Noble Blood - The Woman Who Wrote Fairy Tales

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

When it comes to fairy tales, most people know Charrles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Fewer know of Madame d'Aulnoy, whose own life of murder and political inrigues inspired the stories where love is hard won and happiness is harder when the parties are human. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's Book 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. The French fairy tale, Lo Cé Blue, or The Bluebird, tells the story of Florine, a beautiful princess who is as so many beautiful princesses are, being kept in a tower. Her stepmother is seeming to keep her apart from Prince Charming in the hopes that the prince will marry her own daughter, the, of course, spoiled and notably ugly, Triton.

What this stepmother doesn't know, however, is that the prince had been cursed for his rejection of Triton by her fairy godmother and turned into a bluebird who visits Florine in her top. for years. This is one of those happily ever after fairy tales. The curse is in the end, lifted, and the lovers marry. But the story doesn't just end there. Instead, the bluebird ends with a rhyming verse moral to drive home its message. In English translation, better to be a bird of any hue, a raven, crow, an owl, I do protest, than to stick for life to a partner like glue who scorns you or whom you detest. Too many matches of that

sort I've seen, and wish now that there was some king magician to stop these ill-matched souls at once and lean on them with force to keep his prohibition. Fairy tales are often seen as stories for children, but in their sometimes intense dark and moral dilemmas, they can also be fairly adult in their content. Prince Charming, choosing to defy the fairy godmother's ultimatum and accepting his ornithological punishment rather than being forced to marry a woman he doesn't love, gains new significance when you learn the true story of the woman who wrote his tale, Madame Del Noir. The Baroness Del Noir's tale, like that of many a fairy tale heroine, begins in a dark place

due to a marriage that was arranged against her will. But over the course of her life, she would build an independent living as a well-known author who published 12 books, including two collections of fairy tales, or Condefie, a term that she is known today for coining. Despite that, her work is often forgotten compared to contemporaries like Charles Perrault, with translated collections of her stories being few and far between in this day and age. Her exclusion from the canon, however, doesn't make her work any less impactful. Take her rise to literary fame in French society and throw in the story of her actual life,

including its many instances of political intrigue, exile, and murder, and you have a tale that perhaps Madame Del Noir is the only author who would be fit to tell. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Madame Del Noir was born Mary Catherine Le Gamel de Bondiville, of the noble family Le Gimel de Bondaville. She was born in either 1650 or 1651, in a town in Normandy bearing her family name, Barnville-Labitron. If you were thinking her name, potential birth year, and place of birth is already TMI,

well, you're in luck because that's just about all we know of Mary Catherine's childhood. We can at least assume, however, that an early influence in her social and social and and intellectual life was her aunt, Marie Bruno de Loge. Marie was a renowned salon holder and a fixture in Parisian intellectual life in the early 17th century, earning herself the nickname The Tenth Muse from poets, authors, and academics. The first recorded detail of Marie Catherine's childhood, however, is its abrupt end. On March 8, 1666, 15-year-old Mary Catherine entered a marriage arranged by her father to a man named Francois de Lemault, Baron Del Noir, a Parisian man 30 years her senior.

It's possible she was being educated in a convent at the time the marriage was arranged and had to be abducted by her father. But the reliability of that particular anecdote is shaky, and it'll become clearer as to why later. Francois, the husband, was not born a baron, but worked in the service of a duke and accumulated enough wealth during this time that he was able to purchase land and title.

The duke was the illegitimate son of Henry IV, France and his mistress, but was then created Duke of Vindom in his own right in 1598 when he was four years old. The Duke apparently had a reputation for roguishness and disilluteness, which seemed to rub off on his sidekick, as Marie Catherine's husband would have his own reputation as a gambler and a libertine. Details of the couple's married life are, once again, practically non-existent, but it's not hard to imagine that the marriage between a 15-year-old girl from the country and a 45-year-old notorious Parisian gambler did not inspire a great mutual love. We do get whispers of truly juicy things beginning to happen, though. In 1669,

three years and three children into marriage, Mary Catherine and her mother would allegedly conspire with their respective lovers to bring a charge of high treason against the Baron del Noir for speaking out against the king. The story goes that the Baron, remember, Marie Catherine's husband, had been overheard swearing in public against the taxes that had been imposed, which at the time was considered an offense of Lais Magiste, coming from the Latin, Laysa Majestus, which literally means injured majesty. Simply put, treason. In mid-17th century France, this was a crime that the baron would have hanged for had he been found guilty. For many, it was likely not a leap of the imagination to believe the accusations of treason,

thanks to his association with the scandalous Duke of Vendom, who had been involved in a number of conspiracies in earlier years. But the circumstances surrounding the accusation paint a picture that is less of a bold act of patriotism and more of a bold attempt to get Murray Catherine out of her marriage. Additionally, by this point in her life, Marie Catherine's mother had made a second marriage, and she was now titled the Marquise de Godain. We don't know when her husband, Marie Catherine's father, had died,

