, which both breaks with the tradition established by her immediate predecessors, Mme de Lafayette and Mlle Bernard, and stands apart from the tradition of women's writing in general during this period.

The plot, which is set in the England of the early Reformation, begins appropriately, given the historical background, with the theme of persecution. The Comte de Warwick, who has remained true to the old faith, is implicated in charges of high treason laid against a kinsman. He is obliged to flee the country, leaving behind his French-born wife and their two-year-old daughter. News of his death reaches Mme de Warwick, who succumbs to grief and dies, leaving the infant Julie in the care of friends and fellow-Catholics, the Comte de Duglas and his wife. Milord and Madame de Duglas, who already have two children, Hypolite who is aged seven and Lucile who is four years old, bring Julie up as their daughter. This initial act of subterfuge or deceit is the direct consequence of the theme of persecution which opened the work. It is feared that, if Julie's true identity were known, members of the Warwick family, who for political reasons have converted to the new faith, would seize her and bring her up as a Protestant.

The consequence of this initial obfuscation of the heroine's identity is that when, in early adolescence, Julie and Hypolite fall in love, they are consumed with guilt, believing their passion is incestuous. The terms in which the theme of guilt is introduced into the story is significant. In La Princesse de Clèves, for instance, the sense of guilt experienced by the heroine is founded on the moral laws governing marriage; and in that sense, as I have suggested, the basis for her self-reproach is real. Here however the lovers' sense of guilt is unfounded, and stems from the initial deceit practised on them by society.

Julie, taking the onus of guilt on herself, decides to become a nun. On the eve of her going away to France to enter a convent, her ‘parents’ reveal her true identity to her. She immediately tells Hypolite that she is not his sister and, freed from the burden of guilt, the lovers now see their love as natural and therefore innocent and so feel free to express it.

Under the dual stresses of the truth—that of Julie's true identity, and that of Julie's and Hypolite's mutual passion—the social unit of the family disintegrates. Julie first of all feigns illness in order to avoid entering a convent and thus losing Hypolite forever. Then, when their subterfuge is discovered and with it the truth of their love, Hypolite's parents engage in the first of their acts of deceit against the lovers, making secret plans for Hypolite to be sent off on the Grand Tour.⁶ The lovers' passion runs counter to the parents' plans, that is to say the social reality of marriage and the family. A rich heiress has been chosen as a suitable marriage partner for Hypolite, whereas Julie is a penniless nobody. There is no room for passion in this scheme of things.

At this point the battle lines between the Old Order and the New are drawn up. Hypolite's sister, Lucile, had already been enrolled as an ally. On learning of his parents' plans (which had been hatched secretly), Hypolite immediately rushes off to London to enlist the aid of his friend, the Comte de Sussex, with whose help, and that of the French ambassador who was to have accompanied him to France, he manages to remain in hiding in England and to visit Julie secretly by night in the gardens of his parents' country home.

The idyll of these nocturnal meetings, when the lovers are discreetly chaperoned by Lucile and Sussex, is shattered when the Comte de Bedfort, who had figured in the background of the story as Julie's unwelcome suitor, arrives on the scene accompanied by his henchmen, to abduct Julie. Hypolite appears as she is being carried off. The two men fight a duel and Bedfort is gravely wounded. This episode of violence which interrupts and destroys the innocent happiness of the lovers is doubly significant. Structurally it brings to an end the first phase of the story of the lovers' passion: it is their first violent confrontation with society. It is also the first of the cyclical episodes involving Hypolite, which constitute the structural framework of the plot. However, it is the profoundly ambiguous nature of this violence that is important. In the first place, Julie's abduction is unequivocally an act of violence, yet subsequently there is no question of Bedfort's being blamed, much less punished.⁷ On the contrary, this is how the Comte de Duglas defines the situation to his son: ‘Vous estes si malheureux que de blesser un homme qui faisoit profession d'estre nostre ami, qui porte le même nom que vostre Mere, qui est enfin riche & puissant’ (47). In other words, society is shown as acting in collusion with the rich and powerful aggressor who forms part of the social group, against a weak and defenceless member and, here again, Julie's orphaned status is an important element in the situation. Moreover, this ritual of violence—the duel between two men of the same social caste—signals Hypolite's participation in both worlds: the public one of social convention and the private one of passion.

The second phase of the story both begins and ends with the theme of exile. Hypolite is immediately packed off to Italy to stay with Senator Alberty, a Florentine friend of Milord de Duglas. His journey there is the not without further adventure, however. Not only is his ship first overtaken by a dreadful storm which almost wrecks it, but it is then attacked by pirates. During the combat one of their leaders is taken captive: Hypolite subsequently discovers that he is none other than Julie's father, who had been captured by Dragut Raïs. Just as Warwick's wife had believed he was dead, he had believed that both his wife and child had died. On their arrival in Italy, Warwick immediately makes his way to Venice, where he has some unfinished business to attend to.

The deceit that had characterized Milord and Madame de Duglas's dealings with Hypolite and Julie since discovering their love is now practised in an even more systematic fashion in order to separate them and to safeguard family interests. Their letters are intercepted and false ones substituted. Finally Milord de Duglas, acting in complicity with the English Agent in Florence, concocts a story of Hypolite's having fallen in love with an Italian heiress whom he wishes to marry. Julie's response to this apparent betrayal is to agree to marry the ever-constant, or rather the ever-importunate, Comte de Bedfort. On learning of Julie's marriage, Hypolite, accompanied by his host's son, Leandre, who has become his close friend, returns to England. And once again we see that each moment of crisis for the hero serves to renew and further develop the theme of friendship, of solidarity of the New Order against the Old.

