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 2 “Bitches and Queens”: Pets and Perversion at the Court of France’s Henri III Juliana Schiesari Desire and the beast intersect in myriad and suggestive ways, to the point of becoming figures for each other: not only is desire metaphorized as beastly, but the beast is also represented as an emblem of desire, especially forbidden or perverse desire. The beastliness of desire is a common staple, since at least Plato, of moralizing discourses that prescribe moderation and restraint of bodily pleasures. However, what one could call (with a certain Lacanian irony),the desire of the beast retains its fascinating currency across a number of literary texts, going back at least as far as the ancient poems and epigrams featured in Maximus Planudes’s Greek Anthology (first published in Florence in 1494). “Beauty and the Beast” is one of the most overt of countless narratives that phrase both the fear and attraction of desire as a confrontation with the nonhuman, which in a most magical way converts the beast into the human at the right moment. This conversion from beast to human also both represents and eschews the eroticism of the encounter and thus dispels its terror while underscoring pleasure. One might also interpret the narrative as a fantasy of a nonpatriarchal symbolic order whose expression is allowed ideologically to unfold to the extent that the conclusion of the narrative recodes the relationship between Beast and Beauty into the familiar patriarchal bond of husband and wife. But often what one could call the desire of the beast raises hackles for a symbolic order predicated on a heteronormative ideal. In the Renaissance, what was commonly perceived by humanists from Ariosto to Conrad Gesner as the excessive attention of ladies to their lapdogs found its literarily respectable correlate in the Greek Anthology, where the loved object may be not only a male or female human but also a horse,a dolphin,a bird,or even a cicada.1 Thanks to the editorial efforts of Maximus Planudes, the Greek Anthology had an enormous effect on Renaissance poetry, first in Quattrocento Italy, then in sixteenth-century France and England. In this regard , the court of King Henri III of France offers one of the best contexts within which to observe the slippery relations between petkeeping and divergent sexualities. Henri III was known for collecting both young boys (his infamous “mignons”) and lapdogs (especially the papillon or chienlion ). It is not certain which of these two loves proved most shocking to a France wreaked by religious, civil, and dynastic conflict. Henri III’s keeping of lapdogs—as was in vogue by contemporary, mostly aristocratic women—and his cross-dressing at elaborate costume balls with his mignons , blurred gender categories and sexual identities. Understood to be the ultimate drag queen in Agrippa D’Aubigné’s satiric remark that “chacun estoit en peine / S’il voyoit un Roy femme ou bien un homme Reyne”2 (“all had trouble knowing whether what they saw was a woman king or a man queen”), Henri III comes in the writings of his contemporaries to emblematize within the royal body the dissension and corruption of the body politic. Brantôme, for example, describes with obvious disgust how the king’s affection for lapdogs is manipulated by a gentleman seeking admission to a royal order of knighthood: [Un gentilhomme] arriva au bout de ces années, sur le poinct que le roi projectoit son Ordre et qu’il s’estoit mis en verrue d’aymer de beaux petitz chiens de lions et turquetz et autres. L’on dist au roy, et luy en fit-on grand cas, que ce gentilhomme avoit deux turquetz, les plus beaux qu’on sçavoit voir au monde. Le roy les vouloit voir, et les trouva encore plus beaux qu’on ne les luy avoit faictz, et pour ce les luy demanda, qui en récompense le fit chevalier de ce bel Ordre. Voylà un Ordre bien donné et posé, pour deux petitz chiens! Tant d’autres pareilz fatz contes apporterois-je, pour monstrer es abuz de ces chevalliers en leurs eslections, que je n’aurois faict.3 [(A nobleman) came to court at the end of this time, when the king was making projects for his Order and had gotten all worked up with his love for beautiful little Lion dogs and Turqués and others. It was told to the king, and much was made of it, that this nobleman had two Turqués...

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