but it's worth thinking about that the fact is Marie Catherine's mother could only help her daughter escape her terrible marriage once her husband, who had arranged the terrible marriage in the first place, was gone. The mother and daughter's plan seemed to work initially, but then it spectacularly crashed and burned. After three years spent in the Bastille, the Baron was able to convince the court of his innocence and countercharge his wife and her mother

for conspiracy against him. The men suspected to be the women's lovers were captured, tortured until they confessed, and then executed. The archives of the Bastille, steal document the initial accusation, the counter-accusation, and the executions, but it's not detailed how Marie Catherine or her mother escaped similar fates. We know the Marquise fled to England, and some versions of the story say Marie-Catherine

escaped by going with her. Other versions of the story, however, paint a more dramatic tale in which after a warrant went out for Marie Catherine's arrest, she, to quote, one biographical account, quote, managed to escape the officers by jumping out of the window at their early morning summoned and hiding in a church under a convenient briar. And quote, bottom line is Marie Catherine made it out of France.

Over the next decade, Marie Catherine, Madame Del Noir would live in Spain, England, and Holland. Despite, or perhaps because of, the warrant for her arrest, it's believed that Mary Catherine and her mother potentially both worked as spies for France during their periods abroad. The details of Marie Catherine's life abroad for all of those years, however, are once again practically lost to time. That might sound confusing when you learn that Mary Catherine published three memoirs, including the ladies' travels into Spain or a genuine relation of the religion, laws, commerce, customs, and manners of that country, and another memoirs of the Court of England in 1675. While that sounds like a lot of great

firsthand information, I'd like to quote a sentence from the introduction of a 1913 translation of memoirs of the Courts of England. Quote, although Marie Catherine's autobiography exists, the difficulty of constructing an account of her life is so great as to render it an almost impossible task. End quote. You see, these autobiographies are what's referred to today as pseudomemoirs,

as they are in fact collections of stories, Marie Catherine, gathered from associates and presented as the lived experiences of one woman herself. It's likely that some of the experiences were her own, but as expressed in the earlier quote, it's truly impossible to pick out which stories those were. The earlier tidbit about her living in a convent, for example, comes from one of these memoirs, So details like that are often left out of her biographies

on account of their existence among any number of false narratives. This wasn't Marie Catherine's attempt at becoming the 17th century's most notorious scammer influencer, but it was a form of literary fiction and a reflection of her creativity as a writer. These memoirs are like any other, reflections of a moment of time in a given place, but far more entertaining as their collections of only the most exciting moment that she could collect or come up with.

The public at the time of publication understood and acknowledged this as well. In 17th century France, readers just wanted to enjoy some good storytelling. Later historians would deny her the identity of, quote, historian, because of the confusing nature of Marie Catherine's recollections. These weren't histories. They were stories. It's however agreed upon that, while sometimes embellished, the stories she tells seem to be true

even if they happened to a friend of a friend. A few episodes ago, I actually quoted memoirs of the Court of England for Marie Catherine's account of seeing the future. King Charles II, and his lover Lucy Walter, at court in the Hague. But it might not have been Marie Catherine herself who saw them. More plausibly, it was an acquaintance of hers in Holland. This idea is again nicely summed up in an introduction to one of the memoirs, this time in an 1808 edition of her memoirs in Spain. Quote, that some of the stories here may appear marvelous

and romantic cannot be denied. But succeeding writers and travelers have confirmed almost every particular descriptive of the national manners. The historical facts are known to be perfectly constant to truth, and the manner of narrating them adds an infinite charm. After 16 years of collecting stories across Europe, Marie Catherine was allowed to return to France,

possibly as a reward for her. alleged spy work. Her mother was given a pension by the Spanish king and instead stayed in Madrid. If you're wondering how Marie Catherine's husband reacted to her return, we'll join the club. His last mention in any account of her life is his accusation against her, so it's possible he either died or also left the country at some point. Marie Catherine formally returned to Paris and her past transgressions, much like her husband in modern historical accounts, seems to have been all but forgotten.

Instead, she becomes a celebrated intellectual figure. At her home at Rue Saint-Bin-ois, Marie-Catherine began to host what would become some of Paris's most popular salon gatherings, frequented by aristocrats and princes, among intellectuals, including her friend, Charles de Saint Evermond, whom Wikipedia describes as a, quote, French soldier, hedonist, essayist, and literary critic,

to give you an idea of the kind of circle that she was surrounding herself with. As told by Marina Warner in her book, From the Beast to the Blonde, on fairy tales and their tellers, quote, cultivating the polite arts, she and her friends told fairy tales and, over raspberry or gooseberry cordials and hot chocolate, dressed up to play the parts. In other words, my understanding of a dream party. Speaking of fairy tales,

the 1690s also marked the formal beginning of Marie Catherine's literary career, publishing under the name Madame Del Noir. Her first contribution seems to be her editing the anthology, collection of the most beautiful pieces by French poets. As an author, early published works included her, quote, memoirs abroad, and they were hugely successful, providing Marie Catherine with quite incredibly a stable income to support herself and her daughters as a single mother.

