Some Notes on the Authoress, Mlle de La Force

Sorting through fact from fiction while researching Mlle de La Force’s life was a difficult, if immensely rewarding, puzzle. Charlotte-Rose de Caumont (de) La Force (or Mlle de La Force) is not nearly as well-known as her contemporaries Perrault, Mlle de Scudéry, or Mme d’Aulnoy, and most of the information available in English emphasizes the many rumors and scandals (often mistakenly) associated with her. For example, it turns out it was not Mlle de La Force who was implicated in the witchcraft Poison Affair and had an affair with the Dauphin, but Mme de Murat, her cousin by birth and marriage and fellow fairy-tale writer.

Charlotte-Rose was born in 1650 into an aristocratic family with a rich Huguenot history in the old province of Guyenne, now in the Aquitaine region in southwest France. Huguenots were French Protestants, mostly Calvinists, at the time of the religious Reformation and upheaval in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 36 years between 1562 and 1598, there were eight wars of religion between the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority in France, resulting in the deaths or forced exile of thousands. Peace finally came in the form of King Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes in 1598, which forgave the blood spilt in the past and granted Protestants certain rights by law, including the freedom to practice their religion and to hold political positions.

Charlotte-Rose’s grandfather, a Huguenot who lived with her until his death when she was two, was Jacques Nompar de Caumont. He had survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572. The massacre started as a planned assassination of a few key Protestant leaders during the celebration of Henri IV’s marriage, but it spread into a slaughter of some four thousand Huguenot victims. Though his father and brother were killed, Mlle de La Force’s grandfather lived to become a loyal friend of Henri IV and a Marshal of France. He spent the last years of his life recording his experiences, which Mlle de La Force later used as a reference when she wrote her Secret History of Henri IV, King of Castille.

In 1660, when Charlotte-Rose was just ten years old, she met King Louis XIV, the Sun King, when he came to stay at her home at the château de Cazeneuve. When she was sixteen, she was appointed maid of honour to the queen until 1673, when she became lady-in-waiting to Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise. These positions kept her at court and put her in the center of aristocratic literary culture. She had friends and connections who were writers, actors, blue-stockings, and précieuses.

In 1685, King Louis XIV revoked his grandfather’s Edict of Nantes and established Catholicism as the only true and permitted religion, denying Huguenots their right to practice their professions, to be judged fairly by their peers, and to practice their religion, on threat of violence and harassment by the king’s dragoons. Though forbidden by law to leave the country, some 200,000 Huguenots fled rather than be forced to convert. Mlle de La Force, however, like most Huguenots who remained behind, converted to Catholicism and joined the ranks of the “new converts” who, though technically Catholic, were not necessarily faithful to their new religion and were known for subverting it. As part of the king’s court, she received a yearly pension of 1,000 écus (approximately $75,000 by 2007’s conversion rates) as a reward for her example, and, like the rest of the court’s “new converts,” was monitored far more strictly than the rest of the populace to be certain she remained loyal to her new religion.

Little has been written about Mlle de La Force’s personal beliefs, but 10 years after the revocation, she began publishing secret histories about the historical figures at the forefront of the previous century’s Wars of Religion, and towards the end of her life she wrote a collection of Pensées chrétiennes (Christian Thoughts) that were never published. Whatever her beliefs or thoughts may have been, her family’s history and the tumult of her grandfather’s and her own religious times made their mark on her.

Then in June 1687 (it is important to note she was 37), she met and fell in love with a young man—kind, handsome, and handsomely rich—by the name of Charles Briou and promptly married him upon his reaching his majority at age 25. Their married bliss lasted a full ten days before his unhappy father caught up with the happy couple to demand that the king annul their wedding (they were living under the king’s protection in Versailles). The elder Briou then kidnapped his son and locked him away in Saint-Lazare until he would agree to the annulment. Charles Briou was let out in December six months later, and after a trial by parliament that lasted two years, Charles and Mlle de La Force were forbidden from seeing each other.

