“La Belle et la Bête” by Madame de Villeneuve, translated as “The Beauty and the Beast in our companion volume, was first published in 1740 as by far the longest item in a two-volume collection entitled La Jeune Américaine et les Contes marins, signed “Madame de ***” and bearing a title-page alleging that it had been printed in La Haye [The Hague]. Although it is not impossible that it really had been published in The Hague, the attachment of title-pages bearing false places of publication was commonplace at the time for works printed in Paris without the benefit of the royal license necessary for licit publication, and the likelihood is that it was really published in Paris.
The collection was incomplete, the frame story containing the included tales breaking off with a long way still to go and the number of stories included being fewer than the number advertised in the prefatory note. In 1865, however, some years after the author’s death, the two earlier volumes were reprinted, as the first two items in a five-volume collection entitled Contes de Madame de Villeneuve, similarly bearing title-pages claiming publication in the Hague but also giving a Paris address from which the volumes could be purchased.
The three new volumes did not contain the material missing from the earlier collection. Although the frame narrative is continued in a rather tokenistic fashion, the additional volumes are almost completely taken up by a single novel, “Les Nayades,” here translated as “The Naiads.” That collection too is manifestly incomplete, the final page advertizing the imminent continuation of the series of tales with one entitled “L’Empire du temps et le pouvoir de la patience” [The Empire of Time and the Power of Patience], which never materialized (the 1768 book entitled Le Temps et la Patience bearing her signature is simply a reprint of La Jeune Américaine.) Presumably, the author had intended to work on that continuation before her death but was unable to do so.
Madame de Villeneuve (1685?-1755) began life as Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot, born in Paris to Protestant parents from La Rochelle. Although there is some uncertainty about her birth-date, which contemporary bibliographers were unable to discover, modern sources claim that she was born in the same year that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and thus rendered French Protestants vulnerable to relentless and savage persecution. In 1706 she was married to Jean-Baptiste Gallon de Villeneuve, of Poitou, a lieutenant-colonel in the infantry, but she requested a legal separation of their assets within six months, her husband already having squandered most of their combined fortune. In 1711 she was widowed; she had apparently given birth to a daughter, but all historical trace of her was lost and she probably had not survived infancy.
Soon reduced to penury, Madame de Villeneuve returned to Paris in search of gainful employment, where she met the playwright Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674-1762), subsequently known as Crébillon père in order to differentiate him from his son, also a writer, and eventually moved in with him and lived with him until her death. Crébillon père served as a crown censor licensing publications, so Madame de Villeneuve became familiar not only with the requirements for obtaining such licensing but also the procedures that could be followed in their absence. She published four more books after La Jeune Américaine during her lifetime, one of which was another collection of tales, Les Belles solitaires (1745) and the other three being naturalistic novels, one of which, La Jardinière de Vincennes [The Gardener of Vincennes] (1753), was moderately successful. Although there is no formal record of who it was that arranged for the posthumous publication of the 1765 Contes, and Crébillon père was already dead by then, the likeliest candidate seems to be Crébillon fils (1707-1777), also a royal censor, who might have inherited the manuscript of “Les Nayades” along with his father’s property.
A further naturalistic novel published after Madame de Villeneuve’s death, in 1757 is widely attributed to her, but the author of her entry in the 1827 Biographie universelle published by Louis Gabriel Michaud flatly denies that attribution and also denies her authorship of several other tales wrongly attributed to her by various sources, although he does not question her authorship of “Les Nayades,” in spite of its belated date of publication. Nor had Joseph de La Porte, who included a long synopsis of the novel in the account of the author contained in his Histoire littéraire des femmes françoises (1769), although he was careful to say that the other posthumous novel was only “attributed” to her, without endorsing her authorship of it.
Madame de Villeneuve owes such posthumous fame as she still retains primarily to an abridged adaptation of “La Belle et la Bête,” which was published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711-1780) in her Magasin des Enfants—not a magazine but a kind of educative manual for parents and teachers—in 1743. The shorter adaptation became far more famous than Madame de Villeneuve’s original, and is the version that has been reprinted, copied and adopted relentlessly ever since. Although it is not inconceivable that Madame de Villeneuve gave her permission for the adaptation, the overwhelming probability is that it was simply plagiarized, Leprince de Beaumont knowing full well that, as the original was an unlicensed publication, there could be no legal grounds for complaint.