Back in England, Hypolite seeks out his faithful friend Sussex, and on his advice he and Leandre, disguised as peddlers, visit Julie at her husband's home. The meeting between the lovers has disastrous consequences. On returning to the forest where their menservants are waiting for them, Hypolite and Leandre are surrounded and attacked by a band of officers of the local magistrate, who believes they are highwaymen. Placed under arrest, the following day they are forced to take part in what the writer describes as a gladiatorial combat as part of the entertainment at the house of a nobleman who was celebrating his daughter's wedding.⁸ Instead of fighting each other, Hypolite and Leandre privately agree to attack the sheriff's officers. Panic ensues. Julie and Lucile appear—they are of course among the wedding guests. Hypolite and Leandre are both seriously wounded and are taken into the house, where their true identity is revealed to their host. The Comte de Bedfort, on learning that Hypolite and the peddler are one and the same person, is instantly seized with mad jealousy and decides to carry his wife off to a secret prison. This he executes with the deceit and treachery which both characterizes him and also places him firmly in the camp of society, as it is depicted in the work as a whole. Feigning illness, he bears his wife off to their home and proceeds to make secret plans for what amounts to her abduction. Without any prior warning, Julie is bundled into a coach and made to board a ship for France. The parallelism of the lovers' fate is stressed here in the language used to paint the scene of each being borne into exile. First we have Hypolite's last sight of England:

Hypolite abatu de douleur, se fit apporter un matelats sur le tillac & de ce lieu tant qu'il le put il regarda l'Angleterre, envoyant mille soupirs vers sa chere Julie.

(56)

In a parallel situation Julie is described as being,

couchée sur le tillac, sa teste appuyée sur sa main, le visage couvert d'un grand voile, & les yeux tournez vers son pays, qu'elle quittoit avec mille regrets. L'on m'enleve, cher Hypolite, disoit-elle pendant que tu te fie en nostre bonne fortune!

(106)

These are poetic moments in the story, yet ones which, to the late twentieth-century reader, also underline the different fate meted out to the hero and heroine. On his arrival in Italy, Hypolite was free to lead the normal life of a man of his age; Julie however was about to be held prisoner in a convent. She is borne off by her husband to the convent of Saint Menoux, near Bourbon L'Archambault,⁹ and placed in the charge of the Abbess with the strictest instructions that she must be prevented from having any contact whatsoever with the outside world.

The final section of the story opens with a further act of violence. Having lain in wait for Bedfort for some weeks in Calais, Hypolite meets up with him and immediately challenges him to a duel. Having gained the upper hand over his opponent, Hypolite is treacherously stabbed in the back by Bedfort's manservant and is left for dead. Indeed, his wounds are such that Hypolite's faithful manservant sends for Milord and Madame de Duglas who hurry to his side. This reconciliation, more than having any particular moral significance, is primarily a structural device to bring about the marriage of Lucile and Leandre (who has also hastened to join the stricken Hypolite), so that the writer has them strategically placed in Italy in readiness for the dénouement.

Hypolite slowly recovers and is ordered to take the waters at Bourbon L'Archambault, where, by a stroke of good luck, which is probably his due after so much misfortune, he discovers that Julie is in the nearby convent of Saint Menoux. Disguised as the assistant of an Italian painter currently employed by the Abbess, Hypolite gains access to the convent and is reunited with Julie. Months of idyllic happiness for the lovers ensue before the real world, the demands of social existence once again make themselves heard. Hypolite is in reality not a painter's apprentice, but the son and heir of the Comte de Duglas and as such is summoned back to England to the bedside of his dying father. Again, the different fates of men and women are illustrated here. Hypolite, his father's son, goes home to attend to his inheritance; Julie as a wife, remains her husband's property and subject to his dictates. She chances to find a letter from the Comte de Bedfort to the Abbess in which he announces his intention to come to the convent (without warning Julie of course) to take his wife away to a more secret and secure prison.

Julie, with the connivance of Cardiny, the Italian painter, flees to Italy, while the Abbess, a scatter-brained creature, in order to head off Bedfort, writes to inform him that his wife has died suddenly. Hypolite, whose arrival in London had been delayed by a fall from his horse which had resulted in a badly-injured ankle, arrives in time to learn the news of Julie's death. In despair he, together with Julie's father, who had also just arrived, and the faithful Sussex, set off for more adventures in the Mediterranean, (perhaps the seventeenth-century equivalent of young Englishmen in the nineteenth century going out to the colonies to work off their aggressions).

Although she arrives safely in Florence, where she passes herself off as a widow, Julie's peace is soon disturbed by the unwelcome attentions of Leandre's father, Senator Alberty, who has fallen madly in love with her and who wishes to marry her. Just as she is planning to take refuge in a convent, masked men burst into her apartment late one evening and carry her off.

The theme of abduction, a topos of this writing, can be criticized as straining the bounds of credibility—vraisemblance—which we have been taught to revere in literature. However, it does serve to emphasize the vulnerability of the heroine when, as either orphan or widow, she is not under the protection of father or husband.

Not unnaturally, Julie assumes that her abductor is Alberty père and is therefore even more terrified when, on the mountain road leading from Florence to Sienna, her abductors are intercepted by a second band of men headed by Senator Alberty and Leandre. Julie escapes during the mêlée and eventually takes refuge in the hut of a poor shepherd and his wife. Again the theme of disguise is brought into play when Julie dresses up as a male pilgrim in order to make her way on foot to Venice.

As on previous occasions, disguise is a preliminary to amorous encounter, this time however, not between Julie and her lover. Whilst lying asleep in a meadow outside Bologna, Julie is wounded in the leg by an arrow. Her involuntary assailant, the Marquise Becarelly, takes Julie alias Silvio back to her house, has her wounds tended—and falls violently in love with ‘him’. Unable to resist her passion, on the eve of ‘his’ departure, the Marquise steals into ‘his’ bedchamber and passionately embraces the sleeping Silvio. At this moment both are stabbed by the Marquise's jealous husband, who, warned of his wife's new passion by her maid, has returned secretly in order to avenge his honour. Both Silvio and the Marquise are thrown into prison, accused of adultery, a heinous offense for women. The wronged husband, fearing that his wife's family might, through their wealth and power, prejudice the outcome of the trial in her favour, proposes that the jury should include some foreigners. The scene is set for the final coup de théâtre: amongst the jurors chosen are Hypolite and Warwick, and the wronged husband is none other than the Comte de Bedfort. Believing that Julie was dead, he had gone to Italy where he had married an heiress, taking her name. On a visit to Florence, he had seen Julie in a church and it was he who had abducted her from the Alberty household, with the intention of locking her up forever—or worse.

