A Trip to the Country: by Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat

Introduction

1 Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Countess de Murat, was born in Paris in 1668 into a prominent military family with long-standing ties to the sword nobility.1 Both of her grandfathers, Jacques de Mauvissière, Marquis de Castelnau, and Louis Foucault, Count de Daugnon, had been marshals of France during Louis XIV’s minority,2 and her father, a colonel during the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), died near Utrecht during the siege of Ameyden when Henriette-Julie was still a young child. Although her father was governor of Brest at the time of her birth and her mother, Louise-Marie Foucault de Daugnon, had family ties to the Limousin region, contemporary epistolary correspondences indicate that Introduction Allison Stedman   1. Although nineteenth-century literary biographies such as Michaud’s Biographie universelle and L. P.’s Répertoire universel des femmes célèbres maintain that Murat was born in Brest in 1670, more recent studies dispute this claim. Édouard Guitton’s “Madame de Murat ou la fausse ingénue,” Sylvie Cromer’s introduction to Murat’s Edition du Journal pour Mademoiselle de Menou, and the 1996 Le XVIIe siècle dictionnaire des lettres françaises, collectively establish that Murat was in fact born in Paris in 1668. Cromer establishes the precise date of October 14, 1668, based on the manuscript genealogies of La Buzardière, a château in the province of Maine, where Murat retired at the end of her life. See Genevi ève Patard’s critical introduction to Madame de Murat: Contes for all sides of the debate over Murat’s birth date, place of birth, marriage, and subsequent exile (Patard, Madame de Murat, 9–11). 2. During the Old Regime, the marshals of France were the royal court’s most important officers of state. The Court of Marshals, a select group of noblemen appointed by the king, had as its primary peacetime function the prevention of duels through mediation and forcing would-be combatants to reconcile. introduction 2 Henriette-Julie most likely spent the majority of her childhood in Paris,3 where she would have received a worldly education typical of the Parisian aristocratic elite.4 In 1691 Henriette-Julie married the widowed military colonel Nicolas de Murat, Count de Gilbertez,5 and quickly became a fixture of the Parisian literary scene just as the late seventeenth-century vogue of literary fairy-tale production was unfolding. At the salon of the Marquise de Lambert that Murat frequented starting in 1692, she socialized with two of the genre’s earliest pioneers: the Countess d’Aulnoy, who had published the first literary fairy tale of the French tradition as an interpolated story in her 1690 Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (Hypolitus, Earl of Douglas) and would go on to publish a total of twenty-five fairy tales by the end of the decade, and Catherine Bernard, whose 1696 novel Inès de Cardoue, nouvelle espagnole (Inès of Cordoba, a Novella Set in Spain) contained two more fairy tales as interpolated narratives.6 In addition to frequenting Lambert’s weekly gatherings, Murat also kept the company of her cousins Charlotte-Rose Caumont de la Force and Louise de Bossigny, 3. As Geneviève Patard points out, Murat and her family are mentioned frequently in the Marquise de Sévigné’s letters throughout the 1670s, especially those dated January 5, 1674; May 31, 1675; August 12, 1675; July 3, 1676; and October 15, 1677. These letters detail the daily activities of the Parisian elite (Patard, Madame de Murat, 10). See also note 29 in the translation. 4. Nineteenth-century biographical sources give a different version of her formative years, claiming that the future author was raised in Brittany and that she made her first appearance at the royal court of Versailles at the age of sixteen dressed in the traditional peasant attire of the Breton region, to the delight of Queen Marie-Thérèse. No documentation from the period exists to support this account, however. As Auguste-Pierre Ségalen points out, by the time Murat turned sixteen, Queen Marie-Thérèse would have been dead for three years (Ségalen, “Madame de Murat et le Limousin,” 77–94). For examples of what is now referred to as “the Breton legend,” see Michaud’s Biographie universelle and Miorcec de Kerdanet, Notices chronologiques, 205–6. 5. According to Ségalen, the Count de Murat had previously been married to Murat’s cousin Marie de La Tour...