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adarkrainbow · 2 years ago

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Lheritier’s Riquet variant: Ricdin-Ricdon

We looked at Perrault’s Riquet, and at Catherine Bernard’s Riquet, but we need to cover one more tale to obtain the full trilogy: mademoiselle Lheritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon, which concludes the “variation game” of these authors on the story of Riquet with the tuft. I haven’t talked about her before, but you’ll see her pop up here and there because she wasn’t just another random author of the “first wave” of fairytales - she was actually a key-player in this first wave of fairytales, because she was none other than the niece of Charles Perrault and thus reacted/influenced the Perrault tales. In fact, she published two fairytales in 1695, before Perrault - one being notably a vaiation of “Cinderella” and “Diamonds and Toads”. Ricdin-Ricdon was rather published, alongside other fairytales, after Perrault’s, and thus this is a clear answer to Riquet’s Perrault.

Though, mind you, her fairytales were VERY different from the Perrault’s tales - hers being much, MUCH more novel-like, for example, much longer, relying more heavily on allegories (but not making them obvious), taking back the madame d’Aulnoy’s habit of naming characters after traits (madame d’Aulnoy invented the “prince Charming” name), and also relying much more on the medieval Christian imagery of angels, demons and wizards, rather than the traditional fairy-world of fairy tales.

Also... I will try to cut the recap short because mademoiselle Lheritier has the habit of making a very expensive tale by adding tons of secondary characters that ultimately serve no purpose for the narrative, and can easily be cut off with no problem - for example, a character I will omit from my recap is the best friend of the protagonist at the court, a girl named “Sirène” (Siren) because she can beautifully sing. She is described, she is mentionned regularly, but given she plays absolutely no role in the story and serves no point, I will cut her off. Many other characters will probably also be removed for similar reasons.

(Oh yes, and again - all the illustrations for this post actually come from Perrault’s Riquet with the tuft)

In one of the most beautiful countries of Europe - but that historians never wrote down the name of - there was a king called “King Prud’homme” because he was perfectly moral, fair with everyone and loved his people like a father (”Prud’homme” is a old fashioned term for a wise and knowledgeable man). He had married a queen who was so active and liked to work around her palace so much she was called “Queen Laborieuse” (laborieuse meaning Industrious). And they had a son named Prince Aimant-joie (Joy-loving). He was called like that because he spent his days looking for new pleasures and entertainments - he constantly went to balls, and dances, and theater plays, and hunting games. His parents however didn’t mind his constant need to be entertained and pleased - because beyond that he was virtuous, intelligent and good-looking. He was so busy looking to be entertained he had no time for love or girls, and he had a quite bad habit... You see he was so quick, so fast, so energetic, every time he went hunting he ended up splitting away from his men, ending up alone into some new part of the wood, stopping by whatever house he could find for the night (be it a gentleman’s or a peasant’s), and returning home to his parents to then tell them what wonderful adventures he had.

And one day, as this precisely happened, he stopped in a village by a garden in which was a beautiful young maiden, who was holding a flax-covered spindle, - and saw she was beaten up by an ugly old woman. The prince asked what was going on, and the hag could have insulted the stranger for putting his nose into other people’s business, but noticing his rich clothes, she decided to simply answer: I am beating her up because she spins too much. She spins day and night, despite me telling her not to do it, and we ended up with too much thread! The prince answers that if she doesn’t want a girl who works too much in her home, then he’ll take her to the royal palace - because his mother the queen enjoys spinning a lot, and always keep with her numerous spinners, and she would be more than happy to have such an industrious girl with her. So the prince takes the maiden (which is named Rosanie by the way) on the castle, and everybody in the village is amazed and jealous at seeing her taken away to the palace by the golden-clad prince...