Yet some good came of that heartbreak. At the trial, the writer La Fontaine came to sit beside the weeping Charlotte-Rose and distract her from her tears, and a lasting friendship was born.

Mlle de La Force was both a poet and a novelist, but she is best known for her fairy tales and her “secret histories” (a term she coined), which were an early form of historical fiction. She wrote largely for her friends, but explicitly kept in mind the general public who might not be as well versed in the histories that were her sandbox. Her secret histories became quite popular. In fact, most of her early works were secret histories, two of which focused on prominent figures of the Wars of Religion, which you can see from the following list.

• • Les Fées, Contes des Contes, 1692
  Fairies, Tales of the Tales, also known as The Fairies, the Tale of Tales. Rumored collection of fairy tales, either lost or never originally existed. Posthumously, this title seems to have replaced by or been combined with the title of her two volumes published in 1698 as Les Contes des Contes. This combination is my theory, since her contemporaries never mentioned a previous collection when the 1698 collection was published, despite the fact that historians refer to the title often. In my search for answers, I found a volume entitled Les Fées, Contes des Contes published unsigned in 1708 but attributed to her, and Charlotte Trinquet referred to a volume with this title published posthumously in 1725 and accredited to Mlle de La Force. In other words, there is much extant confusion on this subject. Did this volume of fairy tales exist in 1692 or is this title simply an alternative to the original title of her 1698 volumes? No one seems to know for certain.
• • Histoire secrète de Marie de Bourgogne, 1694 (2 volumes)
  Secret History of Mary of Burgundy, also known as The Secret History of Burgundy, follows the love affair of Marie, only child and heiress of a duke, with Charles d’Orléans during the reign of Louis XI in the fifteenth century. This secret history immediately became popular and was hailed to be well researched and plausible, even if the story emphasized the love and character of Marie over the events in which her story was placed.
• • Histoire secrète de Henri IV, roi de Castille, 1695
  Secret History of Henry IV, King of Castille. Henri de Navarre played a huge part in ending the Wars of Religion and establishing religious tolerance with his Edict of Nantes in 1598, though he himself had reconverted to Catholicism in order to take the throne. He married Marguerite de Valois, a marriage he annulled in 1599, citing childlessness. He then married Marie de Medici, but he was also known for his many lovers, seven of whom had children by him. He was assassinated in 1610 by a religious fanatic. Mlle de La Force’s treatment of his life and loves became quite popular, and with her family’s history and stake in the Wars of Religion, it is unsurprising that she was drawn to write about him.
• • Histoire de Marguerite de Valois, reine de Navarre, sœur de François Premier, 1696 (2 volumes)
  History of Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre, Sister of François I, also known as The History of Marguerite de Valois. Daughter of King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, Marguerite de Valois was the sister of kings François I, Charles IX, and Henri III. Her marriage to Henri de Navarre made her queen of Navarre and later queen of France when he ascended the throne and became King Henri IV. It was during the celebration of her marriage to Henri that the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre erupted. With her family Catholic and her husband Protestant, Marguerite took an important role in the Wars of Religion. Mlle de La Force was not the only writer to be drawn to her story. Two centuries later, Alexandre Dumas was also inspired by her life, loves, scandals, and conflicts when he wrote his famous myth La Reine Margot. Like Dumas who wrote after her, however, Mlle de La Force took more artistic license with the facts and events of history in her work about Marguerite de Valois than she did in her work about the life and loves of Henri IV.
• • Gustave Vasa, Histoire de Suède, 1697
  Gustava Vasa, History of Sweden features Christine de Danemark (Christina of Denmark), the great-granddaughter of Marie de Bourgogne, about whom Mlle de La Force had previously written. This novel departs from France, taking its readers into a Sweden Mlle de La Force had never visited.