The law condemns Bedfort, not as a bad husband however, but on the technicality of bigamy, so that, overcome with shame, he quickly succumbs and dies. Julie is happily reunited with her father and with the faithful Hypolite so that, after their trials, the lovers are at last married and, as in a fairy-tale, we leave them to live happily ever after. …

In judging Mme d'Aulnoy's portrait of her heroine as a married woman, and in assessing how far she has distanced herself from the Lafayette model, one has only to compare the situation in La Princesse de Clèves, where the institution of marriage was represented by the kind and loving Prince de Clèves and where the lover was the arch-seducer Nemours. In the Histoire d'Hypolite, we have the taciturn and menacing figure of Bedfort as the husband and Hypolite, the passionate youth, as lover. In Mme d'Aulnoy's version of events, society is indicted whilst the individual, that is to say the passionate individual, is exonerated.

Hypolite's character is in many ways complementary to Julie's, and here again Mme d'Aulnoy has succeeded in creating a new and arresting literary type, indeed more original and more remarkable than that of her heroine, because in creating a male character she has greater scope in relation to the literary and moral conventions of her day, a point I shall return to later.

Here again, Mlle Bernard can be seen as the mid-point in the evolution of the hero from the Nemours model. As we have seen, Mme de Lafayette's lover was a courtier, invested with power, who in addition exercised sexual power over women. The Duc de Misnie was young, to some extent still in the power of his widowed mother and presumably innocent in the ways of love. Hypolite marks a further stage in the rewriting of the image of the lover. His youthful innocence is an essential element in the lovers' story, as is his disempowered status as a son who has not yet come into his estate. In certain respects he is a correlate of the orphaned Julie; and here again the sharp male/female distinction of Mme de Lafayette's story has been abandoned in favour of a view of the lovers as a couple united against society.

However, as I have indicated in my résumé of the plot, Hypolite belongs to two worlds in a way that Julie does not; and his story also serves to illustrate the profound difference between men's and women's destinies. As a young nobleman, Hypolite partakes of the freedom that is his right: freedom to travel and to make friends outside the family circle. His participation in what I have termed the ritualized violence of the duel, the symbol both of manhood and nobility, has an important functional role in the plot.

As a lover, however, Hypolite presents a very different picture. Where the initial image of Julie was one of strength and determination, Hypolite is from the outset portrayed as being driven by passion. He is a rash, impetuous youth. For instance, when Sussex points out to him that his deceiving his father in order to remain in England will not be effective for long, Hypolite replies, ‘ne deust-il estre trompé qu'un jour […] c'est un jour qui sera employé pour voir Julie’ (37).

The violence of his emotions are graphically described. It is he who is most often portrayed as being in a physically weak condition. When Julie announces her intention to enter a nunnery, Hypolite reacts by becoming violently ill.¹⁰ There then follow the episodes when Hypolite, having been seriously wounded in sword fights, lies helpless. And here one notes the double use Mme d'Aulnoy makes of the theme of violence. On the one hand it indicates Hypolite's participation in the rituals of society. On the other, and more important for the underlying meaning of the text, it provides the author with a pretext for scenes of sensibility in which displaced eroticism forms an important element. Hypolite's weakened state gives scope for descriptions of physical contact between the lovers, without transgressing the bounds of decency observed in this kind of writing. For instance, when Julie cradles Hypolite's head in her arms whilst bathing his face with her tears as he lies wounded after the fight with the magistrate's men: ‘Julie toute appliquée à son cher Amant, dont elle avoit appuyé la teste sur ses genoux, le tenoit entre ses bras, elle lui mouilloit le visage de ses larmes’ (98).

The novelty of Hypolite's character is so apparent that it scarcely needs to be stressed. The most superficial reading of the text shows how little he conforms to the stereotype of the hero of the Villedieu or Lafayette tradition. The antithesis of Nemours, for whom, as we have seen, love was a combination of a society game and a hunt, Hypolite for his part lives only for love. As he says to Leandre: ‘J'aimois Julie avant de me connoître moi-même’ (69). At another moment he stresses that, through their mutual passion, he and Julie are one person: ‘Que m'est-il donc arrivé? Car enfin mes interests ne peuvent estre separez de ceux de ma Maîtresse’ (109), a sentiment that prefigures Prévost's Des Grieux.

The character of Hypolite is interesting, not only because of its novelty, but because it challenges conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity. An important element in the story, important too in its role in creating the image of the hero, is the series of scenes between the lovers in which Hypolite is portrayed in the more passive position, weakened by illness or physical injury, so that an element of specifically male sexuality is absent. Three scenes in particular illustrate this. First, in the grotto, Hypolite is about to take his own life, believing that Julie, whom he is madly in love with, is his own sister (19). Then, after Julie has declared her intention to become a nun, Hypolite falls ill with despair and there ensues a scene of great sensibility, if not of passion, between the lovers (21). The most extreme example of the correlation between injury or illness on Hypolite's part and intensely emotional scenes between the lovers occurs after he is gravely wounded in the sword fight during the wedding celebrations, where the violence of his emotions nearly cost him his life (103). Moreover, the concept of living one's life for love was traditionally the heroine's lot and, as we have seen, Hypolite's existence during the course of story was dedicated to the pursuit of his love for Julie. We do not doubt Hypolite's passion. Its virile expression is a more moot point. Clearly Mme d'Aulnoy has not attempted to create a psychologically realistic portrait of a male character, but to express an ideal, corresponding perhaps more to female fantasy than to observable fact. And here too she departs from Mme de Lafayette's model in Nemours. To attempt to suggest reasons for this choice leads one immediately into the realm of speculation. The extraordinary nature of Mme d'Aulnoy's hero is however a fact; and one assumes that the success of the work was in some part due to her readers' response to him.

