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Mademoiselle de Lubert’s first fantastic tale, published in 1737, was the striking original Tecserion in which the eponymous king of the Land of Ostriches is madly in love with Belzamire, Princess of Flowers, who herself dotes on the King’s nephew, Melidor. The story is replete with elaborate descriptions of strange societies, including one located on…
The Comte de Caylus was one of the major writers of the “second wave” of fairy tales produced in the 1730s and 1740s, when the publication of unlicensed works became far too abundant for effective suppression by the authorities. He displayed a flair for the bizarre that continually edged into the surreal, and never entirely…
Françoise le Marchand deserves to be reckoned a significant, if slightly shadowy, figure in the revival of contes de fées in 1730s and 1740s France. It is not obvious why either of the two novellas translated here, Florine (1713) and Boca (1735) had to be published illicitly, but it undoubtedly reflects the fact that the…
The remarkable stories included in this volume, published in the 1730s, show a marked evolution in the contes de fées, each being more substantial, and more imaginatively innovative than its predecessor. Although they clearly attempt to take up where Baronne d’Aulnoy and Comtesse de Murat had been forced to leave off, in terms of their…
Stories by Catherine Bernard, François Fénelon, Louis de Mailly and Jean de Préchac. This volume includes three tales by Catherine Bernard (1662-1712), one of the originators of contes de fées, that deliberately subvert not merely their narrative strategy, but also their entire mythology; two enigmatic allegories of French history as seen through the prism of…
In the tales collected here, published in 1750-55, Madame Fagnan demonstrates that the fantastic can be a useful instrument in the advancement of Enlightenment, because rather than in spite of its absurdity. Her sardonic narrative points out the absurdity of the conte de fées, and emphasizes that the age of the fays, if ever there…
As the contes de fées suffered a decline in fashionability in the 1750s, they began to rely on hybridization with Oriental and Medieval fantasies. The thirteen stories collected in this volume may be replete with fays, ogres, magic swords and other motifs, but they also revolve around a series of moral dilemmas, provided with fanciful…
This two-volume collection assembles all the known tales of the fays published by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy (1651-1705). From the early 1690s onwards, Madame d’Aulnoy was an active member of a literary salon where she and the Comtesse de Murat became the most prolific contributors to the new genre of the contes…
This two-volume collection assembles all the known tales of the fays published by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy (1651-1705). From the early 1690s onwards, Madame d’Aulnoy was an active member of a literary salon where she and the Comtesse de Murat became the most prolific contributors to the new genre of the contes…
The Contes de fées, defined here as tales that contain fées, i.e.: “fays” (as opposed to “fairies,” which in British literary history referred to imaginary entities often different from the French fées), were invented by aristocratic women of the 17th century, such as Madame d’Aulnoy, the Comtesse de Murat, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, etc. In…
Catulle Mendès (1841-1909) wrote more tales featuring fays than any other French writer–nearly twice as many as Madame d’Aulnoy. However, by the 1880s, the genre had been largely misremembered and remained unread for a hundred years. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Mendès elected to draw his own imaginative raw materials from Shakespeare rather from than…
This volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles more than eighty contes, fables and apologues employing supernatural motifs The light-hearted flippancy of the majority of the stories collected here has its own heroic dimension in blithely sacrificing the…
The present volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles 23 tales of the fantastique dealing with anomalous events and altered states of consciousness that might or might not have supernatural causes. Other writers such as Marcel Schwob have…
The Incredible Adventure (1902) by Louis Forest is about the inventor of a material vehicle capable of carrying passengers anywhere in the universe, and devotes considerable attention to hypothetical physical and psychological effects of the experience of approaching and transcending the velocity of light. The Triumph of Humankind (1911) by Francois Leonard sees the Earth…
In The Man Who Could Read Minds (1928), Jean Pilgrim manufactures strange spectacles that permit the observation of what is happening in the minds of others. Paul Gsell’s novel begins as a Voltairean satire, but soon changes both tone and direction as it progresses from relatively amiable exploration of the hypocrisies of art and science…
During the Reign of French King Charles VI, a fierce struggle for power develops between the king’s brother, Louis d’Orléans, and his cousin, Jean de Bourgogne. When the latter instigates the murder of the former in 1407, the conflict degenerates into a civil war between Burgundians and Armagnacs. In the midst of this blood-drenched background,…