In 1697, several satirical and widely circulated poems called Les Noëls scandalized the court with their critiques. Though they were unsigned, they were attributed to Mlle de La Force, who published most—if not all—of her fiction anonymously and who’d already had scandalous and subversive marks against her with her status as a “new convert” and her elopement with the much younger Charles Briou. Although she never claimed these poems, the king forced her into exile from Paris and the court on pain of losing her pension. She fled to live with the Benedictine sisters at Gercy Abbey, not far from Paris, and remained there until she received a pardon and permission to return in January 1713.

The year 1697 was also when she wrote to and shared her fairy tales with her friends, who, it is said, compiled and published them in 1698 without her consent as the book Les Contes des Contes.

Though much of what she wrote during her exile remained unpublished until after her death, her exile from Paris did not keep her from writing or staying abreast of the highly fashionable intellectual and literary salons. She wrote extensively, although she wrote far fewer secret histories.

• • Histoire d’Adelaïs de Bourgogne, 1698 (Never published)
  Unfortunately, I was unable to find a summary or description of this manuscript in the resources available to me, but my best guess would be this is a secret history of Adélaïs of Burgundy, wife of Louis II, the Holy Roman Emperor who lived in the early tenth century. If so, this would be the furthest Mlle de La Force delved into the past in her secret histories, but its time period would roughly correspond with the mythical past of her fairy tales, which were published the same year.
• • Les Contes des Contes, 1698 (2 volumes)
  The Tales of Tales. The first volume includes “Plus belle que Fée” (“Fairer than Fae”), “Persinette,” “L’Enchanteur” (“The Sorcerer”), and “Tourbillon” (“Whirlwind”). The second volume includes “Vert et Bleu” (“Green and Blue”), “Le Pays des Délices” (“The Country of Delights”), “La Puissance d’Amour” (“The Power of Love”), and “La Bonne Femme” (“The Good Woman”). I will discuss her fairy tales more further on.
• • Les Jeux d’Esprit, ou la Promenade de la princesse de Conti à Eu, 1701, (published posthumously in 1862)
  The Games of Wit, or the Cloister of the Princess of Conti at Eu. Set in 1615 at Eu in a fictionalized cloister where the princess of Conti resides in exile, it contains the only contemporary depiction of a literary game of French salon culture. The game consists of a pass-along story, where one participant begins and the next picks up the story where the last left off, which is a storytelling game familiar to us today. However, in this instance each participant pretends that they were eye-witnesses to their joint tale, elaborating on what they each recollect of “what happened,” which has the effect of making the story feel seamless and real. The story the characters tell, however, is one none of them saw, for it too is set in the past, in 1349, in an idealized time where, as in Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales, women had more freedom and power to follow their hearts and minds.
• • Anecdote galante, ou Histoire secrète de Catherine de Bourbon, duchesse de Bar et sœur de Henry le Grand, 1703
  Remarkable Anecdote, or Secret History of Catherine of Bourbon, Duchess of Bar and Sister of Henry the Great. “Henry the Great” is another name for King Henri IV, about whom Mlle de La Force had previously written. His sister Catherine was born Huguenot but forced to convert to Catholicism at the time of the massacre, but she reconverted to Calvinism at her earliest opportunity and was instrumental in convincing other Huguenots to accept her brother’s Edict of Nantes. Although this novel was indeed published, I was unable to find either an accessible copy or a summary of Mlle de La Force’s take on Catherine’s life. Perhaps, since the word galant can mean “lover” and well as “remarkable,” Mlle de La Force told the story of how Catherine wished to marry a Catholic, but when the Pope refused to give her a dispensation (since Catherine refused to convert back to Catholicism) her brother the king bullied the Archbishop of Reims into marrying Catherine to her duke instead. Henri IV likewise tried to convince his sister to reconvert, but Catherine remained steadfast to her religion until her death not long later.
• • Pensées chrétiennes, (never published, remains in handwritten pages)
  Christian Thoughts. As previously mentioned, I was unable to access a copy of her manuscript. What I can offer here about Mlle de La Force’s character and beliefs is only speculation cobbled together from the themes of her secret histories and fairy tales.

