The Woman Who Wrote Fairy Tales

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 tower for years. This is one of those happily ever after fairy tales. The curse is in the end lifted and the lover's 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 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 darkness and moral dilemmas, they

can also be fairly adult in their content. 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 Delnois, the Baroness Delnoi's tale, like that of many a fairytale 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 twelve books, including two collections of fairy tales or conde fi, a term that she

is known today for coining. Despite that her work is often forgotten compared to contemporaries like Charles Perrot, 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.

Legumel de Bandeville. She was born in either sixteen fifty or sixteen fifty one in a town in Normandy bearing her family name Barneville la Bertrand if you were thinking her name, potential birth year and place of birth is already tmi will, you're in luck. Because that's just about all we know of Mary Catherine childhood. We can at least assume, however, that an early influence in her social 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 seventeenth 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 eighth, sixteen sixty six, fifteen year old Mary Catherine entered a marriage arranged by her father to a man named Francois de Lameaux, Baron Delnois,

a Parisian man thirty 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 the fourth of France and his mistress, but was then created Duke of Endome in his own right in fifteen ninety eight, when he was four years old. The duke apparently had a reputation for roguishness and desoluteness, 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 fifteen year old girl from the country and a forty five 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 sixteen sixty nine, 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 tree against the Baron del

Nois 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 mageste, coming from the Latin leaesa majestus, which literally means injured majesty, simply put treason. In mid seventeenth 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 Endome, who had been involved in a number of conspiracies in earlier years. But the circumstances surrounding the accusation paint a picture that is 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 Gaudain. We don't know when her husband, Murrie 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 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 Murray 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 summons and hiding in a church under a convenient briar end quote. Bottom line is Marie Catherine made it out of France.

Over the next decade, Marie Catherine, Madame Delnois 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 sixteen seventy five. While that sounds like a lot of great firsthand information, I'd like to quote a sentence from the introduction of a nineteen

thirteen 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 which refer to today as pseudo memoirs, 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 seventeenth 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 seventeenth 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 seemed 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 the Second 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 eighteen o eight 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 sixteen 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 will 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 Benois, 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 Evremonde, 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 sixteen nineties also marked the formal beginning of Marie Catherine's literary career, publishing under the name Madame Delnois. 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 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 sixteen ninety seven, and her Conte nouveaux la fille a la mode or New Tales or Fairies in Fashion from the following year. While taking inspiration from common tropes in folk and fairytale traditions, which researchers now date as having begun in the Bronze Age. Madame

Desnoi's stories were all original tales. Their style was directly influenced by her experience as a selonier 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 the ridegroom was Donoi'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 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 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 first born 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 Percinet, 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 and 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 and illustrious fair 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 Delnois employed versions of the love at first site 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 Murray Catherine managed to avoid arrest in escaping her

own marriage, her supposed lover did not. It was all so not the last time Marie Catherine would see these consequences of defying an arranged marriage first hand. The scandalous trial of Angelique Nicole Cartier Tiquet was on the lips of every Parisian in sixteen ninety nine. Angelique's parents died when she was only fifteen, and her father, a wealthy bookseller, left a sum of a million livre 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 de Quay, 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 Angelique 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 sixteen seventy six, when Angelique was eighteen and Claude was over forty, 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 of 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 work arrested. Angelique 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 eighth, sixteen ninety nine, after leaving dinner at a friend's house, Claude de Quet 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 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, Angelique was immediately implicated, along with her porter, who acted as one of the assassins. In June, the servant was

sentenced to hanging and Angelique was sentenced to beheading. She maintained her innocence until she was tortured on the day of her death, escaping conviction once again. Was Angelique's other accomplice in the plan, her friend Marie Catherine Denis. It's not known when the two women met, but as a woman in Parisian society. It's likely that Angelique attended Marie

Catherine salons, perhaps even acting in her plays. And Marguerite Denier, a famous early eighteenth century French journalist, include in a seventeen oh two publication an account of the Tiquet 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, Saint moi conna assassinat 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 sixteen ninety nine 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 sixteen ninety nine 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 seventeen o five, leaving behind twelve published works, including twenty four fairy tales that would change the genre forever. While Murray Catherine's story might have been reflected in The Bluebird and the White Cat, Angelique is more closely seen in Delnoit's The Yellow Dwarf, in which the heroined love is killed by the dwarf attempting to marry her and she dies of grief. For Delnois, the Yellow Dwarf represented the evils

of man, while animals represented escapism from those evils. To once again quote Marina Warner, Madame del Noi 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 Delnois. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little

bit more about her legacy. Despite her fameuring 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 Perrault instead. Parrault 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 Delnois's tales, which were written for an audience of salon goers. It wasn't all roses for Paroult, 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 twenty nineteen, the independent US publisher Blackcoat Press published a long awaited two volume collection of Mary Catherine's work, and in twenty twenty, Princeton University Press published a collection entitled The Island of Happiness as a decidedly feminist work featuring 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, Delnoir 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, worry 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 unreciprocated lust, poking fun at the

seriousness of a tragic fairytale 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 iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild

from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood 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 Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from