An aspect of Mme d'Aulnoy's art as a writer which perhaps goes some way towards explaining her choice of hero is the emphasis on visual effect present in her writing. Unlike Mlle Bernard, the aesthetic that shapes her work is founded on the emotional response provoked in the reader by visual description; and here Hypolite's character as a man of sensibility plays an important part. How often we see him—and the reference to sight is entirely appropriate here—sunk in despair or striding about in anguish, uttering cries of grief, as when he learns of Julie's marriage to Bedfort:

Dans ce triste estat il ne fit aucune reflexion à l'heure qu'il estoit, bien que la nuit fust déja fort avancée, il n'avoit pas pensé à sortir du bois, & marchant tantost d'un pas precipité, tantost s'appuyant contre un arbre, tantost sur couchant sur la terre, il ne trouvoit point de situation tranquille, l'agitation de son esprit, son desespoir, sa colere, toutes ces passions le tourmentoient d'une maniere si violente, qu'il estoit plus proche de la mort que de la vie.

(81)¹¹

It is significant that no extreme manifestations of emotion are attributed to Julie; and this fact would offer a practical reason for Mme d'Aulnoy's choosing to create her hero quite as she does, since such violent emotion would perhaps have been considered to be lacking in decorum—bienséance—in the heroine of a work of fiction as opposed to the theatre.

As Hypolite suggests, he and Julie are indissolubly bound together by their passion; and it is in the description of the passionate encounters between the lovers that the writing in the Histoire d'Hypolite strikes a poetic note not previously encountered in fiction, as we can see in the following passage: ‘Que dis-je ma chere maîtresse? si vous ne m'estes point contraire, qui pourra separer nos cœurs? croyez Hypolite! lui dit-elle en le regardant tendrement, que la mort seule les pourra separer’ (34). And, on the eve of Hypolite's exile, Julie writes:

Malgré votre douleur & la mienne, je vais vous voir partir, essayons au moins, mon cher Amant, de vaincre nostre mauvaise fortune par nostre fermeté, vous me promettez de m'estre fidelle, qu'est-ce qui pourroit me rendre infidelle? rien au monde, pas même la mort; nostre constance triomphera de nos malheurs, nous nous reverrons, mon cher Hypolite, & l'amour couronnera nos peines.

(51-52)

This second passage is particularly interesting since it forms part of one of the letters which the lovers exchange. The use of letters in this novel, indeed the use of letters in women's fiction in general during this period would merit a separate study. In the hands of a skilled artist like Mme d'Aulnoy the letter can be used as a means of circumventing certain moral conventions which weighed heavily on the woman writer. In her letters, the heroine can express herself more passionately than she would in her lover's presence.

However, passion in the Histoire d'Hypolite does not simply give rise to passage of lyricism, although that is an important part of its function in the text, it is also the source of scenes of unequivocal if ambivalent eroticism. Julie and Hypolite become aware of their mutual attraction when they are scarcely more than children, as the result of a boating accident in which Hypolite saves Julie from drowning. We read:

Il la serra etroitement entre ses bras, il attacha sa bouche sur la sienne, & fut prest d'expirer par la douleur extrême qu'il ressentoit, mais ses brûlants soupirs, & le déluge de larmes dont il lui mouilloit le visage, la tirerent bientost d'un estat, où la seule frayeur l'avoit jettée.

(16)

This passage encapsulates the chief features of the eroticism in the Histoire d'Hypolite. First that it is invariably related to the theme of disguise or mistaken identity, which, as I have suggested, is a primary element of the thematics of the work. At this point in the story, Julie and Hypolite still believe that they are brother and sister and therefore fail to acknowledge the erotic implications of their behaviour. Equally important, from the point of view of the women writer of the 1690s, is the fact that, because of this misunderstanding, she is able to introduce material into the text of a more erotic nature than would otherwise be acceptable in this literature.¹² Disguise can thus be seen as a form of subterfuge. The other significant feature of the passage is the role played by tears in this eroticism. Each of scenes of close physical contact between the lovers is marked by outpourings of tears which, literally, unite them. In the important scene at the outset of their story, when Julie is preparing to enter a convent, it is Hypolite who weeps:

Il se tourna un peu pour cacher l'abondance de larmes qui lui couvroient le visage; mais Julie l'obligeant de la regarder ne m'enviez point, lui dit-elle, mon cher Hypolite, la seule consolation qui me reste, laissez-moy voir toute votre douleur.

(23)

Long before Prévost, Mme d'Aulnoy had discovered the erotic symbolism of weeping.¹³

The theme of disguise in the Histoire d'Hypolite functions as part of the poetics of the work, conveying a sense of isolation, of alienation from the real world, from the confines of society. The lovers' clandestine meetings invariably take place with Hypolite wearing disguise, wearing a strange wig that alters his appearance, dressed as a peddler, or masquerading as a painter. In other words, in order to rejoin Julie in their private world, the timeless world of lovers, Hypolite has to divest himself of his persona as the son of Milord de Duglas. This otherness that characterizes the lovers is further represented by the surroundings in which they meet, the natural world which is at one with their natural and therefore innocent passion. Hence the descriptions of the natural world, that of gardens, orange groves, the nearby forest which form an integral part of the poetics of the work.¹⁴

In contrast with the world of the lovers stands society and its laws, represented by Milord and the Comtesse de Duglas as parent-figures, and by the Comte de Bedfort, as the husband with the authority which society has invested in him. I have already referred in general terms to Hypolite's parents. In relation to Julie, as we have seen, the contrast between parent-figures here and in La Princesse de Clèves is striking. The arbitrary power, amounting to tyranny, invested in the figure of the parent is expressed by Milord de Duglas, when he says of Julie: ‘Encore qu'elle ne soit pas nostre fille, elle dépend assez de nous pour faire le bonheur ou le malheur de sa vie’ (52). The relationship between Hypolite's parents and Julie is, in every sense of the word, false, a falsity which is stressed when Mme de Duglas persuades Julie ‘comme sa meilleure amie’ of the material advantages of marriage to the Comte de Bedfort.¹⁵ This false friendship again conjures up echoes of La Princesse de Clèves, where Mme de Chartres had urged her daughter, with a sincere concern for her well-being, to confide in her about her feelings towards men of the court. If the good mother-figure is absent from the Histoire d'Hypolite, the absence of the father-figure is even more eloquent. The Comte de Warwick's decision, on landing in Leghorn, to make straight for Venice to attend to his affairs there rather than to return to Julie in England may strike the present-day reader as indicating a lack of parental feeling. At all events, Warwick's behaviour, which forms part of the image of orphanhood with which the heroine is invested, also forms part of the portrait of a society founded on material considerations.