Speaking of fairy tales, since very few of Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales have been translated into English and few of her biographers mention the events and themes of her fairy tales at all except in passing, I would feel remiss if I didn’t discuss her fairy tales here.

The first volume of her fairy tales contains four tales, the first being “Plus belle que Fée” (“Fairer than Fae”). “Plus belle que Fée” has been previously translated into English (as “Fairer than a Fairy”), and its plot is also fairly straightforward so I won’t go into too many details.

“Plus belle que Fée” tells the story of a princess who is captured by an evil, jealous Fairy Queen because she is beautiful by her own merits and not due to any fairy gift. She is given a set of impossible tasks, and she and another captive maiden must complete their tasks, outwit the evil Queen, find and rescue the good Fairy Queen, and then overthrow the evil one, all using their courage, compassion, and help from their suitors.

I found “Plus belle que Fée” reminiscent of the Latin myth “Cupid and Psyche” in that the princess is given a set of impossible tasks in order to overcome her future mother-in-law’s jealousy so she can marry her suitor. Yet I was surprised by the amount of attention the tale gives the role of her friend and fellow captive. Again and again the princess turns back to help her friend or procure what her friend needs. “Plus belle que Fée” isn’t just a romance, but is also a tale of true friendship and the risks and sacrifices necessary for the courage to maintain it.

“Persinette,” the precursor fairy tale to “Rapunzel,” is the second story in the first volume. It is Mlle de La Force’s most famous fairy tale. It is also the shortest and simplest tale of the first volume.

“L’Enchanteur” (“The Sorcerer”) is a convoluted tale about how the sorcerer King of the Distant Isles gains his family. The tale starts when the sorcerer falls in love with a maiden destined to wed another king. He helps her trick her new husband into bedding another while she and the sorcerer carry on their love affair in secret. Their child is raised by the mortal king until the prince goes abroad and his true father reveals himself through a magical test of courage. Shocked to learn he was born of an affair, the prince returns home, tells the mortal king what he learned, and together they punish the queen for her deception by locking her in a tower where she is, nevertheless, continually visited by her sorcerer-lover. They try again to punish her by laying a trap for her lover, but she retaliates by tricking her son into being bitten by a magical snake that attaches itself permanently around his wrist.

Pained and ashamed of his curse, the prince retreats into hiding until his fiancée’s brother finds him and learns the secret of breaking his curse: a virgin must be willing to take the curse in his stead. His fiancée indeed does so, but with a twist. Horrified by what he has done and what breaking his curse has cost her, the prince returns home, frees his mother and weds his sweetheart. Meanwhile, the mortal king has forgiven the queen, but before he can remarry her, he dies. (Suspicious, suspicious.) Indeed at the royal wedding the queen’s fairy-sorcerer-lover arrives to marry her himself and lift his daughter-in-law’s curse, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Biographers who love emphasizing scandal often cite “L’Enchanteur” as their main example proving Mlle de La Force was unafraid of showing the physical aspects of love in her fairy tales. It is true that “L’Enchanteur” is the most shocking of her tales, for it includes a beheading for the prince’s magical test of courage and a voyeuristic eroticism in the fiancée’s transfer of the curse to herself. Myself, I was surprised to see that the sorcerer’s and the queen’s adulterous affair—though punished within the story—is eventually approved by its end. Unrelated to this, I also noticed that though the King of the Distant Isles is called an enchanter or a sorcerer, his behavior, powers, and the name of his homeland all lead me to believe he is a fairy. Biographers have noted that Mlle de La Force is among the few “fairy tale writers” to write mainly about actual fairies, and I would have to agree with their assessment.

