Salonline: Webseries of the French Salonnières

By Australian Fairy Tale Society, Jo Henwood, Alyssa Curtayne and Eliane Morel

The women who gave birth to the fairy tale genre in the Salons of Louis XIV's Versailles were brilliant, subversive, and scandalous – yet it is surprisingly difficult to find solid information about them in the English-speaking world. 

This book provides a succinct and enlightening history of the fairy tale salons, and biographies of the key Salonnières, Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, and Henriette-Julie de Murat, plus the better-known Charles Perrault and others. 

Among the many stories these Salonnières wrote, few of which are easily found today, twelve are reproduced here, both as summaries of the original stories, plus the full retellings written by the storytellers who created the Salonline webseries for the Australian Fairy Tale Society, a group dedicated to understanding and interpreting fairy tales for contemporary Australians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Australian Fairy Tale Society
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645680614

Book preview

The Salons and Salonnières

The women who gave birth to the fairy tale genre in the Salons of Louis XIV’s Versailles were brilliant, subversive, and scandalous – yet it is surprisingly difficult to find solid information about them in the English-speaking world. 

This book provides a succinct and enlightening history of the fairy tale salons, and biographies of the key Salonnières, Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, and Henriette-Julie de Murat, plus the better-known Charles Perrault and others. 

Among the many stories these Salonnières wrote, few of which are easily found today, twelve are reproduced here, both as summaries of the original stories, plus the full retellings written by the storytellers who created the Salonline webseries for the Australian Fairy Tale Society, a group dedicated to understanding and interpreting fairy tales for contemporary Australians.

Timeline of the Salonnières

French Fairy Tale Salons

By Jo Henwood

In Paris, during the latter years of the reign of Louis XIV, the place for the intelligentsia to gather was in the Salons of the brightest ladies in France. Here, in the private homes of well born ladies, men and women gathered to read aloud plays and essays, discuss philosophy and politics, play word games, and perform the latest literary fad, fairy tales.

This was where the fairy tale was born as a genre, the first time the term was used, and the writers who originated these stories saw themselves as the fairies, able to create transformations and wield power with wisdom. Their names may be eclipsed by Perrault’s today, but in the 1690s he was the novice. Thanks to the works of Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Murat, Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and others, the fairy tale has brought insight and entertainment to millions.

Origins of Fairy Tales in France

But while the fairy tale was properly born in the French Salons, its origins go further back.

France was the place, not only because the Salons provided a setting in which educated and creative people had the leisure and the stimulation to create stories layered with satiric meaning, but because that class also had access to literary forms that fed this new type of story.

The medieval fairy traditions of fairy and folklore, particularly of Morgan Le Fay (la fée, the fairy), and Melusine the shapeshifting queen (Zipes 229), was accessible to all levels of society, including the aristocrats through their nursemaids (Windling).

Italian Inspiration

However, the earliest form of literary fairy tales were Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Pleasant Nights (1550-53) and Giambattista Basile’s Tale of Tales (1634-36) from Italy (Windling). These fairy tale-type plots and classical myths formed the basis of the magnificent Baroque court entertainments that Catherine de Médici sponsored, which in turn inspired the new art forms of ballets, masques, and operas – including ‘unusual entertainment’ (known as divertissement) or melodramatic play-ballets (called féerie). Fairies, witches, and other supernatural characters interacted with noble heroes in plots that demanded the intervention of some good higher power, such as a fairy or goddess. The Italian commedia delle arte developed comic versions (Zipes 226-227).

First Generation

The first generation of fairy tale salons came about in the mid-17th century, when disaffected women in Italy, Spain, England, and France began to gather in their own living rooms (salons) to discuss politics, philosophy, arts, and literature, and urgent social matters such as marriage, love, access to education, and financial and physical independence, starting with the Blue Room of Marquise de Rambouillet from 1618 to 1645, quickly followed by the Salons of  Marie-Therese Rodet Geoffrin and many others.

The large-scale entertainments of divertissements and féerie flowed into this aristocratic domestic sphere in parlour and salon games, riddles, plays, and most particularly, storytelling (Windling; Zipes 223).

‘Mme de Coulanges, who has come here to pay me a gracious visit that will last until tomorrow, wanted to acquaint us with the stories that are currently amusing the ladies of Versailles.’ – Mme de Sevigne 1677 (Quoted in Harries 229).

These Salons soon became the subject of considerable public ridicule, most famously with Moliere’s one act prose satire The Absurd Precieuses or The Affected Ladies (1659) which mocked these ladies who delighted in word play, coining a new phrase for them, the précieux.

Affair of the Poisons

The salons were a haven for women, whose behaviour and conversations at court were constrained by ritualised conventions, and whose lives were limited by barriers to education, to freedom of choice in marriage and divorce, and to birth control, which made death by childbirth common (Windling).

Affairs and scandals were therefore regular occurrences, but none was so far reaching as the Affair of the Poisons which revealed just how desperate some of these women became. In 1679, an inquiry exposed how many of the aristocracy had been using some of the numerous Parisian female fortune-tellers for poisons (‘inheritance powders’), love potions and abortifacient drugs, witchcraft, and black masses. The investigation resulted in thirty-six executions (Britannica).

Perhaps as a result of this Affair, by the 1690s, in the closing years of Louis XIV’s reign, society had become dangerously conservative – at least officially – to the point of religious extremism with prominent clerics arguing for the banning of plays and other entertainments at Versailles (Ashley). It was in this setting that the second generation of fairy tale Salons flourished – part escapism, part enrichment, part subversion.

Second Generation

Within these Salons, in aristocratic houses in Paris rather than in Versailles itself, one of the conversational parlour games that took off in the 1690s was for Salonnières to retell an old tale (known as contes de vieilles, ‘old ladies’ tales’) (Zipes 222), or rework some old themes, spinning clever new stories from them that showcased verbal agility and slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life (Windling).

These apparently improvised performances or readings gave the writers a chance to demonstrate their skills privately prior to publication, at a time when the women had few opportunities in the public sphere (Zipes 224).

Hostesses

Some of the women who hosted these Salons became fairy tale writers themselves, most notably Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Banville (Baroness D’Aulnoy), whose Salon on the Rue Sainte-Benoît thrived from 1686 to 1699, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, and Louise de Bossigny (Comtesse d’Auneuil), whose Salon ‘was open