Madame de Murat: Contes (review)

This volume of the Bibliothèque des génies et des fées presents the texts written by Henriette Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat, considered to be contes by the volume's editor, Geneviève Patard. The edition offers a "modernized," "corrected," and "actualized" version of these texts, suppressing capital letters and "reorganizing" paragraphs and punctuation in order to make them more "coherent" and "less disturbing" for "modern" use (49–50). Since capital letters, punctuation, and organization of paragraphs are often semantically meaningful, the scholarly reader might object to this editorial decision. The first of de Murat's works reedited is the Contes de fées: Dédiez à Son Altesse Sérénissime Madame la Princesse Douairière de Conty. Par Mad. La Comtesse de M***, published by Claude Barbin (also Jean La Fontaine's, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's, and Charles Perrault's editor) in 1698. (A photographic reproduction of the original edition is accessible on the Web site of the Bibliothèque Nationale [BN] in Paris). Patard's edition reproduces the dedicatory letter followed by the complete texts of the three unframed tales Le Parfait Amour, Anguillette, and Jeune et Belle.

De Murat's second volume, the Nouveaux Contes des Fées, was published in the same year by Barbin. The critical edition reproduces the important dedicatory letter followed by Le Palais de la Vengeance and The Prince des Feuilles, but omits the third text, Le Bonheur des moineaux, explicitly subtitled Conte in the original edition (also available on the BN Web site). Arguing that de Murat had "abusively" (49) defined this text as a conte, Geneviève Patard transfers it into the "Annexes" suppressing the original subtitle, Conte. She thus "corrects" the author's own disposition without taking into consideration that the early French fairy tale came into being through a complex interaction of different generic forms as the fable, the exemplum, the nouvelle, and other verse and prose forms. In the critical edition, what was originally the fourth tale, L'Heureuse peine, thus follows immediately the second, making it difficult to recognize the semantic and metanarrative meaning of the shorter rhymed text significantly placed between them by the author.

The editor's idea of what a conte is or should be seems firmly established on the basis of the presuppositions of the folkloristic approach and the classifications proposed by Aarne-Thompson and Propp. This conception of the conte informs also the notices and the résumés, which focus on motifs, themes, and tale types. A reader who is more interested in narrative strategies and problems of reception and canon formation can find precious information and analysis in Elizabeth W. Harries's important book Twice upon a Time (2001), a reference missing in Patard's bibliography.

The third section presents the four texts contained in the Histoires sublimes et allégoriques: Par Madame la Comtesse D**, published by Barbin in 1699 (the original edition is also available on the BN Web site). I have found no information about the fact that the book wears the initial D** (used by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy on the title pages of her books) rather than "Madame de M***." Patard's edition reproduces the important dedicatory text Aux Fées modernes that has been recently translated by and commented on by Holly Tucker and Melanie R. Siemens in Marvels & Tales 19.1 (2005). The first text, Le Roi Porc, is explicitly defined by the author as Histoire; the second, L'Isle de la Magnificence ou la princesse Blanchette, as Histoire allégorique; the third and fourth, Le Sauvage and The Turbot, again as Histoires. The generic definition by the author thus differs explicitly from the texts subtitled Contes of the two volumes published in 1698. ditor calls them indifferently contes in her résumés as well as in the notices without commenting on the differences explicitly indicated by the author.

A fourth section of the edition presents fragments of...