At the castle she is presented by the prince as the best spinner-woman in the kingdom. The queen, who acts very kindly towards Rosanie, offers her a series of room with the most precious materials to spin from - the rarest hemp, most precious flax... But there is one problem. The truth is that the girl absolutely hates spinning, and the reason her mother was beating her up was because she didn’t spin enough. Mind you, when Rosanie forces herself to spin she does produce the most beautiful thread you can imagine... But she takes such a long time to do so that she basically makes half a spindle in one whole day and one whole night, and again this is when she finds in herself the courage and will to start spinning. But the girl is not ready to reveal that yet, because her mother’s lies (she was actually being ironic with the prince and mocking him/her by pretending Rosanie spinned too much) actually allowed her to escape the harsh and barbaric hag, replacing her by the sweet and caring queen.

Rosanie spent her first night in the palace unable to sleep, due to her anxiety, while the prince also spent his night unable to sleep - but due to his slowly newborn love for Rosanie. The next day, the queen and everybody at the court realizes that despite her humble clothes Rosanie is extremely beautiful: she has ash-blond hair, perfect teeth, a skin so white and pales it shines, with a touch of red here and there, a small mouth... And this beauty only becomes greater when the queen gives her clothes fitting the court and the latest fashions. During her first day at the court, Rosanie gets out of the spinning duty by pretending her hand hurts, so instead she enjoys all the gifts she is given and the praise her beauty earns her. The second day, she tries to dress herself on her own with her new clothes, but being a peasant girl unusued to this courtly attire, she does a very poor job - she takes so much time preparing herself, when she starts spinning it is too late, and she can merely do a quarter of a spindle. Hopefully she plays that to her advantage - she pretends a sudden attack of rheumatism prevented her from doing more than this. The queen buys this, especially since this quarter of spindle is actually extremely well-done, but many girls at the court, who are envious of Rosanie’s praised beauty, see clearly that she fakes her illnesses, and mock her for being badly dressed and having a weird hairdo.

Fleeing into the woods beyond the palace’s garden to cry (due to these vicious mockeries), Rosanie considers her options: she doesn’t want to betray a queen that was so kind to her, and she doesn’t want to be banished from the palace in shame when the truth will be revealed... So she should return to her mother in the village... And yet, returning there would mean returning to a life of abuse at the hands of the uncaring hag, and now being accustomed to the beauties and luxuries of the court she doesn’t imagine herself living in a poor village again... Unable to choose, she decides to kill herself by throwing herself off the rooftop of a little gazebo at the end of the palace’s park. However, on her way there, she meets a man... A tall, brown-haired, shadowy man, graceful and laughing. He asks her what is wrong, and she tells him her life story. We notably learn more about her from before she entered the story: Rosanie was born of a good and generous peasant, a man that was secretive and talking very little, hence his name “Disant-peu” (Saying-little), but who was so respected he was called to settle feuds in numerous villages. Disant-peu raised Rosanie with love and care, notably making a lot of effort to give her the best education a peasant girl could have, avoiding her becoming “sinful and stupid”. However her father was a rude and impolite woman who always treated Rosanie with harshness and coldness, because she favored Rosanie’s brother much more (said brother NEVER appears in the story) - which notably led to fights between the parents. Rosanie’s father reproached his wife to not love Rosanie, whereas Rosanie’s mother said the father was spoiling her too much. She notably said that because Rosanie, seeing her beauty, natural grace, and several talents, became convinced that she was destined of a great fortune, of a higher social class - which made her disdain and reject the other peasant boys, and in general dislike her humble life in the village, to the point she rejected the wedding proposal of “the best party a peasant girl could have”, which made her mother really mad. [Note: Rosanie clearly appears here like a spoiled girl by modern standards, but by late 17th century standard/fairytale standard/and with the logic of the story, there is actually a reason behind this behavior]. Anyway, her father ended up leaving for a travel-journey, and never coming back - everybody assumes he is dead, and this is how she ended up at the mercy of her abusive hag of a mother. The rest of the story we know already.