Although Madame de Villeneuve’s authentic version was reprinted by Charles-Joseph de Mayer in his forty-one-volume collection of Le Cabinet de fées, ou Collection choisie des contes de fées et autres contes merveilleux [The Fays’ Cabinet, or selected Collection of Tales of Enchantment and Other Marvelous Tales] (1785-1789), which was similarly unlicensed and bore title pages claiming publication in Amsterdam, it virtually disappeared from view thereafter and remained difficult to find for the next two hundred years, prior to a 1996 reprint of the story. It was, however, translated into English by James Robinson Le Planché (1796-1880), supplying by far the longest item in his volume Four and Twenty Fairy Tales (1858), and Le Planché also adapted the story for the stage; his rather mannered version has been reprinted recently and is currently in print, but I thought it worth doing a new translation to accompany “The Naiads,” because the juxtaposition of the two tales adds interest to both.
The Leprince de Beaumont version of “La Belle et la Bête” was also translated into English, and became the basis for numerous further adaptations, of which the best known during the 19th century was probably a retelling in verse published as an anonymous booklet in 1811, generally credited to Charles Lamb—although Andrew Lang doubted that attribution, and challenged it when he reprinted the poem in 1887. It is at least arguable, however, that the principal interest of Madame de Villeneuve’s original story is not so much the basic narrative that was plagiarized by Leprince de Beaumont as the two supplements ignored in the abridged version, in the first of which the re-metamorphosed Beast explains how he came to be transformed into the monster and why it was forced to act in the fashion it did in regard to the Beauty; in the other, the fay who has contrived the Prince’s liberation from his curse then fills in a further back-story, which explains how and for what motives an evil rival placed her in that elaborate necessity. The second back-story contains an original account of the organization and internal politics of the world of Faerie that is of considerable interest in itself, as well as completing the explanatory schema of the enigmatic fundamental tale.
The corrupt version of “La Belle et la Bête” included in the 1743 Magasin des Enfants is illustrated, and the illustrations depict the Beast as a large dog, but the story lends no encouragement to that depiction, and it does not correspond at all with the only four specific details contained in the original story, which are that the Beast is equipped with something resembling an elephant’s trunk, has scales that rattle, has paws instead of hands and is extremely heavy. Later images that equip the creature with an animalesque head but a more-or-less human body—including the illustrations in Le Planché’s Four and Twenty Fairy Tales—have no warrant in either version. The Magasin des Enfants version is also harsher in its moral judgments, punishing the Beauty’s jealous sisters (reduced to two from the original five) by turning them into statues rather than forgiving them and treating them kindly—a moral policy taken to an unusual extreme in “Les Nayades.”
It is not immediately obvious to a modern reader why “La Belle et la Bête” was published without a royal license, especially given that the author had a close liaison with a censor able to hand out such licenses. In fact, that might have been the problem, and Crébillon père might well have thought that if he or anyone else granted a license to a book written by his mistress—his Protestant mistress—it might render him vulnerable to criticism, and perhaps to attack. It is unlikely that the mere fact that the Beast continually asks Beauty point-blank whether she will permit him to couche [go to bed] with her would have caused difficulties, but what might well have done is the fact that although the story is explicitly set in the present rather than the vague legendary past in which most contes de fées are set, albeit a long way from France, it contains absolutely no mention of religion, and is thus literally ungodly.
That might be considered from a distance as a delicate diplomatic omission on the part of a Protestant writer working in a sternly Catholic country, but the representatives of the Catholic Church would undoubtedly have seen the matter differently. The absence of religion from the Magasin des Enfants version is less obvious, and that version is, in any case, contained within a stubbornly pious frame narrative, which includes numerous versions of stories from the Old Testament retold in a manner to which no Catholic clergyman would have objected.
“Les Nayades,” which is set in a vague distant past, addresses the diplomatic problem of godliness differently, the author equipping her fictitious realm with a pagan religion honoring “divinities” based on elemental spirits; it might nevertheless have been regarded with a similarly jaundiced eye by censors who were supposed to be defending the Church as well as the State from seditious notions. Although the King who is one of the story’s main characters advocates and practices a hyper-Christian forgiveness of his enemies, relentlessly turning his other cheek to the most vicious slaps, he does not do so in Christ’s example, and the underlying rhetoric of the narrative calls that policy somewhat into question—without, however, resorting to the crude and brutal principle of talion featured in the Magasin des Enfants version of “La Belle et la Bête.”
