Henriette-Julie de Castelnau

Entry by Geneviève Patard, 2007

Born to Michel de Castelnau, a descendant of the high aristocracy of the county of Bigorre, and to Louise-Marie Foucault of Limousin, Henriette-Julie de Castelneau, born circa 1668, came from a long line of families recognised for their gloriously triumphant military backgrounds. Indeed, her two grandfathers, namely Jacques de Castelneau and Louis Foucault de Saint-Germain, were Marshals of France. Her childhood was marked by the death of her father, the Governor of Brest, who was killed on the 2nd of December 1672 near Utrecht in The Netherlands, at the head of his regiment. Contrary to long-standing beliefs about Henriette-Julie de Castelneau’s legendary childhood days spent in Brittany, her family returned to Paris. In 1691, she married Nicolas de Murat, Comte de Gilbertez, and Colonel of an Infantry Regiment. In 1696, although not yet in her thirties, Mme de Murat wrote her Mémoires. As she told the story of her life, she fought to defend the cause of women, while crafting a response to a work that had just been published and which she considered damaging to the image of the female sex, the Mémoires de la vie du Comte D* avant sa retraite rédigés par Saint-Evremont. Through her response to this text, she intended to convince the world ‘that, very often, there is much more discontent than disorder implied by a woman’s behaviour’. She spent time in the salon of Mme la Marquise de Lambert. She was also an active contributor to the growing popularity of a new literary genre, the fairytale, with the publication of her collection of Contes de Fées and Les Nouveaux Contes de Fées (1698), followed by her Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (1699). The stories in the latter work cited begin with a letter addressed to the ‘Modern Fairies’, whom the storyteller implores to distinguish themselves from the ‘Former Fairies’, whose works of magic were ‘low and childish’. At the same time, her work Voyage de Campagne (1699) included a tale about the conversations had by a group of aristocrats in a rural setting. In that same year, she was elected as a member of the Academy of the Ricovrati in Padua, along with, to name but a few, Mlle Chéron, Mlle de la Force, Mlle Deshoulières, Mlle Bernard – thus joining Mlle de Scudéry, Mme d’Aulnoy and Mlle Lhéritier. However, Mme de Murat was the subject of endless rumours of scandal, which grew in her wake. The reports written on 29 September 1698 by Police Lieutenant René d’Argenson serve as evidence of this. She was accused of a variety of “misdemeanours,” in particular relating to her homosexual tendencies. Given a warning on several occasions, she was finally arrested on the 19 April 1702 and imprisoned in the Château of Loches. On the 14 March 1706, she made a failed attempt to escape. She was transferred to the Château of Saumur, where she was more rigorously imprisoned. She then spent time in the Château d’Angers in 1707, before moving back to Loches in the same year. Rather than imprisonment, she merely found herself in exile in the town, where she rubbed shoulders with high society. We know more about this period of her life thanks to a daily diary kept by Mme de Murat, sent in the form of letters to her cousin, Mlle de Menou, between the 14th of April 1708 and the 5th of March 1709. At long last, Mme de Murat managed to attract the attention of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, thanks to his mistress, the comtesse d’Argenton, for whom she had written a poem. On the 15th of May 1709, she was granted partial release from prison, after which she moved to live with an aunt in Limousin. She continued to publish, this time her work Les Lutins du château de Kernosy, a nouvelle historique [ ‘historical’ novel], which appeared in 1710. At the time of Louis XIV’s death, the Regent gave her leave to return to Paris, but she chose to retire to the Province of Maine, taking up residence in the Castle of La Buzardière. Weakened by illness, she died there the following year, on the 29th of September 1716. In her use of generic forms and her exploration of blurred boundaries, whether it be in her memoirs, literary tales or nouvelles [novels], Mme de Murat exhibited an astonishing amount of freedom through her writing. She did not hesitate to draw upon the many and varied sources of inspiration she came across as she read for pleasure. She breathed new life into motifs borrowed from Italian writer Giovanni Francesco Straparola and the Abbé de Villars. In particular, Mme de Murat borrowed elements from the latter author’s text Comte de Gabalis, which she used as a vehicle to voice her concerns in a style imbued with préciosité. Throughout her work, light-hearted dreams of chivalrous scenarios are intertwined with the denunciation of the social subservience of women. Up until the publication of the first tales from the pen of Madame de Murat in a new edition of Cabinet des Fées (1785), her first attempts at writing stories enjoyed success in 18th-century France. The publication of her complete works, which included the compilation of her handwritten correspondence, as announced in the Bibliothèque universelle des Romans (1775), never took place. Subsequently, her character became a topic of great interest in the domain of Gay and Lesbian Studies. However, it is as part of the new wave of criticism surrounding the fairytale as a literary genre which became prominent at the end of Louis XIV’s reign, and, in particular, thanks to the editorial venture to produce the Bibliothèque des Génies et des Fées, that Mme de Murat’s work has received new attention.