The man offers her a way to escape all of her troubles. He giftes her a magic wand (described as small, made of an unknown shining wood of a grey-brown color, with a “changing stone” on it that is neither agate nor carnelian/cornerlian). This magic wand, when touching any kind of weaving material (wool, silk, hemp, flax) magically spins it in no time, AND the wand can also create beautiful tapestries. All the man asks in echange, is that in three months the girl gives him back the magic wand, while calling him by his name - Ricdin-Ricdon. Then everything will be well, BUT if she ever forgets his name and cannot tell him in three months, he will then gain the power to take Rosanie everywhere he likes and force her to constantly follow him. Rosanie takes the deal, but adding one condition: the wand must also have the power to make her hairdo and dress her properly (remember, the court-girls’ mockeries of her appearance were the reason she fled in the woods in the first place). The deal is made (and Ricdin-Ricdon mentions that he and his brothers always love to help women become pretty, he adds that it is because of them that some twelve years-old girl can make hairdos and put on makeup better than fifty year old women). Immediately fixing her appearance, the girl then meets the prince in the woods - and the prince is so pleasant and so kind with her, she gets overjoyed, so overjoyed she immediately forgets the name “Ricdin-Ricdon”.

Fast forwarding, things go much better for Rosanie at the court. She over-uses the wand to create lots of magical thread and beautiful tapestries which please and amaze the queen, who in return showers Rosanie with attentions and favors - all the girl asks in exchange for her work is to be left alone when spinning/weaving (so that nobody sees her using the wand) and to be allowed to entertain herself when she is not working. Rosanie gets to enjoy all the pleasures of the court-life, while gaining the admiration and love of everyone for her beauty and talents (except for the other girls of the court and of the capital city, who almost all are envious of her). She is also being taught the codes, workings and rules of the court and the social life of the upper-classes - but Rosanie is actually still flawed... We have a long paragraph describing the problem with her - she is too childish. She latches on the most childish pleasures of the court (ribbons and ornaments, collecting pets like dogs and birds), she always got bored whenever there were serious discussions, she only went to shows to “be seen” rather than to appreciate the things presented to her, she was unable to understand the jokes of comedies and the metaphors of poetry, and she couldn’t find any pleasure in being with people that weren’t her age... But hopefully “her sweetness and her virtue” managed to compensate this big flaw of her. As for the prince... Well, the prince is burning with love for her (and the oldest and more experienced of the courtiers do notice this, though the younger courtiers do not notice it and themselves seduce and pursue Rosanie), but he finds himself unable to express his love for her clearly since 1) he doesn’t want the whole court to know his feelings publicly and 2) Rosanie is always surrounded by people or guardians or friends or admirers, and he can never be alone with her. After some orgaization he manages to organize a private encounter where he and Rosanie are together, and he confesses his love... But Rosanie knows that, since she is of a lower birth, a mere peasant girl, the prince cannot marry her - and while she isn’t against sharing the prince’s love, she also explains that she doesn’t want to just be a mistress. However the prince convinces her of his serious and pure intentions when he explains he is ready to abandon the thone just to marry her - and the two start a secret romance. Well... “secret” for maybe a short time, because quickly everybody sees and understands the prince’s feelings. The king is not much worried, because he thinks it is just a youth’s crush that will pass, and the queen trusts Rosanie’s virtue too much to think she would do anything dishonoring her son. But someone else is very unhappy with this...

Meet Penséemorne (Dreary-thought). She is one of the handmaidens of the queen, and a very beautiful and graceful appearance... but a dark and cunning soul. And she basically is what anime fans call a “yandere”. Penséemorne has been in love with the prince for a very long time, and she had been sending him signals and seduction attempts for a very long time. The prince, who was at the time only concerned about entertainment and hunting parties, never noticed her and ignored her completely - but Penséemorne, in her delusional state, believed that the prince was just being quiet, had received all of her love signs, and secretly planned to make her his wife... So when she sees him falling in love with Rosanie, she considers this a “betrayal” and treats the prince as her “ungrateful lover”. To the point that she goes to a pernicious sorceress to ask her to kill the prince in revenge (she sorceress is noted to be a friend of Penséemorne, who she originally asked to make the prince fall in love with her, but it failed).

