Clare Pollard on the 17th Paris salon where aristocratic rebels and misfits met to reimagine old folk tales and write subversive new ones

As a teenager in Bolton, wanting to be a writer didn’t mean dreaming of hours by myself in my study. No, in the fantasy, being a writer was a social vocation. It involved debating philosophy in Parisian cafes, or eating daube in brightly painted Bloomsbury dining rooms. It involved acid-tongued banter around the Algonquin round-table, or Dadaist games, or little magazines. It definitely involved salons, by which I mean curated parties peopled by writers and artists – the kind thrown by Zora Neale Hurston in Harlem, or Edna O’Brien in 1970s London, when Judy Garland or Marlon Brando would swing by.

As an adult my attraction to movements and moments has never really gone away. One of my prized souvenirs is a swan feather from a visit to Coole Park, where Synge, Shaw and Yeats once carved their names on their patron Lady Gregory’s tree. I have pored over Anne Sexton’s descriptions of attending Robert Lowell’s workshops with Sylvia Plath, and their trips to the Ritz afterwards for three-martini afternoons. I have drunk brandies in surrealist bars, loitered over expensive pieces of cake in Viennese coffee-houses and browsed Beat poetry in the City Lights bookshop. But in all of these cases, only the ghosts of other writers have accompanied me – my writing life has, largely, been a lonely one and I’ve never been part of a literary scene.

Then recently, reading Nicholas Jubber’s excellent history of fairy tales The Fairy-Tellers, I was reminded of the late 17th-century salon in Paris behind the legendary anthology Le Cabinet des Fées. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, her book of feminist fairy tales, completely changed me, and I had since devoured her translations of the salon’s most famous member, Charles Perrault. I also own all Marina Warner’s books on fairy tales, so had encountered this group before. But this time I was casting about for a subject for a historical novel, so could suddenly see dramatic potential. Dangerous Liaisons meets Disney. It felt like an idea I’d been waiting for all my life – a chance to finally go to the salon, after all.

The fashion for literary salons in Paris is said to have begun with the Marquise de Rambouillet, who claimed to find the court of Louis XIII too rustic. She instigated the practice of receiving her closest circle at home in her famous blue room, panelled with blue velvet, where she lay on an opulent daybed nibbling sweetmeats. Such social occasions, blurring the line between public and private, were an opportunity to practise polite conversation, named after the Italian term “salon”, meaning a reception room. They soon became a place where enlightened noblewomen, unable to access formal education beyond convent school, could think and learn – listening to talks by philosophers and writers of the day and participating in games of wit – almost becoming unofficial universities.

Inevitably, women who attended such events were also soon mocked. They were referred to as les précieuses – meaning the “precious ones”, which gathered a similar charge to “bluestockings” in Britain – and were parodied in plays such as Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies).

My novel, The Modern Fairies, focuses on Marie d’Aulnoy, whose salons briefly created a fashion for telling fairy tales. Indeed, she is the creator of the term conte de fées or “fairy tales”, as well as the author of classics such as The White Cat and many “monster-groom” stories that prefigure Beauty and the Beast. Her own story is one worthy of telling by the fire – she was abducted by arrangement of her father at the age of 13, and forced into a marriage to a much older Baron, famous for his gambling and libertinism (a monstrous groom indeed). Mme d’Aulnoy seems to have plotted, alongside her mother, to have her husband framed for treason, but he was cleared and her lover executed, while she fled the country, apparently escaping her prison through a window. No one knows what happened to her during the following period, but years later she mysteriously reappeared in Paris, leading a literary salon.

Others who clustered around this salon included the wine-swilling, pipe-smoking Princess de Conti; Charlotte-Rose de la Force, a lady-in-waiting who would write an early version of Rapunzel; Henriette de Murat, who liked to shock people by wearing her red riding hood to church and who was later accused of lesbianism; and Charles Perrault, who had been in charge of the royal buildings at Versailles, planning its maze and furnishing its famous hall of mirrors, but who had fallen out of favour with the court. This group, whom Henriette de Murat referred to as the Modern Fairies, began to gather regularly to drink hot chocolate or gooseberry cordials, flirt, dress up, play games and share tales of Mother Goose.

Over 100 years before the Brothers Grimm, the group were among the first to collect many folktales and eventually print them, although each teller would give old tales such as Donkeyskin a new spin – it was Perrault’s innovation to have Cinderella’s slipper, traditionally fur, transformed into glass. Other times they invented new ones, with Charles’ relative Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, for example, writing The Subtle Princess and an early version of Rumpelstiltskin called Ricdin-Ricdon. It amazes me that the versions we know of tales such as Red Riding Hood or Bluebeard were written to be performed in someone’s front room. It proves, I think, how creativity flourishes in a collaborative atmosphere.

And of course, it’s also very interesting that these fairy tales we now consider a core part of children’s literature were being performed for adults, often with a moral sting in the tale. Perrault’s version of Red Riding Hood ends by reminding us:

Children, and most especially girls –
pretty ones, sheltered from the world –
should never talk to unknown men,
who likely want to gobble them.

These tales – about kings and queens, love and marriage – were also often subtly subversive, seeming to question authority and patriarchy. Henriette du Murat penned one called The Palace of Revenge for example, in which a palace is entirely lined with mirrors that induce violent passion, and at the end they are all smashed – a story that must have been very difficult to hear without thinking of Versailles. Soon such tales began to put members of the group in grave danger. Two of them were served with a lettre de cachet – a secret order from the king – leading to exile and imprisonment, while another was to be executed for attempted murder. Louis XIV ran a surveillance society, with his chief of police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, bragging of spies on every corner of Paris. Was there a wolf in the salon’s midst?

Although my novel is fiction and to be taken with a pinch of fairy-dust – I played very loose with the timeline, condensing the events of decades into a single year – an amazing amount of it is actually based on truths. During my research I could hardly believe the ways in which the tales and the tellers’ real lives under Louis XIV overlapped. This was a society where women were frequently locked up in towers, as some of my characters discover to their cost. Princesses walked among them and balls were a regular occurrence. The king’s mistress was accused of witchcraft, and of poisoning a rival with a piece of fruit. Henriette de Murat is said to have escaped imprisonment by dressing up as a boy, while Charlotte-Rose de la Force is alleged to have sneaked into a castle to find her lover as part of a travelling circus, disguised as bear! In such a context, fairy tales start to look more like realism than fantasy.

I followed such delicious historical morsels like a trail of breadcrumbs, leading me through my story. I wanted The Modern Fairies to be told by a voice you could trust. It’s a tribute to storytellers and the very real risks they take in many societies – the truths they bear witness to, as well as the joy they give. While I may not currently attend a salon in person, writing this book allowed me to partially fulfil such ambitions. I’m happy to have spent many hours at the salon of my imagination, sipping champagne and nibbling macaroons, in dialogue with the Modern Fairies and spellbound by their wonderful tales.

This article is from Idler #97.

CLARE POLLARD AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Poet, novelist and playwright Clare Pollard will present her popular Poetry Salon at the Idler Festival on Sunday 12 July. She’ll be reading from her latest collection and will also introduce two of her favourite new poets to the festival.

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

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