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Madame de Murat: Contes. Edition critique établie par Geneviève Patard. Bibliothèque des génies et des fées 3. Pans: Honoré Champion, 2006. 478 pp.
This volume of the Bibliothèque des génies et des fées presents the texts written by Henriette Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat, considered to be contes by the volume's editor, Geneviève Patard. The edition offers a "modernized," "corrected," and "actualized" version of these texts, suppressing capital letters and "reorganizing" paragraphs and punctuation in order to make them more "coherent" and "less disturbing" for "modern" use (49-50). Since capital letters, punctuation, and organization of paragraphs are often semantically meaningful, the scholarly reader might object to this editorial decision. The first of de Murat's works reedited is the Contes de fées: Dédiez à Son Altesse Sérénissime Madame la Pnncesse Douairière de Conty. Par Mad. La Comtesse de M***, published by Claude Barbin (also Jean La Fontaine's, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's, and Charles Perrault's editor) in 1698. (A photographic reproduction of the original edition is accessible on the Web site of the Bibliothèque Nationale [BN] in Paris). Patard's edition reproduces the dedicatory letter followed by the complete texts of the three unframed tales Le Parfait Amour, Anguillette, and Jeune et Belle.
De Murat's second volume, the Nouveaux Contes des Fées, was published in the same year by Barbin. The critical edition reproduces the important dedicatory letter followed by Le Palais de la Vengeance and The Prince des Feuilles, but omits the third text, Le Bonheur des moineaux, explicitly subtitled Conte in the original edition (also available on the BN Web site). Arguing that de Murat had "abusively" (49) defined this text as a conte, Geneviève Patard transfers it into the "Annexes" suppressing the original subtitle, Conte. She thus "corrects" the author's own disposition without taking into consideration that the early French fairy tale came into being through a complex interaction of different generic forms as the fable, the exemplum, the nouvelle, and other verse and prose forms. In the critical edition, what was originally the fourth tale, L'Heureuse peine, thus follows immediately the second, making it difficult to recognize the semantic and metanarrative meaning of the shorter rhymed text significantly placed between them by the author.
The editor's idea of what a conte is or should...