PRINCESS LIONETTE AND PRINCE COQUERICO.
La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico is an infinitely better story than La Princesse Camion: but, like that, its aim is no higher than to excite the interest and awaken the wonder of its readers. As a work of fancy, however, it is one of the best of its class, and I believe is now for the first time translated into English.
I do not recollect any story on which it could be said to be founded; but at the end of La Tyranine des Fées détruite, by the Countess d'Anneuil, is a story, entitled La Princesse Lionne, in which a princess is changed into a lioness, and persecuted by a fairy called La Rancune; but there the similarity ends. Mademoiselle de Lubert edited an edition of the Nouveaux Contes des Fées of the Countess d'Anneuil, and may have taken an idea from that particular incident.
The model of the globe in which Prince Coquerico saw and heard all that passed in the universe, and witnessed the opera, the play, and the orations at the Académie Française, reminds one of the room in the Palace of the Beast, the various windows of which afforded Beauty similar entertainment.
The Fairy Tigreline's employments of spinning and threading pearls, is in strict accordance with the manners of the sixteenth century. "Passons avec les dames," says Rabelais, "nostres vie et nostres temps à enfiler les perles ou à filer, comme Sardanapalus."—Livre i. chap. 33. I have mentioned (p. 438) that the opera of Armide was considered the chef-d'œuvre of Quinnault. The music was composed by Lulli, and it is reported that he made Quinnault write the last act over again five times, which so disgusted the poet that he ceased to write for the stage from that period. The incident of the shield is that in which Ubaldo holds before Rinaldo his adamant or diamond shield, in which the latter sees himself reflected in his effeminate attire, is awakened to a sense of his degraded situation, and abandons the enchanted gardens of Armida.—Book xvi.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] At a spring called the Fountain of Thirst, or the Fountain of the Fays, "corruptly called 'La Font des Sees'" (says a writer in 1698), and every year, in the month of May, a fair is held in the neighbouring mead, when the pastrycooks sell figures of women 'bien coiffées,' called 'Merlusines.'