Funestine

The remarkable stories included in this volume, published in the 1730s, show a marked evolution in the contes de fées, each being more substantial, and more imaginatively innovative than its predecessor.

Although they clearly attempt to take up where Baronne d’Aulnoy and Comtesse de Murat had been forced to leave off, in terms of their imaginative extravagance, their use of metamorphoses and their quirky employment of allegory exhibit a further development in the direction of the calculatedly absurd and the surreal.

These are not the only works of the period to extrapolate its licensed disorder to the chaotic brink of surrealism, but they do so more self-consciously than most. The stories gathered herein provide an intriguing kaleidoscopic pattern, and can justly be reckoned to be more than the sum of their parts.