“Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are to this day some of the first stories we hear as children—and as we learn from Clare Pollard’s witty, sexy, historical novel, The Modern Fairies, they were all the rage in the court of Louis XIV.
The Modern Fairies is loosely based on a group of real-life salonaires who met at the home of Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a woman with a troubled past that included imprisonment and a childhood marriage to a cruel aristocrat. D’Aulnoy and her friends were the original collectors and disseminators of well-known folk tales a century before the Brothers Grimm. Just like the princesses in their stories, they inhabited a world of wicked mothers, murderous husbands, locked towers and poisoned fruit.
The women are joined by Charles Perrault, a wealthy widower and advisor to the king, who went on to great fame as one of the first authors to publish a collection of fairy tales. Over the course of a cold winter, certain details of these contes de fées prove a little too close to the realities of court. There is a spy at d’Aulnoy’s gatherings, and meetings become more dangerous as love letters are misdirected, husbands discover cheating wives, and both the local clergy and the king’s chief of police are put on high alert for any whiff of scandal.
The Modern Fairies is arranged as a series of stories within stories, each fairy tale as light as a bonbon yet cleverly revealing aspects of the teller’s situation, whether a violent husband, younger lover or jealous rival. An all-knowing narrator, perhaps Pollard herself, pops up to offer commentary on the societal restrictions experienced by these noblewomen and to reflect on the subversive ties between tales told and lives lived. An award-winning poet and translator, Pollard has great fun with these stories and with the gossip, the flirtations and the sheer amount of sex at the court of Versailles. She demonstrates, too, how important these women were for documenting, embellishing and preserving a wealth of stories, and like them, plays her part in translating an oral tradition into a written one that we can continue to delight in.