Kathryn R. Bastin

In 1781 Rétif de La Bretonne (1734–1806) published the unusual pamphlet Lettre d’un singe aux êtres de son espèce, bookending his work of proto-science fiction, La Découverte australe par un homme volant. Rétif decries the barbarous actions of humans through his hybridized protagonist César Singe, described as a ‘singe-Babouin-métis’. His letter takes up debates around the soulless animal and chattel slavery, but more largely lambasts enslavement by first overturning the nascent Enlightenment idea of humanity and secondly by questioning the primacy of scientific discourse over speculative imagination. Through the hybrid simian’s pen, Rétif mobilizes arguments against human destruction and enslavement, exposing essential questions surrounding power and ethics that remain relevant today, forecasting the future radical politics of antiracism.

In 1672, the French writer and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry warmly received two reptiles into her Parisian home. Sent from Alexandria, these chameleons represent a turning point in the history of emotions and science, as written by a woman during the Grand Siècle. More than a decade after their arrival, Scudéry published her scientific observations and her deeply emotive account of their lives in New Moral Conversations ( Nouvelles Conversations de Morale ) in 1688 as “Story of Two Chameleons” (“Histoire de deux caméléons”). In this article, I argue that scientific discourse and affective moments coexist to construct a landmark moment in how emotions were written, felt, and understood in seventeenth-century France. Through Scudéry’s brief but evocative text, we see Scudéry first use, and then subvert, the Cartesian animal-machine, and build shared emotional communities through a fusion of science and emotions that tap into cross-species shared affective circuits.

In this article, I study the underexplored question of breastfeeding in late seventeenth-century French fairy tales. At a time when wet-nursing was the cultural norm, fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Jean de Préchac, and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy trace important shifts in the history of attitudes toward breastfeeding. These tales illustrate examples of breastfeeding that go against the grain of the common custom of wet-nursing and also support this tradition, thus adding to our knowledge about how beliefs regarding maternal breastfeeding began to change at the end of the seventeenth century, paving the way for the Rousseauian ideal of maternity to come.

The Labyrinth of Versailles was a splendid horticultural space in early modern France frequented by courtiers and very likely by Louis XIV's son the dauphin. In this article, the author argues that the Labyrinth stood as a vital locus of etiquette formation for the court, and more widely, the surrounding Parisian villages and early modern Europe at large. Fouquet's usurpation of kingly authority comes into play, as well as political allegory, that tie together to show the crucial nature of the Labyrinth as an architectural space that ultimately influences comportment of the era. The author examines texts by Charles Perrault, Isaac de Benserade, and engravings by Sébastien Le Clerc. She considers two of the most important fountains within the verdant passageways, those of the monkey king and the monkey judge, which showcase the critical nature of imitation for acceptable comportment of the period.

Mirrors deceive and mirrors reveal. Mirrors are ephemeral, just like beauty. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650/51–1705) was not spinning tales as wet nurses and nannies did in the bedroom of Louis XIV or other aristocratic children; neither were peasant children gathered closely around her in front of the hearth to listen to her contes. D’Aulnoy created fairy tales for adults, specifically told and read in salons of aristocratic women—and these fairy tales were their looking glasses. In her story,“Babiole,” d’Aulnoy constructs a tale in which a cursed queen gives birth to a human infant that metamorphoses into a monkey shortly thereafter. Despite the fact that Babiole describes herself in repugnant terms, d’Aulnoy’s treatment of Babiole’s humanness is captivating: she is depicted as a reasoning being, capable of owning pets, falling in love, and refusing to look at herself in the mirror. The tale concludes with a magical transformation in the desert from monkey to beautiful woman—after which she marries her cousin, the prince, who once rejected her apish love, but eagerly accepts her now human hand. Babiole reunites with her birth mother, and they live happily ever after, free from bestial tones of the simian.