“Tourbillon” (“Whirlwind”) is the final tale in the first volume. In this tale, a fairy falls in love with the widower king of Armenia, but destiny dictates that he will never return her love if his beloved daughter lives past her fourth year. So, in a twisted scheme to win his love for herself, the fairy sends her most trusted servant to kidnap and slay the princess. When the servant and the young princess reach the river, a great whirlwind appears and snatches the child away. The servant, thinking the princess fell into the river at the sudden storm, returns and tells the fairy she is dead. But four years pass and the king still does not love her as much as the fairy loves him. Learning the princess is probably yet alive, she searches and finds the girl in a castle no one can enter except the most beautiful boy in the world. The fairy finds such a specimen in France, a ten-year-old prince whom she induces to innocently befriend the princess. The two children grow up together under the fairy’s watchful eye, for the fairy wants revenge for her loveless life and determines the princess should experience it, too.

When the children are grown and the fairy is certain they are in love, she kidnaps the prince and gives him a set of impossible tasks in order to deprive the princess of his love. At this point Whirlwind, son of Zephyr, appears and proclaims his love for the princess; she denies him but begs his friendship and aid for her prince. He agrees, then helps the prince to both survive and finish his impossible task of stealing the pillow out from under Morpheus, god of dreams. Yet when he returns the prince to the princess’ side, the fairy discovers them and kidnaps the princess until the princess can call her friends with a magic horn. Together, they defeat the fairy, put her into an enchanted sleep with Morpheus’ pillow, and the prince and princess marry and live happily ever after.

“Tourbillon” is an excellent example showing the influence of Mlle de La Force’s aristocratic upbringing and education on her writing. “Tourbillon” interweaves the setting of France with the court’s fascination with Armenia and the mythologies of Ancient Greece and Rome. Folklorists sometimes sneer at Mlle de La Force’s aristocratic contemporaries for crafting fairy tales out of their own imagination and background rather than recording the “true” fairy tales, folktales, and legends of the lower classes. It’s true that in my own research of Breton legends (Brittany was settled by Celts) and Alsatian folklore, I have noticed a difference between the tales told at the common tailor’s hearth and those of Mlle de La Force. Yet “Tourbillon” and “La Puissance d’Amour” show the aristocracy’s fascination with the East and King Louis XIV’s emulation of the emperors of Rome and the artisans of Greece. Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales show us glimpses of who she was, her background, and her culture.

Her second volume starts off with the tale “Vert et Bleu” (Green and Blue), which opens on a long-awaited pregnancy. The Queen of India gives birth to a baby daughter and summons her sister, a fairy, to divine the young princess’ destiny. The fairy prophesies that the princess will only be happy if she overcomes a great opposition and weds a man who is good and kind. Discouraged by the rarity of such men and the prophecy of the “opposition,” the fairy gains permission to take the princess away from the world and raise her so she won’t fall for a man unworthy of her. The fairy takes on this task with the aid of her retinue and with her close friend, a magician who has a son about the princess’ age. She names the girl Blue, for her striking blue eyes. Meanwhile, the King of Springtime has a son named Green who grows into a splendid young man and overthrows an evil tyrant and gains a measure of renown. When Blue hears about him, she instantly admires him. But when she is lucky enough to meet him and fall in love, she does not know it is he, nor that he is a prince until later.

The rest of the tale is fairly standard. The jealous magician’s son kidnaps her, Green tries to rescue her, but in the end it is the fairy who reunites the lovers after she is certain it is Green who fulfills the prophecy, apologizing for getting in the way of their love. Though the tale is rather straightforward, the narrator’s running side commentary on love, loyalty, opposition, wisdom, and the mistakes we make with good intentions is both interesting and insightful.

“Le Pays des Délices” (“The Country of Delights”) is a relatively simple tale. A princess falls in love with an enemy prince-knight, marries him in secret and conceives. She gives birth to a baby boy and, fearing discovery, sends him downriver in a little boat. He is found and raised by fishermen. When he is grown and restless, a talking oyster tells him he is meant for more than fishing and trains him in the ways of a prince. The oyster then informs him about a hidden, mystical isle ruled by a fairy or goddess-like woman called Favor and gives the boy with the means to reach the isle. When he arrives, he meets and falls in love with Queen Favor, but she rejects his love, saying that she will only love he who is completely faithful to her, then disappears. He travels over the isle, discovering its many delights and being faithful to her memory, until he is reunited with her and lives a happy and satisfying life with her to the end of his days.

