Catherine Bernard was a French poet, playwright, and novelist. She composed three historical novels, two verse tragedies, several poems, and was awarded several poetry prizes by the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

. Bernard established the fundamental aesthetic principle of the French literary conte de fées

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

popular in the salons

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

of the late seventeenth century with the dictum: "the [adventures] should always be implausible and the emotions always natural". Her works are appreciated today for their psychological nuance.

Biographical résume

Catherine Bernard was born in 1662 in Rouen

Rouen

Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...

 to a Huguenot

Huguenot

The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...

 family of wealth and comfort. She was related through her mother to the brothers Pierre

Pierre Corneille

Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...

 and Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille was a French dramatist.- Personal life :Born in Rouen nearly twenty years after his brother Pierre, the "great Corneille", Thomas's skill as a poet seems to have shown itself early. At the age of fifteen he composed a play in Latin which was performed by his fellow-pupils at the...

. Bernard was precocious and began writing at a young age, earning praise from her cousin, the author and critic Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle , also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author.Fontenelle was born in Rouen, France and died in Paris just one month before his 100th birthday. His mother was the sister of great French dramatists Pierre and Thomas Corneille...

. At eighteen, she left her home in Rouen to pursue a literary career in Paris.

In 1685 at the age of twenty-three, she converted to Catholicism and was well enough known at that time to have received notice in the Mercure galant for her "ouvrages galants". The romance Frédéric de Sicile (1680, by Pradon?) was attributed to her as well as her cousin's L'Ile de Bornéo.

Bernard produced three historical novels, two verse tragedies, and several poems. She was saved from abject poverty by monetary prizes awarded her work. She died 16 September 1712. Her works continue to be appreciated for their stylistic and psychological depth.

Novels

Bernard's first novel Eléonore d'Yvrée was published in 1687 with a dedication to the Dauphin and a moralizing preface. In its use of history, narrative structure, and theme of dutiful sacrifice of passion, the novel followed in the tradition of Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves

La Princesse de Clèves

La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette.The action takes place between...

. In the Mercure galant of 16 September 1687, Fontenelle praised its economy of plot and structure, its concise style, and its psychological nuance. The book was followed by Le Comte d'Amboise in 1689 and her last and most adventurous novel Inès de Cordoue in 1696. Both elaborated upon the "sacrifice of passion for duty" theme. All three novels were reprinted in the Bibliothèque de campagne in 1739 and 1785.

With Inès de Cordoue, Bernard established the fundamental aesthetic principle of the French literary fairy tale popular in the salons

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

of the late seventeenth century with the dictum: "the [adventures] should always be implausible and the emotions always natural". The novel is set in the court of King Philip II of Spain

Philip II of Spain

Philip II was King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and, while married to Mary I, King of England and Ireland. He was lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories such as duke or count....

 and features a fairy tale competition between the heroine Inès and her rival Léonore.

The first fairy tale in the novel, "Le Prince Rosier" ("Prince Rosebush"), is told by Inès and is traced to an episode by Ariosto. The tale follows a princess and her love for an enchanted rosebush. When the charm is broken and the rosebush becomes a prince, he admits to the princess he is in love with the Queen of the Isle of Youth. The princess grows exceedingly jealous over this disclosure, and the prince begs the fairies to return him to his former shape. The second fairy tale, "Riquet à la Houppe

Riquet à la Houppe

"Riquet with the Tuft" , also known as "Ricky of the Tuft", is a French literary fairy tale best known in a version by Charles Perrault that tells of an ugly prince who is capable of conferring wit upon his beloved...

" ("Riquet with the Tuft"), tells the story of a gnome

Gnome

A gnome is a diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature...

-like prince and his marriage to a beautiful but feeble-minded princess. He magically grants her the gift of intelligence but she endures life in his underground realm only through the visits of her human lover. When Riquet learns of the situation, he transforms his wife's lover into a gnome like himself and the bewildered princess spends her days trying to distinguish between the two.

Riquet was retold by Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known include Le Petit Chaperon rouge , Cendrillon , Le Chat Botté and La Barbe bleue...

 under the same title (presumably with Bernard's permission) and included in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé

Histoires ou contes du temps passé

Histoires ou contes du temps passé subtitle: Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye is a collection of eight literary fairy tales written by Charles Perrault and published by Barbin in Paris in January 1697...

of 1697. Neither version is thought to be of folkloric origin. Bernard's tale, unlike Perrault's, condemns women's confinement in marriage, and both of Bernard's tales, in defiance of fairy tale tradition, end unhappily. The novel places Bernard in the tradition of prolific French conteuses such as Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy

Madame d'Aulnoy

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French writer known for her fairy tales...

 and Marie-Jeanne Lhéretier de Villandon. Inès de Cordoue is sometimes offered as evidence that fairy tales were the creation of the educated women of the salons rather than illiterate peasant women.

Dramas

Bernard was the most successful female dramatist of the seventeenth century. Her 1689 tragedy Laodamie had a long and profitable run of twenty-three performances with three more in 1690 and 1691. Her 1690 tragedy Brutus was performed twenty-seven times between December 1690 and August 1691 and was restaged eight times before 1700. It was revived by the Comédie-Française

Comédie-Française

The Comédie-Française or Théâtre-Français is one of the few state theaters in France. It is the only state theater to have its own troupe of actors. It is located in the 1st arrondissement of Paris....

 in 1973.

Both dramas display a mixture of Corneillian and Racinian

Jean Racine

Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...

 models typical of French tragedies in the 1690s. Laodamie examines the rivalry of two women and their differing responses to love while Brutus pits a father against his sons in an exploration of love, patriotism, and tyranny. Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

 was condemned in the Mercure galant of March 1731 for his unacknowledged borrowings from Bernard's play for his Brutus of 1730.

Poems

Having attained prominence in the theatre with her verse tragedies, Bernard abandoned the theatre and the showy verse typical of her early years with the support of the patronage of the austere Chancèliere de Pontchartrain, an organization whose moral severity was second only to Bernard's. Some dozen poems followed, however, that were published by Bouhours in 1693 and 1701. One poem was a light-hearted petition to the king for payment of a pension of 200 franc

Franc

The franc is the name of several currency units, most notably the Swiss franc, still a major world currency today due to the prominence of Swiss financial institutions and the former currency of France, the French franc until the Euro was adopted in 1999...

s rewarded her encomiastic verse. The Académie française awarded her prizes for poetry in 1691, 1693, and 1697, and she was elected a member of the Ricovrati Academy of Padua.