During one of his typical “hunting parties where he gets lost”, the prince discovers a beautiful palace in the wood with in it a distraught, but beautiful princess. The princess presents herself as the last heir of the kingdom of Fiction. Now there’s a bit of story here... There was a fertile and happy real, the kingdom of Fiction, ruled by the good king Planjoli (Beautiful-plan) and his wife Riante-image (Happy-image). [You can feel here the allegory being pushed forward] But a wicked and cruel tyrant named Songecreux (Empty-dream) killed Planjoli, took over the kingdom, imprisoned the pregnant Riante-image, and killed the girl she gave birth to. The princess he is talking to is the last living parent of the rightful rulers, who was protected and hidden by a wise wizard. Now she needs to regain control of her kingdom, but prophecies said she could only do so with the help of a protector of royal blood, and she wants him to be it. Then the wizard that helped her arrives, a kind-looking, though skinny and gaunt, old man called “Labouréelamboy” (a nonsensical name). The wizard promptly explains the prince that he needs to marry the princess to rule alongside her upon the kingdom of Fiction, and he gifts him with a ring of power whose magical enchantment will make him automatically vanquish all his enemies and win all fights. But the prince declines all this: while he is ready to help the princess regain her kingdom and fight alongside her, he refuses to have a magical help that will make him “cheat” in combat, he wants his feats to be his own, AND he also refuses to marry the princess since he loves another. The wizard and the princess try everything to convince him, from kind advice to them just going full psychotic on him, but he still refuses the ring and the marriage. At this point, a beautiful child appears out of nowhere, holding a golden scepter: he touches the wizard and princess, that flee in terror while screaming, and he touches the palace, which disappears. The child is revealed to be a celestial spirit sent by Heaven to reward the faithfulness of the prince - meanwhile the palace was an illusion, and the princess and wizad were disguised demons, sent by a wicked wizardess to destroy him. If he had agreed to their demands, he would have been turned into a “slave to darkness”. The child leaves, but not before gifting the prince with an enchanted ring - the Ring of Truth, which is the opposite of the ring of the fake wizard (which was the Ring of Lies), which will allow the prince to see demons and witches at work without himself being seen and while being protected from their wicked intentions. (Oh and the celestial child reveals that there IS actually a realm of Fiction, and the whole thing of the good king Planjoli and the ursurper is real, but the princess and the wizard were fictional characters invented by the demons and latching onto the actual event of Fiction’s overtaking)

Penséemorne, seeing how the sorceress failed to kill the prince, prepares her own plan, this time to remove Rosanie. You see, there was a rude, wrathful and violent ambassador that once tried to pay for having Rosanie sleep with her - which the court-spinner promptly rejected. This resulted in a public humiliation for the ambassador, but since he found himself desiring Rosanie so much, he still tried to ask her hand in marriage (after excusing himself for his behavior), but she still refused. It made him very angry, but he didn’t show it... And Penséemorne manipulates the ambassador into believing that the best way for him to get Rosanie is to kidnap her as he is about to return to his own country. So the ambassador promptly does so, taking his opportunity when the king and prince are gone for a political travel - he and four masked men kidnap Rosanie and take her away... But hopefully, Rosanie’s screams while being dragged in the woods end up attracting three men who defeat the kidnappers - one of these men being the prince Aimant-joie himself! He is quite happy to be able to save his beloved so heroically, and this just strengthens Rosanie’s love for him.

