The Fairy Tellers, page 10
As a child, Hanan remembers the thrill of seeing the gold-tooled, leather-bound volumes of the Nights in a friend’s house, where they were locked inside a glass cabinet, next to an elephant tusk. ‘Her father forbade us from reading it,’ she says, ‘because of the sexuality in the stories.’ She lost interest herself as a teenager. ‘I didn’t want to read folk tales about djinn and animals, I wanted to read Albert Camus and Françoise Sagan!’
These same objections have coloured the Nights’ fortunes in the Middle East – dismissed by intellectuals or branded immoral by religious leaders, who’ve rarely lost their appetite for hurling the Nights on their bonfires. ‘But when I started reading the Nights seriously,’ Hanan tells me, ‘I said, “Oh my God, these stories have everything!” ’ She translated a selection of the tales for a theatre performance and a book, and found them embedded in the daily life around her – whether an aunt nicknamed Dalila the Wily, after a scammer in one of the most comical tales, who hoodwinks various VIPs and is pardoned by the caliph; or the professional storytellers, the hakawatis, who told stories from the Nights in coffee shops. One hakawati she met in the Lebanese city of Sidon had beguiled his audience so much, ‘there were two men in the audience who couldn’t take it when he broke off the story, so they rang the bell of his house and insisted, “you have to tell us what happened next!” ’
The social depth of these stories is reinforced by another Middle Eastern storyteller, Chirine el-Ansari, who has travelled around the region narrating stories from The Thousand and One Nights in Yemen, Morocco, Syria (where she had to use old-school 1970s microphones to avoid interference with the equipment of the secret police), her native Egypt and elsewhere. ‘When I was growing up in Cairo,’ Chirine told me, ‘my grandmother told me many stories. So did my aunt, maids and cooks, and people on the streets. Everyone was telling stories all the time, and later on I realised these were stories from The Thousand and One Nights.’
Storytellers like Chirine and Hanan reflect the deep interconnectedness of these tales with daily life. Which is why they have wrapped themselves around the minds of many Arabic literary heavyweights, surging against the tide of literary snobbery: writers like Tawfiq al-Hakim, who tracked down an insane King Shahriyar in his 1934 play Shahrazad; the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, whose anti-hero in Season of Migration to the North (1966) casts his broken lover as a ‘beggar Scheherazade’, in an astonishing novel whose intricate construction evokes the framing devices of the Nights; or the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who relocated Scheherazade’s characters to a twentieth-century Cairo neighbourhood in Arabian Nights and Days (1979). Amongst more recent echoes are the Algerian novelist Salim Bachi’s New Adventures of Sindbad (2010), which reimagines the eponymous sailor as a migrant in twenty-first-century Europe; and the acclaimed Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light (2001), in which political prisoners tell their storytelling cellmate, ‘Ever since you began telling us tales from The Thousand and One Nights, survival here has been more bearable than it was before.’ There are many others: as I write these words, somebody somewhere is turning out another version. New tales are always spinning off the old.
For me, these tales have been part of my life since I shone a torch under my duvet as a child, floating with Sindbad on the wings of the rukh, riding with the prince on the ebony horse. I’ve studied and taught in Arab medinas, lived in Jerusalem and Fez, and visited other cities around the region, experiencing these tales through the people around me: the raconteurs of Aleppo, spellbinding me in the back rooms of their shops with stories of forbidden romance; the shebab (young guys) of Fez, who called me ‘Ali Baba’ because my beard was so scruffy, ‘like people in old times’. I’ve sat in teahouses listening to tales about the djinn – disturbing tales about men possessed, smoking marijuana in abandoned houses, released from their enchantments only by the reading of Quranic verses. ‘I could feel the pain inside me,’ said a friend called Nabeel, ‘something that wanted to stay but was suffering. After the djinn had left, I slept for a couple of days; I felt like I had been cleaned.’
Is this a collision between different worlds, or a natural elision between facets of the same one? When you’re chatting about Scheherazade or the djinn while soldiers are patrolling the souk with M16 rifles or the guy telling the tale is rolling a spliff? But that’s the point: the stories were incubated in these streets. Time may have detached many of the tales from their roots, but not all those roots have been gnawed away.