(translated by Dominique Mason )

Works

• 1697 : Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M***, Paris, C. Barbin.
• 1698 : Contes de Fées. Dediez à Son Altesse Sérénissime Madame la Princesse Douairière de Conty. Par Mad. La Comtesse de M****, Paris, C. Barbin -- éd. Geneviève Patard, Paris, H. Champion, 2006.
• 1698 : Les Nouveaux Contes des Fées. Par Madame de M**, Paris, C. Barbin.
• 1699 : Histoires sublimes et allégoriques. Par Madame la Comtesse D***, Dédiées aux Fées Modernes, Paris, F. et P. Delaulne.
• 1699 : Voyage de campagne. Par Madame la Comtesse de M***, Paris, Vve de C. Barbin.
• 1708-1709 : Ouvrages de Mme la C. de Murat,inédit, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 3471 (contient le Journal pour Mademoiselle de Menou, 14 avril 1708-8 juin 1709, et un ensemble ayant fait l'objet d'une édition en 1703 (Paris, P. Ribou), intitulé Zatide, histoire arabe, et attribué à E. Le Noble).
• 1710 : Les Lutins du château de Kernosy, nouvelle historique. Par Madame la Comtesse de M***, Paris, J. Le Febvre.
• 1714 : L'Esprit folet, ou Le Sylphe amoureux, dans Avantures choisies, contenant L'Amour innocent persécuté. L'Esprit folet, ou Le Sylphe amoureux. Le Coeur volant, ou L'Amant etourdy. Et La Belle Avanturière, Paris, P. Prault.

Various poems: one sonnet in Recueil de pièces curieuses et nouvelles..., La Haye, A. Moetjens, *1695, t.III, 1re partie, p.61-62; one elegy, one epistle, one eclogue in Nouveau choix de pièces de poésie..., La Haye, H. van Bulderen, 1715, t.I, p.220-222 et t.II, p.157-161, 161-164; one song, one epistle in Choix de chansons..., Paris, sn, 1755, p.45-46; one sonnet, one song in *Recueil de Maurepas, Leyde, sn, 1865, t.II, p.225-226 et t.V, p.56.

• (formerly attributed to the comtesse de Murat): Le Comte de Dunois, Paris, C. Barbin, 1671.
• (formerly attributed to the comtesse de Murat): La Comtesse de Chateaubriant ou les Effets de la jalousie, Paris, Th. Guillain, 1695.

Selected bibliography of images

- v.1698 : Jacques Harrewyn, Portrait de Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat (gravure, 9 x 12 cm, signée), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (N2 MURAT, 55A7037).

Web Links

- Les Lutins du château de Kernosy, Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat[1]
Ce site propose le texte intégral de l’édition de 1710 des Lutins du château de Kernosy (orthographe et ponctuation modernisées) ainsi qu’une bibliographie et des liens utiles.

Reception

- «Le beau partage que l’esprit,
Et que Murat en est pourvue!
On ne l’a pourtant jamais vue
Se vanter de ce qu’elle écrit.»
(Claude-Charles Guyonnet de Vertron, «Madrigal pour Madame la Comtesse de Murat auparavant Mademoiselle de Castelnau», dans La Nouvelle Pandore, Paris, Vve C. Mazuel, 1698, p.452)

- (à propos des Lutins du château de Kernosy) «Ce petit roman n’a pas été fort recherché par le peu que promet le titre, il est cependant écrit avec beaucoup de génie, d’agrément et de goût. Il plaît par la diversité amusante des événements et la singularité des caractères. Il est encore de Madame la Comtesse de Murat, autrefois connue dans le monde galant et remuant.» (Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, De l’usage des romans..., Amsterdam, Vve Poilras, 1734, t.II, p.101)

- «Le style de quelques-uns de ses ouvrages tient beaucoup de son caractère. Il est léger, spirituel, vif et enjoué. Madame de Murat badine plus qu’elle ne travaille.» (Antoine-René de Voyer d’Argenson, Bibliothèque universelle des romans..., Paris, Bureau/Demonville, juillet 1775, p.211)

- «La réputation brillante que ses ouvrages lui acquirent d’abord ne s’est pas soutenue. C’est assez le sort des auteurs qui s’attachent à des productions frivoles, et qui n’ont que les ressources de l’esprit pour se garantir de l’oubli.» (François-Xavier de Feller, Biographie universelle..., nouvelle éd., Lyon, J.-B. Pélagaud, 1851, t.II, p.382)

«Ses vers, en petit nombre, se distinguent par la facilité, et elle aurait pu se faire un nom parmi les poètes érotiques, si elle s’était livrée uniquement à la poésie.» (Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne..., nouvelle éd., Paris, C. Delagrave, 1856, t.29, p.587)

- (à propos des contes) «[Ils] ne doivent pas être confondus avec les productions ordinaires de ce genre: écrits avec beaucoup d’esprit, ils cachent, sous une fiction agréable, une morale d’autant plus piquante qu’elle s’appuie sur une connaissance profonde du monde, principalement de la cour.» (Prosper Levot, Biographie bretonne, Vannes, Cauderan, 1852-1857, t.II, p.99)

- «Cette moderne Sappho [...].» (Alfred Boulay de la Meurthe, Les Prisonniers du roi à Loches sous Louis XIV, Tours, J. Allard, 1911, p.76)

- «[L]a petite révoltée aux dispositions anarchistes qu’est cette plus séduisante que recommandable comtesse de Murat» (Lucie Félix-Faure-Goyau, La Vie et la mort des fées, essai d’histoire littéraire, Paris, Perrin, 1910, p.276)