Unfortunately for Rosanie, as the three months deadline is approaching, she realizes that she forgot Ricdin-Ricdon’s name, and unable to find it back, she becomes anxious and glum. Meanwhile, Penséemorne is so furious at seeing her previous plans fail she decides to unite the magic and the mundane: she gathers three of her lovers who are without riches or titles, and she tells each of them “If you kill the prince, I will marry you and give you my titles/my wealth. Just go into the woods to murder him when he strays away during one of his hunts, and here take this enchanted sword, a gift of my best pal the wicked sorceress, that will make sure that you will harm him without being harmed yourself.” As the prince, surely enough he does end up wandering away from his next hunting game - but this time he comes by the ruins of an abandoned castle, and sees a purple light coming from inside. Peering by a window, he notices a gathering of demons, ugly humanoids wearing strange clothes, and their leader is a scary, dark-skinned, gaunt and ferocious man who jumps everywhere with a great agility. The leader of the demons talk to a woman, who is a witch, and the prince overhears their conversation. He learns that this demon is the one that took on the identity of Labouréelamboy the wizard and failed to get the prince, due to him being protected by celestial spirits - but the demon adds that he has another identity he uses to catch the souls of young girls, and he will soon get a new victim. This other identity’s name is Ricdin-Ricdon. And the demon has a set of lines where he moralizes - this is one of Lheritier’s personal criticism towards society - as the demon says that the reason girls are so easy to get for a demon is men: if the girls weren’t so desperate to look good and have pleasant appearances for men, then they wouldn’t fall so easily for the demon’s traps.

The prince leaves the ruined castle, only to get attacked by the three murderers - however the magic of the swords fail against the prince’s Ring of Truth, and while he does get slightly wounded, he kills two of the would-be murderers, while the third one flees. The prince then returns to the castle with his mother (his father is out in his countryside house) and tells them the wild adventures he lived.

In fact, the narration cuts to follow what happens with the king at his countryside house - because he receives the visit of queen Riante-image, yes, the idow of king Planjoli. She tells the king (king Prud’homme if you recall his name) her whole story, the one told earlier, but with additional info. We learn that, while the queen was pregnant when imprisoned, the wicked king Songecreux planned to kill the child if it was a boy, but imprison the child if it was a daughter so she could marry her own son. Hopefully, the queen Riante-image had a faithful servant and helper, a knight called Longuevue (Far-sight, because he was full of prudence and planning), who disguised himself to enter the queen’s prison. We also learn that, unlike what everybody thinks, Riante-image’s daughter did not die at birth - the truth is that there was a baby switch. There is a very disturbing scene in this flashback where we discover that Longuevue had a dead baby (yes, the corpse of a dead baby) brought from a village nearby to the queen, by hiding it inside a pâté (yes, the one you eat), so that she could pretend her newborn baby was dead - while the actual, alive and well daughter baby, was carried away from the prison... in the coffin prepared for the dead baby. It is a really weird and disturbing moment.

Anyway, we quickly learn that Longuevue gave the little baby princess to a peasant to be raised incognito as an humble girl - and said peasant was Disant-peu, Rosanie’s father. Yes, Rosanie is actually a princess and the daughter of Riante-image, the true heiress of the realm of Fiction. Which is why the queen, who now managed to escape her prison, seeks king Prud’homme, to get her daughter back. (There is also a VERY long sequence describing how the partisans of Riante-image and those still faithful to the good king Prud’homme organizes a secret resistance and a coup d’état to overthrow the wicked Songecreux and have him killed, to take back the country. I mention that because this sequence feeds into the whole allegorical nature of the “Realm of Fiction”, and it is said that despite Songecreux being a “tyrannical and bizarre” king, he actually managed to poison the mind of many people in the realm of Fiction, resulting in a lot of people rooting for him and supporting him, despite being a brutal usurper. This will come back later.

Meanwhile, we are back to the tormented Rosanie, who doesn’t know how to escape her situation... When the prince, however, reveals his story of meeting the demon’s sabbath in the empty castle, she screams loudly upon hearing “Ricdin-Ricdon”, and promptly confesses to her deal with him. The prince does berate her for making such a heavy deal and serious promise to a man she barely knew, but “you always forgive the ones you love”, so he ends up putting this on the account of her youth (again, she is just seventeen) and her lack of experience.

The third murderer, the one that escaped, dies from his wounds, but not before confessing everything and revealing that Penséemorne was behind the assassination attempts on the prince. However, before this reached the ears of the queen, Penséemorne was warned of the reveal, and in her maddened fury, she went to her sorceress friend, strangling her to death, then strangled herself to death.