Hanna heard these tales in the streets around him. He learned them from the people who raised him, as did later storytellers like Chirine and Hanan. How much of himself he brought to these tales is a matter of speculation, but the interconnectedness between the stories and his own adventurous life offers an answer of sorts. The stories may have been embellished and fine-tuned by Antoine Galland – and his literary achievement deserves celebration – but it was Hanna who spun those tales to him. In the process, he gave us the stories that are still the first imaginative experiences of the East for so many of us. Stories that inspired many of the fairy tellers we’ll be visiting in the rest of this book.
So let’s salute the candid, curious, compassionate Hanna Dyab, and seek out our next teller. But first we need to visit one of the wonders of Paris that Hanna wasn’t able to witness: the literary salons, the aristocratic women who brushed off life’s pressures in their asylum of fairies. It’s time to put on our powdered wigs and beauty patches, settle down on Louis XIV armchairs, sip a lemon sherbet or raspberry liqueur and listen to another magical tale . . .
PART THREE
Of Shrews and Salons
Charming Beauty, don’t regret what you have just quit.
A more illustrious fate awaits you, but if you want to merit it,
refrain from allowing yourself to be seduced by appearances.
The Lady to Belle, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1740)
The Tale of the Ram
The candid princess Merveilleuse refuses to flatter her father. When he asks his daughters about their dreams, she tells him she had a vision of him serving her and placing his crown on her head. So incensed is the king by this irreverent vision that he orders a huntsman to slay her in the forest and bring back her tongue and heart as proof. Fortunately for the princess, she has three loyal companions – a dog, an ape and a Moorish slave – who kill themselves so the soft-hearted huntsman can return with the necessary organs.
Meanwhile, Merveilleuse wanders through the forest until she finds a glade. There, surrounded by sheep, is a golden-horned ram with ‘all the sense and delicacy which is required for agreeable conversation’. He invites her into his enchanted cavern, where Spanish wine flows in fountains and there are delightful refreshments of cake, foie gras and coffee. Her host, it turns out, was a handsome prince until he was turned into a ram by a curse. But this is only a temporary condition, and so charmed is Merveilleuse that she accepts him as her husband. While she’s waiting for him to turn back into a handsome prince, she kills the time by attending her sisters’ weddings, in disguise.
After the first wedding, Merveilleuse returns to the ram’s enchanted cavern, and eagerly awaits the second; but he begs her not to stay away too long, or his heart will break. However, finding herself beside her father at the second wedding, she reveals her true identity. Full of remorse, the king begs her forgiveness. To prove his regret, he kneels to wash her hands from a golden ewer and places his crown on her head, fulfilling the dream that led to his murderous command. Together, they ride out to greet the people, but at the gate of the palace they discover a terrible sight.
Lying on the ground before them is the body of the ram. He’d been knocking on the gates of the palace, protesting that he was Merveilleuse’s husband. None of the guards would let him pass, and before the princess could reach him he died of a broken heart. Poor Merveilleuse! She has won the crown, but what does that matter when she has lost the lover with whom she had hoped to share it?
Chapter 7
A Shrew and a Spy
Before Hanna Dyab made it to Paris, fairy telling in France had already gone viral. Around ninety tales from the 1690s have survived, two-thirds of which were written by women. High society may have been their habitat, but it didn’t always favour them. Some escaped from unhappy marriages, others refused to marry at all. So it’s little surprise that the most common tale they recycled was the one about the heroine forced to live with a monster. Ram or rhinoceros, blue bird or wild boar, dragon, dwarf or dolphin: the inauspicious groom appeared in many guises. But it wasn’t until 1740 that the tale found its definitive mould. All those other versions would be discarded, forgotten prototypes for the final form, which proved so popular it’s managed to repel or absorb every later attempt to reimagine the story.
