A summer's fairy tale
The little ones pick blackberries, rescue flies, and learn lessons of life
Chère amie, cher ami,
Dorothée beside the blackberries that grow around the farmyard
“What do flies eat, Bonne Maman?” asked Dorothée, gazing into her cupped hands.
She had paused from blackberry-picking to rescue two flies from a spider web. Looking worn and desiccated, they lay against the plump skin of her palms.
There was a large fly perched on a blackberry. I pointed this out to my companion. Good food for a fly. I suggested she leave the pair of flies on a cluster of blackberries.
It was late in the afternoon. Small swallows had begun to swoop over the fields and hedgerows.
“Non, non,” said Dorothy decisively. At five, she takes a firm stance on many issues. “Those birds eat flies.”
She covered them with a leaf.
We heard a sharp whimper. Half hidden in a thicket by the fence, Charlie looked around, startled, his blue eyes filling with tears. A patch on his little arm was already turning red. He had been reaching for a branch studded with fat blackberries. Entwined amid the thorny stems were silvery green, delicately toothed leaves, soft with stinging down.
“Nettles!” protested Charlie, wiping his cheeks with berry-stained fists.
“Ortilles!” corrected Dorothy. She is learning French.
“Pauvre de Charlie!” she added, with the condescending solicitude of an elder sister. “You should be more careful.”
We took our basket and turned back to the Chateau. Dorothée skipped along merrily, holding her flies close to her chest. Charlie forgot his stings. All along the lane, a profusion of blackberries hung on spiny rambling branches. Yearningly, he gazed at the shiny black clusters. He reached in gingerly among the thorns, his greed now tempered by the desire to avoid scratches and stings.
A heatwave has struck France. Normandy is hot and humid; the thermometer even soared to 30 degrees. This is only 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but to a Norman, it is “lourd,” as heavy as tropical heat. Madame Apolline, whom we encountered as she dashed into the épicierie this morning, was already flushed. Her cheek was moist. After the loss of our vache numéro 200, and its calf a few weeks ago, she checks the cattle first thing in the morning, then several times a day. Leaning out the kitchen window early this morning, we’d already caught sight of her. Standing in their midst under the trees in the home pasture, she looked carefully over each member of the troupeau.
And the farm work goes on. As went up to the village on our morning croissant expedition, Charlie gave a sudden excited shriek. Monsieur Yves’ grandson was driving the tractor in our front fields. We stopped the car and got out to watch. Each time the tractor turned at the top of the field, Tom raised the herse. Charlie was entranced.
Steel tines, like huge, curved teeth, gleamed behind rows of metal discs.
A tiny cloud of dust hung above the tractor. Tom was turning under the wheat stubble, preparing the soil for colza. The seeds will be planted as soon as possible. Once the little plants emerge, they need all the sunny days of late summer and autumn to establish sturdy roots before winter.
We are expecting rain and la fraîcheur when the weather breaks tomorrow. But this hot summer afternoon, we take up the horizontal on the duchesse brisée in the library. Dorothée wants to hear a story. And Charlie lies down on the floor on a sheep’s fleece that he fondly believes to be a bearskin.
Dorothée brings me a book.
“Read this one,” she instructs, opening the page to a picture of a beautiful princess and a fairy with purple wings.
“Il était une fois...” begins the first tale in “Les Contes de Ma Mère L’Oye,” “Tales of My Mother the Goose.” It bears little resemblance to the nursery rhymes of my American childhood.
“Once upon a time, Dorothée,
There was a great king,
The greatest on the earth
Kind in peace, implacable in war
Seul enfin comparable à soi...hmm.”
“Sui generis,” I translated, and skipped ahead, past the éloge.
“His loving half, his faithful companion,
Was so charming and so beautiful,
So agreeable and so dear
That he was still in love,
Less a happy king than a happy husband.
Of their tender and chaste Hymenée
Full of sweetness and delight,
Was born a such a goodly daughter
That they readily consoled themselves
for not having had more children.”
“I’m having a lot of children,” Dorothée interrupted, fixing on this interesting detail amidst the flourish of words.
“What is a Hymenée?” she added inquisitively.
Charles Perrault did not write “Peau d’âne” for children. “The Donkey Skin” was dedicated to an aristocratic lady, a fellow writer and patroness of intellectuals and poets. It was the 1690s; les contes de fées, fairy tales, were à la mode. They were read aloud in the fashionable salons of late 17th-century Paris and Versailles.
“Ma Mère L’Oye” was a type familiar to Perrault’s listeners. She was the proverbial wet-nurse, the country dame who took in the children of aristocrats, les bourgeois, and working people in towns, to raise them on her own good mother’s milk and then to bring them up for a few more years in her country home with her own children.