Afterward the king returns alongside queen Riante-image, and they reveal Rosanie’s true birth status. Immediately a wedding feast is organized to have Rosanie marry Aimant-joie... But during the feast, Ricdin-Ricdon arrives to demand his wand back. Rosanie gives it back, while saying the demon’s name, and the wicked spirit flees whole howling in rage.

Everybody is happy but... And this is where the allegory set up earlier kicks in. The realm of Fiction is back to being a happy and fertile land, ruled over by the heir of king “Beautiful-plan” and the queen “Happy-picture/Smiling-image”, Rosanie married to the king “Joy-loving”. And Rosanie is helped in her new position by two faithful generals of her mother, “Belles-idées” (Beautiful Ideas) and “Bongoût” (Good Taste). But despite the wicked usurper, “Empty-dream” being dead, he still has numerous partisans and followers among the realm of Fiction, who regularly rise up and try to attack the capital, before being defeated... But no matter how much they are beaten, they always come back, the political movement going dormant before waking up - and the tale concludes on the bittersweet note that, as long as the realm of Fiction will exist, there will always be followers of Empty-dreams.

The end

Now that the story is told, what can I add about it?

This version of the story is... a paradox. A paradox because it is much, much more literary than the other two versions, as we have basically a full novel here, with the addition of numerous elements not found in typical Riquet tales (the whole part where the protagonist is taught the workings of the courts and navigate the jealousy of rivals, the addition of a rival who tries to kill the prince or have Rosanie kidnap several times), and on top of the main narrative Lheritier adds a subplot which is all a literary allegory, about Fiction being given back to the principles of happiness, good taste, excellent planning, beautiful ideas, after being threatened by “Songecreux” - empty dreams, aka just nonsense without substance and a whole host of brutal and vicious ideas. So this makes this story much more “literary” in aspect...

... and yet out of the three versions, it is the closest to the “folkloric” version. If you recall what I said earlier, for a very long time it was thought that Perrault’s Riquet with the tuft as the man’s own literary invention. Then, when it became clear he was just answering Catherine Bernard’s Riquet, it was thought SHE was the one who completely invented the story, and Perrault then reinvented another based on that. But it is only recently, when people realizes that Lheritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon was the last part of the trilogy, that a tie to the “folkloric fairytales” was identified - as this tale revealed that this was a variation of the “Rumpelstilskin” type of fairytale. Contrary to Perrault and Bernard, who twisted the typical structure of the Rumpelstilskin fairytale (replacing the guessing of the name with the promise to marry, making the Rumpelstilskin character a helpful and positive character, making the gift of Rumpelstilskin a much more abstract transformation on the person of the protagonist...), Lheritier kept the typical “folkloric” elements of the tales and played them straight, between her literary inventions: the guessing of the nonsensical name, the evil and demonic nature of the so-called “helper”, the poor girl being forced among royalty with a secret she cannot admit... If people hadn’t noticed the connection, they would still think that the two Riquets were pure literary invention without any actual root in folktales.

In fact, there is a fascinating article right here which points out something I didn’t know: https://byufairytales.wordpress.com/rumplestiltskin/

Mademoiselle Lheritier’s “Ricdin-Ricdon” is the oldest literary version of the “type 500, the Name of the Helper” fairytale, aka of the Rumpelstilskin-fairytale. It was the first publication in literature history we know of, of this tale - except for one older version, which is a traditional English/Scottish balad that was found in a 1444 manuscript in Latin: “Inter diabolus et virgo”, Between the devil and the virgin. This seems to be the oldest form of the story we know of. Even though it is clear that the tale must have come from England to France, for the three authors to know of the folkloric material of this narrative (especially since English literature and English culture wasn’t actually well-known, spread or appreciated in any form in France at the time, and the authors clearly were digging exclusively in French folktales to invent their own narratives).

#french fairytales #literary fairytales #ricdin-ricdon #riquet with the tuft #mademoiselle lheritier #rumpelstilskin

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