‘Beauty and the Beast’ was written by an impoverished aristocrat who tumbled through a tricky widowhood to find herself as the live-in mistress to a cantankerous playwright. Although her story would establish itself as one of the most beloved of all fairy tales, it would take time and a later rewriting for that to happen. Little known in her lifetime, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the woman who Voltaire called ‘that old shrew’, was buried under a series of damning epitaphs. ‘She had a very great facility for making mediocrities,’ declared one critic; another accused her of ‘the most common details, no characters or sentiments, and the flattest style’; another condemned her writing as ‘uneven, wordy, incorrect’ (although it was admitted, a little grudgingly, that ‘Her fairy tales are written with a good measure of grace and finesse’).
In order to understand her famous tale, and the circumstances that spawned it, we need to look at the previous versions. Which brings us to the scandalous life of the Baroness d’Aulnoy – salonnière, spy and spinner of tales – and the mischievously imaginative members of her circle: a countess accused of lesbianism, a lady-in-waiting who disguised herself as a bear, the pipe-smoking princess to whom they dedicated their works, and the court secretary who outsold them all.
This book being a trail, shifting geographically with every part, we are only able to pay a brief visit to the conteuses – the female storytellers who developed the fairy tale as a literary art form. We’re dropping in on them, like a dilettante passing through one of their salons, before shining our light on one of the most unjustly neglected fairy tellers of all.
Tea with Tales
If you happened to live in Paris in the 1690s and moved in the right circles – to be precise, if you managed to wangle an invitation to the Marquise de Lambert’s Tuesday salon evenings – you were in for a treat. Under the Gobelin tapestries of her luxurious drawing room in the Hôtel de Nevers, about half a mile north of the Louvre, you could enjoy refreshments of sweetmeats and raspberry cordials, and exchange witty banter with some of the spiciest wits of the age. Card games and drunkenness were forbidden, as was any form of incivility to ladies. Nodding courteously under powdered wigs, the guests skipped around subjects including ‘the problem of happiness’ and ‘the rejection of injustices born of the organization of hierarchical society’. As one guest, the Marquis d’Argenson, put it: ‘The learned brought knowledge and enlightenment; the others brought those good manners and that urbanity which even the worthy need to acquire.’
Although the Marquise de Lambert refrained from publishing until late in life (and even then with reservations), she was a passionate believer in the intellectual rights of women, and invited many female authors to her salon. Countesses as well as conteuses, women like Marie-Catherine, Baroness d’Aulnoy, and her friend Henriette-Julie, Comtesse de Murat, enchanted their audiences with surreal tales about animal armies, foolish kings and spiteful stepmothers, and the resourceful heroines who danced between these adversaries and dressed themselves, when the occasion allowed, in elaborate frocks.
Another attendee of the marquise’s salon, Catherine Bernard, set out the rules for this kind of tale. In her book Ines de Cordoue (published 1696) she wrote: ‘the adventures should always counter plausibility and the sentiments should always be natural’. The rule is cited in the context of a fairy-telling contest, which reminds us that the conteuses were not only friends, they were also competitors, spinning gold while the going was good.
They didn’t have long.
Fairy tales may look like innocent trinkets from afar, but authoritarian regimes have a knack for shattering their baubles. Representing polite society in 1699, the influential Abbé de Villiers complained about ‘these piles of fairy tales, which have assassinated us for the last year or so’ and bemoaned a state in which ‘lazy and ignorant women readers read the productions of lazy and ignorant women writers’. Talking peacocks? Sherbet-drinking rams? Dwarves with diamond swords? Individually, they may have looked like shimmering beads, but string enough of them together, feared their opponents, and you’d have a necklace powerful enough to strangle the patriarchy.
The critique, as well as the competition amongst the tellers, is illustrated by the Baroness d’Aulnoy’s ‘Prince Marcassin’ (1697).FN1 A queen gives birth to a wild boar, who despite wearing a velvet bonnet and diamond bracelets is unable to conceal his innate piggishness. He drives one wife to suicide, murders another, and only finds peace with a third, whose patient guile is rewarded when she discovers that he can shed his pig skin at night and turn into a handsome prince. This tale of women at the mercy of male violence struck a chord: it was retold by Henriette-Julie, Comtesse de Murat, in ‘The Pig King’ (1699). Considering how many of their circle found themselves forced into marriages with drunken rakes addicted to snuff and gambling and other women, this is hardly surprising.