If Julie's relations with parent-figures are characterized by indifference on their part, her relations with her husband are characterized by violence on his. The portrait of marriage in the Histoire d'Hypolite is, as I have already suggested, a sombre one. In the first place we note the dramatic change in tone between Bedfort's attitude to Julie before their marriage and after. When he is still her suitor, she delivers him a wounding rebuff:

Madame, […] vous me defendez de vous voir? oüy, lui ai-je reparti, je vous demande de me laisser en repos. Ha! Madame […] vous me mettez au desespoir, […] que feray-je si je ne vous vois point? vous essayerez de vous guerir, lui ai-je dit, d'une passion qui m'importune.

(43)

This rejection, however, triggers off the first of the acts of violence which Bedfort carries out against Julie. And here, as I have already suggested, the reaction of Hypolite's father shows how society closes a blind eye to violence within its ranks when perpetrated against one of lesser importance.

If the parent/child relationship that had formed such a poignant element in La Princesse de Clèves is significantly absent from the Histoire d'Hypolite, the absence of the husband and wife relationship, the crucial element in Mme de Lafayette's text, is an even more notable gap in Mme d'Aulnoy account. The portrait of Julie's marriage to Bedfort is one of silent jealousy¹⁶ and mistrust which erupt into acts of violence, a violence moreover which is condoned by society. There is no reported dialogue between Julie and her husband (as there is, so frequently, between Julie and Hypolite), and this very silence renders him a sinister and threatening figure. We are simply told of his passion for his wife.¹⁷ Its expression is confined to acts of violence and cruelty, a furtive violence however, which too is silent. The deviousness and duplicity of the Duglas parents appears in more extreme form in Bedfort, who secretly plots to carry his wife off to France to lock here up in a convent there, and who subsequently breaks into her apartment in Florence, accompanied by henchmen masked like himself, with the intention of abducting her to a convent in Sienna where she will be locked up forever. The silent horror that surrounds Bedfort's character as a husband is broken only once, when carrying his wife off to France, he answers to her sobs and pleading: ‘Examinez vostre cœur, Madame […] il me justifiera’ (105), a sombre echo of the ideal on which the young and brave Julie had suggested that marriage should be based, ‘l'union des cœurs’. The reality of marriage is shown to be a far cry from Julie's ideal; and in the name of the rights accorded to a husband, Bedfort sits in judgment on his wife. The power accorded to him by society is never questioned, even by Julie.

Mme d'Aulnoy's treatment of the character of Bedfort is interesting on several counts. First, no attempt is made to endow his character with any psychological depth. Silent, totally depersonalized, he represents a concept rather than an individual. On the other hand, both in the material setting in which he is presented, the castle surrounded by forests, accompanied by masked henchmen, and even more in his capacity to reappear in the plot in order to carry out further acts of violence, he belongs to the realm of fantasy or fairy-tale rather than that of Cartesian reason. And this is essentially the tradition to which Bedfort belongs—that of the ogre of the conte de fées. After all, Mme d'Aulnoy was one of the finest exponents of the conte de fées of her generation; and it would be surprising if elements of her subtle art as a conteuse were not found elsewhere in her fiction. The significance of its presence here lies in the context in which it is placed. It has become yet another form of disguise or subterfuge on the writer's part, allowing her to treat a difficult and painful topic, that of conjugal violence, in a manner which both is effective and also eludes moral censorship. It would presumably have been unthinkable to write about conjugal violence in a contemporary setting. The character of Bedfort illustrates an aspect of Mme d'Aulnoy's strategy in the Histoire d'Hypolite. It is a remarkable love story, but it is far from being simply that. The deliberately unrealistic treatment of the material was, I would argue, part of a coherent literary strategy. One might also argue that a non-realistic treatment of the theme of conjugal violence was imposed on a woman writer by a society that refused to acknowledge the existence of this violence. In her study of the condition of women in early modern Europe, Olwen Hufton has shown how precarious was a wife's situation within marriage and how common was the incidence of conjugal violence, which the law in fact condoned.¹⁸ Julie's real life counterpart would have had to stay with her husband and submit to his brutal treatment.

Finally, in addition to the characters through whom the writer creates the aesthetic and moral fabric of her work, she has given us a series of minor characters, interesting and original literary types who add depth, colouring and, on occasion, an element of comedy to her writing. For instance, there is the delicious pen portrait of the Abbess of Saint Menoux, a silly vain woman (whose counterpart in life Mme d'Aulnoy may very well have encountered). The Abbess's empty vanity is well observed when she is having her portrait painted:

Comme la peinture a de soy quelque chose de sérieux, l'Abbesse commença de s'ennuyer: elle craignoit que cela ne fît tort à son portrait. Il me semble, dit-elle, que d'ordinaire les Peintres sçavent des Histoires & des contes dont ils réjouissent ceux qu'ils peignent, cependant vous ne m'avez encore rien dit qui m'ait donné quelque gayeté, & je sens bien que mon visage va changer si vous ne me faites un recit qui me divertisse.

(123)

This is of course the pretext for the inclusion of a ravishing conte de fées, the so-called Ile de la Félicité, in the text. Then there is Cardiny, the Italian artist, whose initial garrulousness and boasting about his capacities as a portraitist are the subject of gentle irony, whilst his subsequent loyalty and integrity are stressed. Finally the humble shepherd and his wife who befriend Julie when she is fleeing from her abductors in Florence are perceptively and sympathetically drawn. The shepherd's wife takes Julie into their wretched hut and quickly hides her. Then, when the danger is passed, she washes Julie's faces and offers her some bread and a little milk. In all these cases the humanity of these minor figures is tellingly expressed. They are not simply literary vignettes whose existence is quite extraneous to the plot. They constitute a minor element of the thematics of the work as a whole, which revolve around the question of human qualities and individual values as opposed to collective ideologies.