“La Puissance d’Amour” (“The Power of Love”) is about a prince, who cares for no one but takes pleasure in mistresses, and a princess of Arabia, who loves to charm and flirt. They fall in love thanks to the intervention of the god of Love himself. But when the prince tries to court his newfound love, he finds he cannot meet with her. Her many other suitors, one magician in particular, ensure that all her time is taken and he cannot reach her. One day, when he is mourning over his lack of a chance to visit her, the god of Love appears. The prince begs for help, but Love says he will not overcome the difficulty for the prince. Still, Love leaves behind a magic arrow, which the prince then uses to foil the magician’s and a fairy’s spells. The princess, too, meets Love and through his aid is reunited with the prince. Yet when the magician, despairing that he has not won the princess’ heart, meets with Love to beg for Love to release him from this torment of unrequited love, Love refuses. Then, when the prince discovers he is not satisfied with being only her lover but wants to marry the princess, Love secretly sends for the magician to attend their wedding as a jealous onlooker. It’s at this point that a daughter of Heaven appears to protect the wedded couple from Love’s further mischief. The tale includes an interesting commentary on the many attributes of Love, for good and ill.

“La Bonne Femme” (“The Good Woman”) is the only tale in this volume that has been translated into English. In this tale, a good-natured woman, who is tired of the manipulations and deceptions of her king’s court, leaves behind her riches to live on her own in the country. One day while she’s tending her flock, her sheep ignore her summons and wander farther and farther away from home. She follows them, wondering at this sudden change until she, too, becomes lost. Just as she is about to give up and try to return home, she meets three children, two toddler girls and a young boy, with their names inscribed on charms around their necks. After waiting a day to see if their parents will find them, she brings them home and raises them as her own.

As the children grow, she notices the boy and the youngest girl growing closer and closer, which worries her because she does not know if the children are siblings. She seeks out the local fairy for more information and is told by the fairy’s familiar not to worry. When the children are grown, each discovers their pendants can grant wishes. The boy wishes that a forest will grow near their home so the other girl can marry a prince who hunts there and she can be as happy as he and the youngest are. The good woman admonishes him, saying his wish could have brought a tyrannical king to their backyard for all he knows—which turns out to be the case. A prince indeed comes, hunts in the woods, and falls in love with the other girl, but when this is discovered by his father, the evil king comes and threatens the little family. They escape with the fairy’s help to a beautiful land, but with a warning not to venture past an oak tree made of iron. The evil king, however, lays a trap, capturing the youngest, who unthinkingly steps beyond the tree to recover a fowl she shot. The boy joins her in her captivity. The other girl and the prince return to alert the fairy of the kidnapping, but the fairy prophesies that only one who is willing to give up her life for them can save them. This the good woman does, giving herself up to go in their place, but the king suffers the death that was meant for her. The children then learn that the two girls are princesses whose father the evil king dethroned, and the boy and the prince are brothers, sons of the evil king, whom the fairy had promised to protect. They marry, the boy becomes king, and the good woman retires again to her home in the country.

I’ve found Charlotte Trinquet’s article “Mademoiselle de La Force, une princesse de la République des Lettres” a priceless resource for compiling this biography and bibliography. In her article, Trinquet said that although Mlle de La Force had a reputation as a libertine and her stories often include mention of the physical as well as the emotional side of romance, Mlle de La Force’s heroes and heroines always “surmount the worst obstacles to marry their lover” (Trinquet, 155). They soon learn their love doesn’t extinguish when they can hold it legitimately, but instead only grows (156).

In Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales, this belief in love growing within marriage is accompanied by commentary—either spoken by the characters themselves or by the narrator—on love and relationships. In these stories, love has the power to drive men and women to do good when love is selfless, pure, and bound by loyalty, and the power to do harm when desire is tainted by selfishness, resentment, and fury. Mlle de La Force also restates these themes at the end of each tale by way of a poetic moral and tribute to the characters’ discoveries about love, life, and friendship.

All in all, although we do not know much about Mlle de La Force’s life for certain, her fairy tales are a compelling study on what it’s like to struggle to understand and attain love and happiness, as well as an insightful commentary on the flaws of human nature we must overcome in order to keep the love and happiness we attain. We can conclude with confidence that Mlle de La Force believed in good triumphing over evil, in the hope and power of love, and in the strength of good women and men.

Mlle de La Force died in 1724, ten years after her return from exile.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• • If you’re interested in seeing the original Les Contes des Contes’s printed first volume containing the tales “Plus belle que F ée,” “Persinette,” “L’Enchanteur,” and “Tourbillon,” visit its page on Gallica, the digital library run by the Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k109716f/f1.image.
• • Le cabinet des fées : ou, Collection choisie des contes des fées, et autres contes merveilleux (1785) is a 41-volume collection of French fairy tales from this period edited by Charles-Joseph Mayer. Volume 6 includes a complete collection of Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales and names its source as Les Fées, Contes des Contes. Read the volume online at https://archive.org/details/lecabinetdesfe06maye.
• • Translations of Mlle de La Force’s “Plus belle que Fée” (“Fairer than a Fairy”) and “La Bonne Femme” (“The Good Woman”) can be found in the public domain in The Yellow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang (1897 http://books.google.com/books?id=fQxLAAAAYAAJ) or translated by J.R. Planché in Four and Twenty Fairy Tales (1858 http://books.google.com/books?id=tzMOAAAAYAAJ)
• • I found Charlotte Trinquet’s article “Mademoiselle de La Force, une princesse de la République des Lettres” extremely helpful while researching Mlle de La Force. Ms. Trinquet does a thorough job separating fact from fiction in Mlle de La Force’s life. Her bibliography is impressive and reassuring. She also comments on Mlle de La Force’s literary life and her other popular works: http://periodicals.narr.de/index.php/oeuvres_et_critiques/article/view/572/387.
• • If you’re curious about the juicier gossip, scandals and rumors surrounding Mlle de La Force, see the blog post series by Kate Forsyth, an Australian writer with a passion for Mlle de La Force and “Persinette”: http://www.kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/tag/Charlotte-Rose_de_la_Force/.
• • L’association Caumont has some information about Mlle de La Force on their public site: http://caumont-et-son-histoire.fr/spip.php?article31.
• • Both of the two above resources drew primarily from the book Mademoiselle de La Force : un auteur méconnu du XVII ème siècle by Michel Souloumiac, which is now out of print but can be found at http://www.worldcat.org/title/mademoiselle-de-la-force-un-auteur-meconnu-du-xviie-siecle/oclc/56766034.
• • If you want to see a rather more disdainful perspective on Mlle de La Force’s life and works, I’d recommend the book La seconde preciosityé : floraison des conteuses de 1690 à 1756 by Sophie Raynard: http://books.google.com/books?id=l4FTbmvPW7EC.
• • Sophie Raynard also edited a collection entitled The Teller’s Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers. It was published in 2012 by New York University Press and included an article by Lewis C. Seifert on Mlle de La Force, her life, and works. http://books.google.com/books?id=3W98AAAAQBAJ
• • For more information on the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion, read
  http://www.museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-eight-wars-of-religion-1562-1598/. To learn more about the Edict of Nantes’ revocation and its consequences a century later, see http://www.museeprotestant.org/en/parcours/la-revocation-de-ledit-de-nantes-et-ses-consequences/.
• • And of course, Wikipedia is always a good starting point for obscure information: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte-Rose_de_Caumont_La_Force; http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Nompar_de_Caumont.