Although contes de fées of the length of “Le Belle et la Bête” were not unknown by 1740, although not very common—the Mayer Cabinet des fées contains several similar items—“Les Nayades” is perhaps unique in being more than twice as long, extending to approximately 94,000 words. It is, in consequence, one of the earliest “fantasy novels” that can be readily assimilated to the modern genre that was belatedly given that label in the 1970s. Like “La Belle et la Bête,” it uses several of the stock motifs of contes de fées, featuring a Prince Perfect who falls in love with a shepherdess, unaware that she is really a Princess, as well as an exceedingly wicked stepmother and a grotesquely exaggerated ugly sister to supply the beleaguered heroine with an excess of persecution, but, like its predecessor, it is conscientiously concerned to “look behind” those motifs and provide them with much more elaborate explanatory schemas than was then conventional. The embedded story of the strange custodian of the Mill of Misfortune and the explanation of Prince Perfect’s true identity provided by the gnomide queen are addenda as interesting as the supplements in the earlier novella.
Madame de Villeneuve has suffered the fate to which numerous female writers of her era were subjected—including some who had fewer prejudicial strikes against them than she had—in being largely ignored by historians and critics, and her fantasies have faded almost entirely for view. They were somewhat handicapped in attracting the attention of anthologists by their length—those in the totally neglected Les Belles solitaires are also long—but in terms of their content, the author was certainly as enterprising and as interesting as any of the other writers in her problematic genre, and more so, from a modern viewpoint, than many of those whose greater orthodoxy facilitated licensed publication.
Modern feminists have not taken up her cause, some of them, in fact, asserting that “Le Belle et la Bête”—which they tend to know only in the corrupted version—sends entirely the wrong message to girls in need of future liberation from masculine bestiality, but she is a more complicated and more sophisticated writer than that superficial reading of the Beauty/Beast motif implies, and the source of vigor, enterprise and moral fortitude featured in her work is always female, albeit mostly associated on the side of virtue with fays, naiads, hamadryads and gnomides, who lend their support to human women whose actions are hesitant no matter how strong their resilience might be.
Madame de Villeneuve’s main strength as a writer, however, and the main interest she retains for modern readers, does not lie in her politics or her sexual politics, which are admittedly and understandably old-fashioned now, even though they were not devoid of challenge in their epoch, but in the nature and intensity of her imagination. She was one of a number of eighteenth-century writers whose involvement with contes merveilleux was inquisitive and analytical, interested in experimenting with the deployment of narrative implements of such tales, studying their logic and extrapolating their use. Such work has been done with far more sophistication and expertise by modern writers, but that does not detract from her status and achievements as a pioneer, who helped lay groundwork on which countless future writers were to build, and whose endeavors remain enjoyable as well as fascinating.
The translation of “La Belle et la Bête” was made from the 1996 reprint published by Le Cabinet des Lettres, edited by Jacques Cotin and Élizabeth Lemirre. The translation of “Les Nayades” was made from the version of the 1865 Contes reproduced on Google Books. The latter version has a very small amount of text missing because one of the pages in the scanned book was badly torn, so I have adjusted the text slightly at that point in order to maintain its continuity. The original version of “Les Nayades” contains a few interruptions and supplementary annotations by the supposed teller of the tale, some of which I have omitted on the grounds of their redundancy.
Although Cotin and Lemirre retained some of the eccentric features of the typesetting of the original, I have modernized the presentation of the both texts, introducing the quotation marks that are, in any case, necessary in all English translations of French texts. The original texts do not contain any text breaks apart from the entirely arbitrary breaks between volumes and the bracketing of the Beast’s story in the novella, but I have introduced text-breaks for the convenience of readers, mostly where there are changes of scene or viewpoint that would usually be accompanied by text breaks in modern works. The layout of the original texts, including the distribution of paragraph breaks will have been determined by the typesetter, not the author; as it does not represent authorial intention, it did not seem to me to be inappropriate to modify it slightly in order to make the text more comfortably readable.
Brian Stableford