One of the most curious vignettes in the novel is that of the idyll between the Marquise Becarelly and ‘Silvio’. Lewis Seifert has commented on the subversive representation of sexuality here.¹⁹ It is a further example, I would suggest, of the aesthetics of ambiguity characteristic of Mme d'Aulnoy's writing in the Histoire d'Hypolite. The ending of the sad love-story is particularly poignant. Although Mme Becarelly is aware of ‘Silvio's’ true sexual identity, she asks her to dress up once more as the handsome young pilgrim she had fallen in love with: ‘Mais aussi-tost qu'elle la [Julie] vit, elle tomba dans une si grande foiblesse, qu'il sembloit qu'elle alloit mourir; ha! s'écria-t-elle, je trouve mon mal où je cherche mon remede’ (172). The disconsolate Marquise rushes off to bury herself in a convent.

A reading of the Histoire d'Hypolite poses many problems. The title itself can be read in different ways. Why has Mme d'Aulnoy chosen to give her hero's name to the work—as she was to do with her two further novels? As we have seen, Mlle Bernard's use of names in the titles of her stories was a clear indication of the character who was to be the main object of her study. In entitling her book Histoire d'Hypolite, Mme d'Aulnoy may have been seeking to indicate that this was not simply the heroine's text. Certainly Hypolite plays as important a role in the story as Julie and, as we have seen, is in many ways a more original and remarkable literary creation. However the title, Histoire d'Hypolite, can also be read as a conscious subversion, on Mme d'Aulnoy's part, of currently held ideals of the hero and heroism. As we know, Hypolite conspicuously fails to conform to previous stereotypes. His public history, the deeds for which, we are told, he was famous in his time, is confined to the peroration, so that the work can be seen as a new kind of women's history, radically different from the Villedieu tradition, one that validates sentiment.

The figure of Julie also poses problems for the twentieth-century reader and any attempt to interpret her character is bound to carry with it the risk of making anachronistic judgments. Her brave championing, before her marriage, of individual freedom against collective submission strikes us as new and exciting, and one would be curious to know how it was received by Mme d'Aulnoy's early readers.

However, the originality of certain features of Mme d'Aulnoy's heroine is an indisputable fact. And here again, the role of the conte de fées tradition in the presentation of her character should not be overlooked. In her creation of Julie as the prototype of woman as victim, Mme d'Aulnoy has constructed a figure who belongs to the tradition of Cinderella. The manner in which she is introduced at the outset of the story indicates the presence of the fairy-tale tradition: ‘Jusqu'à ce jour, l'on n'avoit peut-estre jamais vû personne plus parfaite de corps & d'esprit, à l'âge de douze ans elle pouvoit déja passer pour une merveille’ (14). However, as with Bedfort, the conte de fées element latent in the characterisation of Julie serves as a means by which the writer can pose questions relevant to the position of women in society. I have already described Julie as a penniless nobody. Through her, money once again makes its appearance in women's fiction; and specifically, money in the form that seventeenth-century women experienced it, in terms of the dowry without which their passage into the adult world through marriage was highly problematic. With the Histoire d'Hypolite, the women's novel has come down an appreciable notch socially from the aristocratic atmosphere of La Princesse de Clèves and its subject matter would have had a greater relevance to the experience of Mme d'Aulnoy's women readers. The theme of money, or lack of it in Julie's case, is a corollary to that of orphanhood; and both relate to the crucial question of the position of women within the family which Mme d'Aulnoy explores in the first part of her novel. It is also the subtext of the second part. We are told that the Comte de Bedfort was prepared to marry Julie without a dowry. This would mean that her position within the marriage would be understood to be more vulnerable, and her ill-treatment at her husband's hands would be less likely to meet with any redress from her family.

In the light of its many positive qualities, it seems strange that a text like the Histoire d'Hypolite should have remained ignored when so much of the so-called minor fiction of the period has been reprinted. In it an intelligent woman writer addresses cultural issues which are of interest to the late twentieth-century reader who is prepared to read her, if not in an impartial, at least in an open-minded, manner.

MADAME D'AULNOY'S CONTRIBUTION TO FICTION

Mme d'Aulnoy is perhaps the most remarkable of the trio of women writers, followers of Mme de Lafayette, who form the subject of this study. Her literary versatility is demonstrated by her success in three different genres: the first person memoir and travel account,²⁰ the conte de fées, and the novel. The self-conscious nature of her art is demonstrated by the difference of tone adopted in these respective genres. In each she has a specific aim and, in the case of the contes de fées and the novels, one might say that she has a specific message. Whereas she speaks with a different voice in the memoirs than in her works of fiction, there are links between Mme d'Aulnoy the conteuse and Mme d'Aulnoy the novelist. Where Mlle Bernard made discreet, but telling, use of some of the seminal themes of the conte de fées in the creation of Eléonor d'Yvrée, Mme d'Aulnoy takes the same themes and makes them the cornerstone of the aesthetic that informs her fictional writing: while nominally taking up the theme of love and marriage so movingly explored by Mme de Lafayette, she exploits it to very different and subversive ends. Above all, she demonstrates the fundamental importance of the influence of the conte de fées on women's fiction of the 1690s.

The presence of fairy-tale elements is discernible throughout Mme d'Aulnoy's fictions. Her heroine the orphan Julie, the step-parents who betray her, her odious and tyrannical husband, the decor of forest and the various forms of imprisonment she endures, all these bear the hallmark of the fairy-tale. So do elements of the decor in the second part of Le Comte de Warwick: the castle surrounded by forests and the fantastic underground palace. The aesthetic of the conte de fées—the cult of the non-rational and the exotic—is discernible in other aspects of Mme d'Aulnoy's fiction, in the orientalism that features in Jean de Bourbon for instance. In his thought-provoking study of the genre of the conte de fées, Seifert defines this literature in terms of nostalgic utopias, a concept that neatly encapsulates the ambivalent tone of this writing which looks into a past and future which are both riven with ambiguity.²¹ The background in general, and the use of an oriental setting in particular, conform to Seifert's definition, in that beneath the surface of fantasy they mediate questions of profound significance in relation to sexuality and gender role.

