MADEMOISELLE DE LUBERT.
Of this lady we have but very meagre information. She was born about the year 1710, and is said by some writers to have been the daughter of a President; and by others, of a "Trésorier de Marine." She appears to have led a studious and retired life, her love of literature indisposing her to marriage. Her Contes des Fées were commenced about 1740; and several have been attributed to her pen which she disavowed. Those she acknowledged were:—Terserion, La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico, Le Prince Glacé et la Princesse Etincelante, La Princesse Couleur de Rose et le Prince Celadon, La Princesse Camion, and La Nouvelle Léonille. She was also the author of a translation of Amadis des Gaules, Les Hauts Faits d'Esplandian, and Anecdotes Africaines, published in 1752. Voltaire and Fontenelle called her "Muse et grace." She was living in 1772, and died before 1779. She had disappeared from society for some time previously, and was presumed to be still living at that date; but a letter written by some one who knew of her decease, inserted in the Journal de Paris of that year (No. 69), addressed to the author of L'Almanach des Dames Illustres, by "l'Ombre de Mademoiselle de Lubert," and dated from the "Mille et unième Bosquet des Champs Elisées," seems to have been considered sufficient authority; though as no precise time or place is mentioned, the letter might have been written by the lady herself had she wished to deceive the public. She had, however, reached a very respectable age, and it is probable that she was dead at that period.
"Her Contes des Fées," remarks one of her critics, "are not nearly equal to those of Mademoiselle de Murat and other ladies who have written in that style. They have less of moral purpose and allegorical allusion." This is quite true; and my object in publishing the two I have selected is to illustrate, as I have mentioned in my preface, the decline of the Fairy tale. Mademoiselle de Lubert is one of the latest of her class. Her stories are only designed to amuse. The publication of The Thousand and One Nights, by Galland, and the immense popularity that work immediately obtained, evidently affected the composition of fairy tales. Wild, extravagant adventures, unconnected incidents, transformations without point or object, a straining after the merely marvellous, and a total abandonment of the laughing philosophy and the unaffected morality which distinguish and immortalize the stories of Perrault and d'Aulnoy, were the first effects of the circulation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. The next was the Orientalizing of every tale of enchantment. Dull Caliphs and Sultans deposed the merry old Kings who "once upon a time" ruled in Fairyland. The amours of the seraglio and the harem were substituted for the innocent courtships of princes or shepherds. The manners and dresses of the time, those delicious anachronisms which impart so much pleasantry—ay, and instruction—to the fairy tale, were carefully avoided; and the characters, arrayed in what the writers flattered themselves were Eastern costumes, were seriously placed in situations compared to which that of Molière's Monsieur Jourdain as Mamamonchi was a nearer approach to reality. Even those that had some claim to Oriental origin were so altered and "manufactured for the European market" that they were said to appear—
—en sortant de chez Barbin[60] Plus Arabe qu'en Arabie.
Le Mercure Galant was flooded with these productions. Almanzor et Zehra, Conte Arabe; Almerine et Zelima, Conte Oriental; Balky, Conte Oriental; Zaman, Histoire Oriental, &c. Then we have Contes Mogol, Contes Turcs, Contes Chinois, Contes Tartares, Contes Persans, &c.; but we are forgetting Mademoiselle de Lubert and her
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Barbin was the publisher of the Mille et une Nuits.
PRINCESS CAMION.