But tales of ‘monster-grooms’ were only one way to critique the gender rigidity of Louis XIV’s France, and the conteuses found many others. There was the all-female sanctuary, which features in the Baroness d’Aulnoy’s ‘The Imp Prince’: an invisible prince discovers an island inhabited only by women, guarded by Amazons and celebrating the arts and sciences. As a reward for his excellence, the prince is allowed to stay. Another story type was the maiden in the tower, reimagined in a precursor to ‘Rapunzel’ by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (a cousin of the Comtesse de Murat and lady-in-waiting to their collective benefactor, Marie Anne de Bourbon, Princesse de Conti). Pointedly, de La Force pinned the blame for the baby’s abduction on the feckless father; and rather than being rescued by the prince, the heroine’s happy ending depends on the wicked fairy’s change of heart: female solidarity wins the day.
For all the wit and subversive pleasures of these tales, however, it was a well-connected man who outdid them all in sales. His name was Charles Perrault.
A lawyer with his own office at Versailles, he’d been a member of the powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Working for Colbert, he played a key role in spin-doctoring the image of the Sun King. Perrault clearly knew a thing or two about communicating to the masses, so quelle surprise that when it came to fairy tales, his instincts were so ruthlessly effective. Having been introduced to the salons through his kinship with one of the storytellers (Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier), he listened to their tales and carved them to the bones, grafting pithy morals on to the endings and including scenes of church ritual (such as Sleeping Beauty’s baptism) to please the authorities. The tales were easy for children to follow, and the parents believed they were morally nourishing. Ergo: instant bestseller.
Perrault’s Tales of Mother GooseFN2 came out in 1697. Over the next year and a half fairy tale collections flooded the bookshops of France. Then, like a finger pricked on a spinning-wheel, the whole show collapsed into a coma. Royal licences dried up, and the tellers found themselves booted out of public life.
The natural exhaustion of a fad? Or was something more sinister behind it? Within a few years Antoine Galland’s translations of The Thousand and One Nights were shining a new path for tales of wonders. But most of the conteuses were still in their prime, and fairy telling isn’t a fad: it isn’t like the chivalric epic or third wave ska. Something else was going on. If we look at the fates of the individual fairy tellers, we can trace a disturbing pattern.
The Hit List
First to be knocked out was Charlotte-Rose de La Force. She ran into trouble when she married the much younger Charles Le Brion, a conspicuous reversal of the usual pattern, in 1687. Charles’s father had the marriage dissolved after just ten days, and the groom interred in a castle. Undaunted, she tracked him down, disguised herself as a bear and hid amongst the real-life bears brought to the castle for entertainment.
A good tale for the salons, sure, but in the sanctimonious bubble of Louis XIV’s court the Protestant-born de La Force was attracting unwanted suspicions. Accused of penning blasphemous verses in 1697, she lost her role as a royal lady-in-waiting and was forced to retreat to the abbey of Gercy-en-Brie, where she would remain for the next sixteen years. It proved a convenient writer’s retreat, at least, and there she penned her tales.
While de La Force was lighting candles in Picardy, her fellow salon-goers were still living the high life. In December 1699, with three collections of fairy tales and a ghost story under her belt, the imaginative Henriette-Julie, Comtesse de Murat, was accused of ‘shocking practices and beliefs’, including lesbianism (although, if that had been a real issue, she would hardly have been the only noblewoman booted out of town), in a report by the Paris lieutenant general of police. Estranged from her husband and pregnant (which hardly confirmed the accusation of sapphic love), she was exiled to the Château de Loches in 1702. For the next seven years she remained under lock and key, except for trips to church and an unsuccessful escape bid, disguised as a man. Not that her imagination was stifled – she wrote her greatest tale, ‘The Goblins of Kernosy Castle’, during this period. But dropsy and arthritis were overtaking her body, and a year after she was granted an official pardon, in 1716, she died in her family’s chateau.