Marie Catherine actually had six children in total. Her first two children with her husband had died young. leaving only a surviving daughter. She would go on to have three more daughters, likely all born while she was abroad and therefore born out of wedlock, but unfortunately we don't have more details about that. Marie Catherine's most popular works were and remain,

of course, her Contest Defi, published in 1697, and her Conte Nouveau-Lafie a la Mode, or New Tales or Fault, or Fault, fairies in fashion from the following year. While taking inspiration from common tropes in folk and fairy tale traditions, which researchers now date as having begun in the Bronze Age, Madame Del Noir's stories were all original tales. Their style was directly influenced by her experience as a salonier and the plays she did with her friends. They were translated onto the page in a

conversational style, a reflection of the oral tradition, telling a story over a drink at a party. For example, in The White Cat, she writes, It would take far too long to recount the adventures of all three princes, so I shall tell you only those that befell the youngest. The White Cat is a story similar to the Bluebird, which we opened the episode with. They are both classified under the type, The Animal as Bridegroom, as made distinct by the Arne-Thompson Uther Index, which is a catalog used in folklore studies to categorize tales.

The animal as bridegroom was D'Lnois's favorite trope, appearing as the foundation of a great number of her stories. In the White Cat, the youngest of three princes, the only one we have time to talk about, of course, is sent on a series of tasks by his father, aided by a talking cat, the queen of a whole society of talking cats, who wears a locket containing a portrait of a man who looks strikingly like the young prince. As Marie Catherine would say, it would take far too long to recount the adventures,

so let's skip till the end. Eventually, the prince is told by his father that the son who found, finds the most beautiful princess to marry will become king. The cat, aiding him once again, tells him that she can present him with a beautiful princess if he agrees to cut off her head. He, like any good friend and cat lover, refuses at first,

but she's able to eventually convince him, and after the deed is done, she, in a shocking twist, turns into a beautiful, princess. She tells the prince her tale. Her mother was a queen who promised her firstborn in exchange for fairy fruit. The fairies raised her in a tower that was impossible to enter except through a high window, which means the story is also classified as a maiden in the tower type in the ATU index. As an aside, Rapunzel, obviously the most famous tale of that subtype

derives from Personette, a French fairy tale, published the same year as the white cat. Anyway, the princess fell in love with a human king who passed by her tower and planned to escape with him, but the fairies were arranging for her to marry an ugly fairy king. When they caught her human lover in the tower, they killed him and transformed the princess and all of the people in her kingdom into cats, with the condition that she would only be free when she found a man identical to her dead lover. The verse moral of the white cat

is not as obvious a denouncement of arranged marriage as the bluebirds was, instead emphasizing the importance of friendship in a relationship. The youthful prince was fortunate to find beneath a cat's skin an illustrious face. worthy of adoration and inclined, the throne her friendship won for him to share. By two enchanting eyes on conquest bent, the willing heart is easily subdued, and still more power to the charm is lent, when love's soft flame is fanned by gratitude. The last stanza is particularly interesting in the context of the fairy tale genre, where many princes and princesses fall in love based seemingly on

nothing more than a first glance. While Del Noir employed versions of the love at first sight trope, even in the Bluebird, we still also see a love built over years of mutual trust. The White Cat is once again a tale of true love torn apart by a forced, incompatible marriage. and the consequences that one faces when one tries to resist. While Marie-Catherine managed to avoid arrest in escaping her own marriage, her supposed lover did not. It was also not the last time Marie-Catherine would see these consequences of defying an arranged marriage firsthand.

The scandalous trial of Angelique Nicole Cartier-Ticay was on the lips of every Parisian in 1699. Angelique's parents died when she was only 15, and her father, a wealthy bookseller, left a sum of a million livres to be split between her and her brother. Described as beautiful, spiritual, and graceful, Angelique entered the Parisian social scene

and soon attracted a number of suitors. A friend of her aunt, Claude Ticay, was among them. He was a counselor at the Parliament of Paris, and he carried a social currency but had no great monetary fortune after he squandered his inheritance that was left by his father. Wanting to acquire both Anjolique and her money, he managed to convince the girl and her aunt that he was actually a man of great fortune, using the classic swindler tactic of enchanting her with extravagant gifts, likely bought with borrowed money. In 1676, when Angelique was 18 and Claude was over 40, the couple married in Paris.