The new style of writing evolved by Mme d'Aulnoy does however bring with it an impoverishment in certain aspects of literary quality in relation to the Lafayette model. Where in La Princesse de Clèves the complexities of the heroine's dilemma are subtly drawn, with the parent/child and husband/wife relationships playing a crucial role in the psychological and dramatic structure of the work, in Mme d'Aulnoy both the psychology and the moral message are conceived and presented in simple terms. Her first and best work of fiction, the Histoire d'Hypolite, owes nothing to Mme de Lafayette in its inspiration and in the literary technique which she deploys. Hers was a very different (and admittedly lesser) literary talent. There are self-conscious echoes of La Princesse de Clèves to be found in Le Comte de Warwick: the heroine's confession of her passion, her farewell to her lover, her concern that her passion should not cause her to stray from the path of virtue. While indicating the aspects of Mme de Lafayette's work which had caught the imagination of other women writers (and, one may suppose, readers as well), they have an almost parodic effect in relation to the original.

It would be a mistake however, to view Mme d'Aulnoy's fictions solely in terms of the conte de fées as her source of inspiration. On the contrary, in a way the most strikingly original aspect of her work derives from the point at which she leaves the tradition behind in the creation of her most remarkable hero, Hypolite, who owes as little to the conte de fées tradition as to Mme de Lafayette's hero, Nemours. Here, while taking up the theme of the young nobleman in love and therefore in conflict with society, so admirably traced out by Mlle Bernard, she has created a literary model whose importance has yet to be fully acknowledged.

As far as an assessment of her work is concerned, I think it would be fair to state that of her three novels we have, in the case of her first, a work of undoubted literary merit. The two following works are pot boilers where, on occasion, Mme d'Aulnoy's innate talent and imagination shine through. Jean de Bourbon, which in some respects further develops themes first explored in the Histoire d'Hypolite, is fatally flawed in that there is no moral framework to lend substance to the plot. Le Comte de Warwick, her last and weakest novel, demonstrates her inability to integrate herself into the Lafayette tradition of writing, even in a debased form.

Her innovations, both in creation of character and in development of themes which were new to the novel, are of seminal importance. Julie is one of Mme d'Aulnoy's most memorable creations, the first fictional heroine to be known only by her first name, if one discounts Mlle Bernard's Eléonor, whose family name appears in the title of the story. She is also the first of a long line of English heroines in novels by French women writers. Through Julie, Mme d'Aulnoy develops the theme of family relationships, in which parent-figures, representing society, are portrayed as agents of repression in relation to the unmarried daughter. In both her first and her last novels, Mme d'Aulnoy proposes a view of marriage as being an even more repressive institution than the family, from a woman's point of view; and in so doing, in the characters of Bedfort and Devonshire, she creates the prototype of the odious husband that was to haunt women's fiction for generations to come. In retrospect, it is not surprising that the subject of marriage should come to the fore in women's writing at a period of cultural change within society in general, when collective values were beginning to be questioned. In their own lives, the women who read Mme d'Aulnoy's novels were given little or no autonomy in the matter of choice of husband; and few legal rights within marriage.²² In this context the originality of the Histoire d'Hypolite, with its heroine's brave attempt to redraw the map of marriage, must be acknowledged. The implied belief in the innocence and consequently the positive goodness of passion, which informs Mme d'Aulnoy's fictional writing, creates the aesthetic link between the principal characters and the natural environment in which they belong. In consequence the natural world forms an integral part of the poetics of her major novel, the Histoire d'Hypolite; and here again a new note is struck.

Mme d'Aulnoy was remarkable in many ways. Her literary achievements rank with those of any of her contemporary novelists. Her literary fate seems to support the thesis of DeJean, to which I referred in my introduction, that women writers were systematically removed from the literary canon by critics whose primary aim was to use literature to inculcate ideals of ‘national’ virtue.²³ The fact that the Abbé Jacquin, an upholder of the new ‘manly’ definition of literature and therefore an enemy both of the novel and of women writers, chose the Histoire d'Hypolite as a particular target for attack is surely an indication of her importance as a successful, and therefore potentially influential, novelist.²⁴ Mme d'Aulnoy's case is perhaps analogous with that of her English contemporary, Aphra Behn, who, as Dale Spender has shown, was attacked as a writer because of the supposed immorality of her life.²⁵

Two questions must be asked in assessing Mme d'Aulnoy's writing. The first is that of its intrinsic literary merit. The second (which should not be confused with the first) is that of its influence on other writers. I am aware that the question of literary influence is a complex one, since one of the aims of my study of these three women writers is to demonstrate the continued but subverted influence of the Lafayette model on subsequent women's fiction. Minor elements of a writer's work may be taken by a successor to form the cornerstone of his or her work. Mme d'Aulnoy's own writing illustrates this in relation to Mlle Bernard. However, given the originality of her work and the success it enjoyed, her influence on subsequent generations of writers is a question that should be addressed.

Notes

1. See Madame d'Aulnoy, Relation du Voyage en Espagne, ed. by R. Foulché-Delbosc (Paris: Klincksieck, 1926).

2. For a recent discussion of Mme d'Aulnoy's contribution to the genre of the conte de fées, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On fairy tales and their tellers (London: Vintage, 1995).

3. An edition of Mme d'Aulnoy's contes de fées was published in 1997 to mark her tricentenary as an author of fairy-tales: Madame d'Aulnoy, Contes, I: Les Contes des Fées, ed. by Philippe Hourcade, Édition du tricentenaire (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997).

4. For editions, see chapter 2, note 55.

5. On Mme d'Aulnoy, see Storer, pp. 18-41. ‘Il n'y eut guère d'auteur plus lu et plus goûté que Mme d'Aulnoy pendant sa vie’. (p. 22). Godenne repeats this acknowledgment of Mme d'Aulnoy's popularity. See his pref. to Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), p. viii, ‘Si l'on excepte l'inévitable Princesse de Clèves, Hypolite est la seule nouvelle à avoir atteint un si grand nombre de rééditions: dix-sept au XVIII^e siècle, vingt au XIX^e’.