Mother Goose might be ignorant of fine ways, but she was no fool. She might spin a tale to amuse her charges, but she was a fount of good sense. The details might be cruel or shocking...but then, so is life! And she isn’t above a happy ending.
“Peau d’âne” was a well-known folk tale; Louis XIV recalled being terrified by the story as a small child back in the 1640s. Perrault’s verse version appeared in print for the first time in 1694. It was a succès fou. And it has never been out of print in French since.
The Marquise de L***, to whom Perrault inscribed his work, is thought to be the writer Marie-Thérèse de Lambert. To be introduced at one of the Marquise’s “mardis,” or Tuesday gatherings, was to reach the threshold of literary and intellectual renown. Fontenelle and La Motte, Montesquieu and Marivaux were her close friends.
The salon of Madame de Lambert, as seen in a 19th-century print by Godard & Aubert, 1846. Gallica BNF
Madame de Lambert’s salon, wrote one of her contemporaries, was the “antichambre de l’Académie.” The Académie française bestowed not only honor and social prestige on its eminent members, but it paved the way to lucrative state pensions and royal favor.
On Tuesdays at the Lambert hôtel particulier in Paris, philosophers and playwrights, mathematicians and poets were invited to a luncheon followed by an afternoon in the “bureau de l’esprit,” organized around a theme. Guests were expected to express a personal opinion with esprit,or wit, or to charm the audience with a poem or an essay read aloud. Good taste, not be confused with prudery, reigned. Politics and religion were off-limits.
Perrault himself was one of the early members of the Académie, elected in 1671. He was already an established figure, close to Louis XIV and former assistant to the king’s minister Colbert, when he read his “Peau d’âne” aloud in the salons of the 1690s.
Charles Perrault, painted by his friend Charles Le Brun, c. 1670. Le Brun painted many of frescos on the ceilings and walls of the palace of Versailles for Louis XIV.
Perhaps at one of these sessions, Claude-Antoine and Jeanne de Saint-Simon, Marquis and Marquise of Courtomer, were among the listeners. They too maintained an hôtel particulier in Paris as well as their château in Normandy. And after all, Perrault’s patron, Louis XIV, was a witness who had signed their contract of marriage in 1682.
Like Louis XIV, the fairy-tale king had magnificent stables. Here, amid the most beautiful horses in the world, was an “âne” with big, long ears.
Dorothée, whose interest had begun to flag at my translation of 17th-century French, brightened at the appearance of the donkey. He was indeed a remarkable creature.
“So dainty by Nature formed
He never produced manure
But fine gold écus, engraved with the sun
And gold Louis of all sorts,
That were gathered every morning on the blond straw...”
Even Charlie found this phenomenon interesting. But the gold-producing donkey was mere background.
The beautiful queen died. So, soon thereafter, did the donkey. That left the king and his daughter.
“Why did the king kill the donkey?” asked Dorothée, horrified at such cruelty.
“And skin him,” added Charlie thoughtfully, patting his fleece.
Ah, mes pauvres enfants, that’s not the worst of it!
Just as the blackberry is very delicious, so the nettle curls around its stem.
This 17th-century fairy tale fascinates not only analysts of myth and folklore but Freudian psychologists.
The king promised the dying queen he would marry again – if he could find a princess more beautiful and finely-made than she. That delectable person, it turns out, is none other than their own daughter.
The princess “se lamentait et pleurait nuit et jour,” but the king burns with “amour extrême.”
Fortunately, the princess’ fairy godmother lives not far away in a grotto studded with coral and mother-of-pearl.
Catherine Deneuve as the princess with her fairy godmother in Jacques Demy's 1970 film, "Peau d'Âne." The princess wears her dress, the "color of the moon."
Il n’est pas besoin qu’on vous die
Ce qu’était une Fée en ces bienheureux temps ;
Car je suis sûr que votre Mie
Vous l’aura dit dès vos plus jeunes ans.
“I don’t have to tell you
What a Fairy was in those fabled times;
I am sure your learned it
At your mother’s knee.”
The fairy counsels the princess to ask her amorous father for three impossible wedding gifts: dresses the color of time, the color of the moon, and the color of the sun. When the king’s tailors and embroiders succeed, and the princess is almost overcome with awe and gratitude, the fairy tells her to demand the skin of the king’s gold-producing donkey. This, the fairy assures her, he will never do. It is the source of his wealth.
But, as the poet recounts,
Cette Fée était bien savante,
Et cependant elle ignorait encor
Que l’amour violent pourvu qu’on le contente,
Compte pour rien l’argent et l’or ;
“That fairy was very wise
And nevertheless she still didn’t know
That mad love, if it can have its way,
Cares nothing for silver and gold.”
Dorothée looked at me in consternation. “What is mad love?” she wanted to know.