The first years of their marriage were allegedly happy. The couple had a son and a daughter, but that happiness dissolved when Angelique was suspected. up infidelity, and she discovered the truth of her husband's wealth, or lack thereof. The tensions in their relationship played out messily and publicly. Claude complained several times directly to the king, trying and failing to have his wife arrested. Anjolique ordered a legal separation of goods to protect her fortune from her husband after his creditors began to hound their family. Claude became, at least a bully, if not an abuser,

of his wife during this period. So a plot was hatched. On April 8, 1699, after leaving dinner at a friend's house, Claude Ticay was accosted by two men. One apparently said, There you are, I've been waiting for you a long time. You must die. And shot him. him twice with a pistol. Clearly, the screenwriting wasn't a part of this arrangement. The other man followed up by stabbing, Claude several times with a sword. A servant quickly found him, and he miraculously survived. The police opened an investigation, and because the couple's hatred for each other was so well known, Anjolique was immediately implicated, along with her porter who acted as one of the assassins. In June, the servant was sentenced to hanging, and Anjolique was

sentenced to beheading. She maintained her innocence until she was tortured on the day of her death. Escaping conviction once again was Anjolique's other accomplice in the plan, her friend, Marie-Catherine Del Noir. It's not known when the two women met, but as a woman. as a woman in Parisian society, it's likely that Anjolique attended Marie-Catherine's salons, perhaps even acting in her plays. Anne Marguerite de Noir, a famous early 18th century French journalist, included in a 1702 publication, an account of the Tiket affair from an anonymous correspondent, written at the time of the trial and execution.

The correspondent details that the day after the attempt on her husband's life, Angelique visited Marie Catherine and exclaimed, Cé moi, Conna assassinate, how should we? Apologies for my French, I promise I tried my best. The tricky thing about French, aside from the pronunciation, is that the sentence could either be translated to mean, it's me who we have murdered today,

meaning we the two women, or it is me who they have murdered today, meaning the public. The French court was actually never able to connect Angelique directly to that 1699 murder attempt, so she was technically convicted for what they believed was evidence of a murder attempt three years prior, with no evidence tying her to either the 1699 attempt or the alleged earlier one, Marie Catherine once again escaped a dark fate. It seems that after the trial, Marie Catherine withdrew from Parisian social life, likely ceasing to hold her beloved salons.

She died six years later in 1705, leaving behind 12 published works, including 24 fairy tales that would change the genre forever. While Murray Catherine's story might, might have been reflected in the bluebird and the white cat, Angelique's is more closely seen in Del Noir's The Yellow Dwarf, in which the heroine's love is killed by the dwarf attempting to marry her, and she dies of grief.

For Del Noir, the yellow dwarf represented the evils of man, while animals represented escapism from those evils, to once again quote Marina Warner, Madame Del Noir seized the opportunities which the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis offered her to create a world of pretend, in which happiness and love are sometimes possible for a heroine, but elusive and hard one. That's the story of Madame Del Noir, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

up everyone. I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent. He said if it was based solely on talent, wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved.

And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Despite her fame during her time, reprints and English translations of Marie Catherine's works became less and less common over time, favoring the works of her contemporary Charles Peralt instead. Peralt wrote specifically with his children in mind, popularizing the identity of Mother Goose as a storyteller. His tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are inarguably feats of storytelling that have stood the test of time.

But they don't carry within them the same adult headiness of Madame Del Noyes' tales, which were written for an audience of salon goers. It wasn't all roses for Peralt, though. There's a reason his donkey skin, about a king trying to marry his own daughter, hasn't gotten a Disney adaptation. But I digress. In 2019, the independent U.S. publisher Black Coat Press published a long-awaited two-volume collection

of Mary Catherine's work, and in 2020, Princeton University Press published a collection entitled, The Island of Happiness, as a decidedly feminist work, featuring illustrations and illustrations, and an essay by the artist Natalie Frank, known for her work exploring gender and sexuality.

It most prominently features one of Marie Catherine's earliest stories, the tale of Mira, which didn't appear in either of her fairy tale collections. Anyone who saw her fell desperately in love with her, D'Lnois writes. However, her pride and indifference made all her lovers die. In an ironic ending, Mira falls for a man indifferent to her. Frank's essay calls it a feminist ghost story for the ages, explaining that, quote, a traditional fairy tale warns of the dangers of unrequited love.

This one warns of the violence that occurs out of unrecipricated lust, poking fun at the seriousness of a tragic fairy tale story. end quote. Even feminist icon Gloria Steinem voiced her thoughts on the collection, saying, In giving us back the women heroines and images and lives that were once the heart and soul of the oldest stories, Natalie Frank is giving back to female readers the right to honor and tell our own stories. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from A-Hart. Aaron Manky. Noblemud is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is

edited and produced by Noamie Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be... Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.