A translation of La Princesse Camion, much abridged and altered, was published in the Child's Fairy Library some twenty years ago, under the title of Princess Minikin. The plot of this story is intricate without being ingenious. The persecution of Camion by Marmotte is purely capricious, and her contrivances are of the clumsiest description. In the original, Zirphil is commanded to "take off, one by one, the scales of the whale;" but a whale has no scales that it could feel the deprivation of. It is skinning the fish alive that would be a cruel operation, and I have therefore rendered "écorcher" in that sense, and not to scale, as it had been previously translated, in accordance with the specific direction quoted above. The transformation of the unfortunate Princess into a crayfish, and her being shelled instead of pounded as Marmotte had decreed, is all of the same character. The long story told by her in that state to the other crayfish in the plantation is a lame way of enlightening either Zirphil or the reader, and has to be continued in as lame a manner by Citronette. The pounding the crayfish for the King's soup, and the disappearance of them in flames when they are put into the mortar, seems to point to an Eastern origin. The latter portion reminds us of the black man flinging the fish into the fire, in the story of "The Fisherman and the Genius," in the Arabian Nights, where there is also a city changed into a lake, and all its inhabitants into fishes, and re-transformed in the end and restored to the rightful monarch, the young King of the Black Island. The crayfish broth may be an allusion to the well-known Bisque d'Ecrévisse, but it is also an Oriental dish; for while this book was passing through the press, a morning journal announced that "the eldest royal son of his Majesty the First King of Siam," on his arrival at Claridge's Hotel, "after satisfying himself that due provision had been made for the comfort of his staff, retired to rest, having first partaken of a frugal repast, prepared by his own chef-de-cuisine, consisting of crabfish pounded with various Eastern condiments."—Morning Post, October 31st, 1857.
The eagerness with which the nobles of the Court sought for the servile office of filling the King of the Whiting's bowl with sea-water, is the only stroke of satire in the story, and evidently levelled at the candle-holding and similar ceremonies of "le grand et le petit coucher." To stand and hold a "bougeoir allumé," while Louis XIV. undressed himself, was, says St. Simon, "une distinction et une faveur qui se comptait, tant le Roi avait l'art de donner l'être à des riens."
In a note to the expression, "shrieks like Melusine's," page 398, I have suggested that some portion of Princess Camion might have been founded on the romance of Melusine. This romance was composed towards the end of the fourteenth century, by Jean d'Arras, at the desire of the Duke de Berri, son of John, King of France, and was founded on an incident recorded in the archives of the family of Lusignan, which were in possession of the Duke. It is briefly as follows:—
THE LEGEND OF MELUSINE.
A King of Albania, named Elinas, had married the beautiful Fay Pressine, by whom he had three daughters at a birth, Melusine, Melior, and Palatine. Fay had stipulated that he should never enter her chamber during the period of her confinement; but the King having broken his promise in his anxiety to embrace his newly-born children, the Queen cried out that she was compelled to leave him, and immediately disappeared with her three daughters. She retired to the Court of her sister, the Queen of the "Isle Perdue," and as her children grew up, instructed them in the art of sorcery. Melusine having learned from her mother the conduct of her father, determined to be revenged on him, and proceeding to Albania, by means of her newly-acquired art carried off the King and shut him up in a mountain called Brandelois. The Queen, who still retained some affection for her husband, on becoming acquainted with this unnatural act, punished Melusine by sentencing her to become every Saturday a serpent from the waist downwards, till she should meet with a lover who would marry her on condition of never intruding on her during the time of her transformation, when she was ordered to bathe; with a promise that if she strictly attended to this injunction, she might eventually be relieved from her weekly disgrace and punishment. Melusine was excessively beautiful, and Raimondin, son of the Count de Forez, having met with her in the forest of Colombiers,[61] fell in love with her so deeply that he married her without hesitation on the prescribed conditions. She built for him, near the spot where they had met, the Castle of Lusignan, and bore him several children; but her husband's jealousy being excited by a cousin, who suggested to him that Melusine had a criminal object in secreting herself on a Saturday, he made a hole with his sword in the door of the chamber to which she was wont to retire, and perceived her in her state of transformation. The various versions of this legend differ in the details of the consequences; but all agree in stating that Melusine, reproaching him with the breach of his word, disappeared, and left him to end his days as a hermit on Montserrat. The popular belief was, that she appeared on what was called the Tower of Melusine when any of the lords of Lusignan were about to die; and Mezeray assures us, on the faith "of people who were not by any means credulous," that previous to the death of a Lusignan, or of a king of France, she was seen on this tower in a mourning dress, and uttered for a long time the most heart-piercing lamentations. The Duke de Montpensier destroyed the castle in 1574, on account of the resistance made to his arms in it by the Huguenots; but the family of Lusignan, till it merged in that of Montmorency-Luxembourg, continued to bear for its crest a woman bathing, in allusion to the story of Melusine.
Ange par la figure, et serpent par la reste.—Delisle.