Walt Disney reshaped “Sleeping Beauty” – also written in verse by Perrault and published together with “Peau d’âne” in 1697— into a film for children in 1959. “Peau d’âne,” on the other hand, was made into a film by the French director Jacques Demy. It was 1970; la liberation des moeurs was à la mode, so was the New Wave.
I explained to Dorothée that “mad” means “insane.”
“Not angry?” she insisted. Well...sometimes, Dorothée.
But once the mad king was out of the story, the tale was, like the film version, delightful – lively, fantastical, and droll.
Si Peau d’âne m’était conté,
J’y prendrais un plaisir extrême...
“Hearing the tale of Peau d’âne
Would bring me great delight...,” wrote Jean de La Fontaine in 1678, explaining the power of storytelling in his poem, “Le Pouvoir des Fables.”
“The world is old, they say, and I believe it
But to instruct, you must amuse it like a child,” he concludes.
The princess, wearing the “peau d’âne” as a disguise, runs away.
Elle alla donc bien loin, bien loin, encor très loin...
Far, far, very far away, she finds work as a souillon on a farm. Her name becomes Peau d’âne. But despite her lowly occupation cleaning the pigsty and washing dirty rags, she still has the heart of a princess. When she sees a fine prince who often visits the farm after hunting, she loves him from afar. Despite her rags, her nobly born heart seeks a noble object.
Epinal's "Alphabet des contes de fées" of 1866 featured "Peau d'âne." Here is the princess, watching sheep and disguised under the donkey skin to "hide her beauty from the immoral attentions of her father."
The fairy godmother has given her a wand, which the princess uses to summon her clothes, jewels, and a mirror. Every feast day, she bathes and dresses in her regal finery.
One such day, the prince glimpses the ravishing princess who lives in Peau d’âne’s hovel. He falls desperately in love. He cannot eat. Peau d’âne makes him a cake, into which falls her emerald ring. Alas for the prince and his distraught parents, no finger will fit the ring!
As a final desperate measure, before the prince expires of starvation and unrequited love, Peau d’âne is summoned.
« Que veut-on dire,
De faire entrer ici cette sale guenon ? » cry the courtiers, laughing rudely.
“What, allow that dirty she-monkey into the palace!”
Yet the ring fits! All are stupefied.
Dorothée nods with satisfaction.
Peau d’âne returns home to change before she meets the prince. Very soon, she reappears in one of her fine dresses. Diamonds sparkle in her golden hair.
To the joy of all, the prince and princess are married. Kings are invited from far and near. Some arrive on elephants from the “land of the dawn,” the East. Others frighten little children with their strange appearance.
The old king attends the wedding, too.
Dorothée looked discomfited.
But he is now married, I read. After all, as Perrault reminds us:
Comme l’Hymen, quelque mal qu’on en die,
Est un remède exquis pour cette maladie...
“Marriage, for all the ill one says of it,
Is a perfect remedy for love.”
The father has returned to his senses. He weeps, bestowing a chaste, paternal kiss on his daughter. And how delighted is the groom to find that his father-in-law is a great king!
The fairy godmother also appears at the wedding. As befits the character who saved the heroine from moral danger, she concludes the poem with several moralités:
That it is better to suffer physical hardship
Than commit a sin;
That Virtue, like the princess, may be unfortunate
But is always Noble;
That Reason is helpless against Passion;
That dry bread and water from a spring suffice for any young person
As long as she has beautiful clothes.
Dorothée listened attentively. Ma Mère L’Oye tells a strange, scary, marvelous and magical tale. But the old enchantress tethers our imagination to the comforting realm of common sense and common moeurs.
Le Conte de Peau d’âne est difficile à croire,
Mais tant que dans le Monde on aura des Enfants,
Des Mères et des Mères-grands,
On en gardera la mémoire.
“The story of Peau d’âne is difficult to believe”, admits the poet in conclusion,
“But as long as there are children in the world,
And Mothers and grandmothers,
We will cherish it.”
I close the book. It is time for the wholesome pleasure of goûter. We check on the flies, who have disappeared.
“I guess a bird got them,” says Dorothée, resigned to the ways of the world.
“Or maybe they flew away by themselves,” she adds, with a gleam of bright hope in her brown eyes.
We carry our slices of brioche and a bowl of blackberries outside onto the grass under the trees. To the lemonade squeezed from the fruit of our citronniers, we add a few lumps of sugar.
To summer!
Elisabeth
Ready for a goûter under the trees.
P.S. Michel Legrand's "Amour, amour," the theme song of Jacques Demy's "Peau d'Âne" of 1970, was a charming discovery after we read the story.
"Amour, amour
M'a rendu fou!"
sings the princess. "Love, love, has made me crazy!"