6. I am aware of the anachronistic resonance here. The anachronism is however Mme d'Aulnoy's, not mine.

7. Julie tells Milord de Duglas that Bedfort was on the point of abducting her when Hypolite intervened: ‘Hypolite a esté obligé de se battre, sans le secours de mon frere, [Bedfort] m'auroit enlevée […], j'en recevois tout le mauvais traitement dont un homme qui forme un tel dessein est capable’ (48).

8. Henri Misson de Valbourg, whose account of England was published eight years after the Histoire d'Hypolite first appeared, refers to gladiatorial combats as being part of the English way of life. See Mémoires et Observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre (The Hague: van Bulderen, 1698), art. Jeux, pp. 257-59.

9. Bourbon L'Archambault, in the Massif Central, was a fashionable watering place in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV's mistress, Mme de Montespan, spent the last years of her life there.

10. ‘Sa fievre qui n'estoit causée que par ses déplaisirs’ (29).

11. His despair when Julie decides to become a nun is described at length (pp. 21, 23, 26). His anguish at the news of Julie's marriage is graphically described (pp. 81, 82), as are his desperate reactions after the sword fight (pp. 101, 102, 110). Violent emotion is the keynote of Hypolite's character.

12. Raymonde Robert comments on the relationship between disguise and eroticism in the Histoire d'Hypolite in his Le Conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVII^e à la fin du XVIII^e siècle (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1981), p. 136, n. 31,

13. For a discussion of tears as a feature of eroticism in Manon Lescaut, see Jacques Proust, ‘Le Corps de Manon’, Littérature, 1 (1971), 5-21.

14. See pp. 15, 42, 79.

15. Given in reported speech on p. 42 of the text when Julie relates the episode to Hypolite.

16. Bedfort's jealousy where is wife is concerned is frequently referred to. See for instance pp. 110, 115, 170. Lucile refers to him in relation to Julie as ‘son jaloux’ (99).

17. At the outset of the story, we learn that Bedfort was prepared to marry Julie without a dowry because of the passion he felt for her: ‘la passion qu'il avoit pour Julie estoit si pure & si violente, que pourvû que [le Comte de Duglas] la lui accordast, il ne vouloit point d'autres avantages’ (22). On learning the false news of Julie's death, we are told: ‘[Le Comte de Bedfort] fut d'abord vivement touché de la perte d'une femme qu'il avoit aimée avec tant de passion’ (145).

18. Esp. I, 134-72.

19. Lewis C. Seifert, ‘Mme d'Aulnoy’, in French Women Writers: a Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, ed. by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 12-13.

20. Mémoires de la Cour d'Angleterre, already referred to, Mémoires de la Cour d'Espagne, 2 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1690), Relation du Voyage d'Espagne, 3 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1691). For a discussion of Mme d'Aulnoy's contribution to the genre of the first-person narrative, see René Démoris, Le roman à la première personne: Du Classicisme aux Lumières (Paris, Colin, 1975), pp. 280-82, 285-86.

21. Fairy tales, Sexuality and gender, pp. 13-14.

22. Here I would once again refer to Hufton's magisterial study on the condition of women in early modern France, The Prospect before Her, esp. pp. 99-172.

23. See ‘Classical Reeducation’ and note 12 to the Introduction above.

24. Entretiens sur les romans, pp. 190, 334, 341.

25. Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986), pp. 49-81.

Works Cited

Authors are listed alphabetically, using the names and titles under which their works were published. An author's family name, if different, and first name, if not cited on publication, are also given in brackets.

In section 1, the cited works of an author are listed in the chronological order of the first edition of each work. If a later edition of an individual work has been used for references and quotations, that edition is also given. If that edition is part of a collected edition, a full reference to the collected edition is given at the end of the entry for the author.

In section 2, generally only the edition cited in the text is given.

1. Works of fiction

Aulnoy, Madame d' (Marie-Catherine), Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas (Paris: Sevestre, 1690). Edn cited in text: ed. by Shirley Jones Day (London: Institute of Romance Studies, 1994)

———, Mémoires de la Cour d'Espagne, 2 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1690)

———, Relation du Voyage d'Espagne, 3 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1691). Edn cited in text: ed. by R. Foulché-Delbosc (Paris: Klincksieck, 1926)

———, Histoire de Jean de Bourbon, Prince de Carency, 3 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1692). Edn cited in text: 2 vols (Paris: Brunet fils, 1729)

———, Mémoires de la Cour d'Angleterre, 2 vols (Paris: Barbin, 1692)

———, Le Comte de Warwick, 2 vols (Paris: Compagnie de Libraires Associés, 1703)

———, Contes I: Les Contes des Fées, ed. by Philippe Hourcade, Édition du tricentenaire (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997)

Lafayette, Madame de (Marie-Madeleine), La Princesse de Clèves (Paris: Barbin, 1678). Edn cited in text: Romans et nouvelles, pp. 241-395

2. Secondary sources

DeJean, Joan, ‘Classical Reeducation: Decanonizing the Feminine’, in Displacements: […] (see below), pp. 22-36

———, ed. with Nancy K. Miller Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)

Démoris, René, Le roman à la première personne: Du Classicisme aux Lumières (Paris: Colin, 1975)

Godenne, René, pref. to Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979)

Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1 vol. continuing (London: HarperCollins, 1995-), vol. I: 1500-1800 (1995)

Jacquin, Abbé, Entretiens sur les romans, ouvrage moral et critique (Paris: Duchesne, 1755)

Misson de Valbourg (Henri), Mémoires et Observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre (The Hague: van Bulderen, 1698)

Proust, Jacques, ‘Le Corps de Manon’, Littérature, 1 (1971), 5-21

Robert, Raymonde, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVII^e à la fin du XVIII^e siècle (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1981)

Seifert, Lewis C., ‘Madame d'Aulnoy’, in French Women Writers: a Bio-bibliographical Source Book, ed. by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 12-13.

———, Fairy tales, Sexuality, and gender in France, 1690-1715: nostalgic utopias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Spender, Dale, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986)

Storer, Mary Elizabeth, La Mode des Contes de fées (1687-1700): un épisode littéraire de la fin du XVII^e siècle (Paris: Champion, 1928)

Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blond: On fairy tales and their tellers (London: Vintage, 1995)