Mademoiselle de Lubert: Contes (review)

This collection of the tales by Marguerite de Lubert (1702?–1779?) is a long-awaited event in fairy-tale circles. Since Lubert penned her tales in the mid-eighteenth century, there has never been a complete edition of her fairy tales. This edition includes the tales whose attribution is certain: "Tecserion," "La Princesse Camion," "La Princesse Couleur-de-rose et Le Prince Céladon," "La Princesse Lionnette et le Prince Coquerico," "Le Prince Glacé et la Princesse Etincelante," the beginning of "La Veillée galante," "Blancherose," and "Les Lutins du château de Kernosy." Lubert's works are presented in the original French with modernized spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The texts are accompanied by a sixty-seven-page introduction and annotations of the texts in French by Aurélie Zygel-Basso. In the appendixes are several tales whose attributions are disputed, along with two epistles by Voltaire, excerpts from the Cabinet des Fées, a Lubert genealogy, an index of names, and a bibliography (largely restricted to works published in French). The volume has nine illustrations.

Those who are unfamiliar with Lubert's tales will discover in this volume the exuberant world of eighteenth-century fantasy. In "La Princesse Camion," one of the best known of Lubert's tales, the neglect of a fairy opens a world of marvel: a fairy-marmot, a prince who takes half an hour to fall down a well, a half-whale princess, a lake of fire, a fairy who lives in a carbuncle, a boat of mother-of-pearl that takes its travelers to a rock-crystal castle built on stilts and inhabited by men with fish heads. Sylphs, sylphides, and the king of Scythia; a princess born in an egg; magicians, enchanters, centaurs; a raspberry fairy; statues that come to life; knights armored in sugar candy riding on saddles of spice bread; and ostrich ladies in waiting fill the pages of Lubert's particularly fanciful world. Everything here is excessive. In "Blancherose" Lubert does not give her reader simply an ogre, but the emperor of the ogres, who arrives on top of an ogre pyramid, accompanied by ten thousand of his kind. Characters inhabit worlds that reflect mondain eighteenth-century esthetics mixed with fairy-tale fantasy. A rococo grotto worthy of any great nobleman's park is decorated with snail shells and bat wings. Objects take on fantastic dimensions: a golden armoire wanders about "Blancherose" under its own power, while the princess living inside it explores an extra-dimensional realm large enough to hold a city and a castle.

Max Milner once remarked on the eighteenth century's taste for "frivolous books that the public snapped up almost before they could be bound" (Le Diable dans la littérature française [Paris: Corti, 1960] 1: 72, my translation). Lubert's tales were part of that taste for the frivolous. Lubert took much inspiration from earlier fairy tales by writers like Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont La Force, but embroidered the plots and themes into new fantasies that drew from the rich realms of marvel in eighteenth century European culture. Illuminist philosophers, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, alchemists, charlatan sellers of immortality potions, convulsionaries, ecstatics, hysterics, philosophers who were setting the stage for the Revolution, and dabblers in the esoteric who were trying to make sylphs appear out of bits of buried glass, authors who reinvoked the devil but made him comically limping, hunchbacked, one-eyed, or amorous—theirs was the age that Lubert inhabited. It was heading toward the Revolution, and toward Emanuel Swedenborg, Alessandro Cagliostro, and Franz Anton Mesmer simultaneously.

Scholars of the French fairy tale need this edition. Any lover of French fairy tales, scholarly or not, will enjoy Lubert's fanciful storytelling. The edition's weakness is in the introduction and annotation by Zygel-Basso, which paint Lubert as a late adherent to a fairy-tale style that had had its heyday in the...