Madame d’Aulnoy’s Drag King: Belle-belle or the Chevalier Fortuné
A literary fairy tale of cross-dressing and unrequited (queer?) affections.
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Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, lived 1652-1705. She, along with many extraordinary women, wrote and shared their literary fairy tales in their salons in Paris in the 1690s. I’m low-key obsessed: here’s a little video I made about her.
In his introduction to The Island of Happiness: Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, translator Jack Zipes says that d’Aulnoy was “an idealist and moralist... What interested her most of all was the status of women, the power of love, ethical behavior, and the tender relations between lovers.” If you’d like to learn more about her and read eight of her tales, beautifully illustrated by Natalie Frank, I recommend this book.
“Belle-belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné” is my favourite d’Aulnoy story I’ve read so far. I’ve read three English translations and consulted the original French to compare certain interesting phrases.1 Like many of d’Aulnoy’s literary fairy tales, “Belle-belle” is not a retelling of a single tale type; rather, it combines many tale types, themes, and motifs. I noticed: the youngest daughter being the only one worthy, be kind to the old lady because she’s really a fairy, the gathering of magically gifted friends, and cross-dressing for identity deceit.
Belle-belle takes her elderly father’s place as a soldier, with the help of a fairy who gifts her a magical trunk and a magical horse. As a chevalier (a knight) named Fortuné, he gathers magically gifted friends on his way to report for duty. Arriving in the city, he is beloved by everyone who sees him for his fancy clothes, good looks, and charm. The king makes him his right-hand man, while his sister, the queen, has a crush. Belle-belle is sweet on the king. The queen pursues Fortuné, but takes his disinterest hard and arranges for him to face life-threatening feats in an effort to get rid of him, but he succeeds with help from his friends. The queen attempts a final time to convince Fortuné to marry her and, upon his refusal, attacks herself and blames Fortuné, which gets him sentenced to death. When the executioner tears away Fortuné’s clothes to reveal his chest for the stabbing, Belle-belle is outed as a woman (boobs!). Her sentence is revoked, and the king is thrilled that he can marry her. Belle-belle’s magical horse brings her father and sisters to live with her, and they all live happily ever after.
As I wrote in last month’s fairy tale essay, though “The Little Mermaid” does not have explicitly queer characters, it is easy to interpret queer themes from the tale. Many fairy tales can be interpreted through a queer lens while some have some pretty blatant queer and gender-bending characters and plots. “Belle-belle,” with its cross-dressing and unreciprocated romantic attractions, lends itself easily to trans+ and queer+ interpretations.
She’s the Man
When and how does Belle-belle become Fortuné? When she puts on men’s clothes? When the fairy gives her the name Fortuné? When she is first perceived as a man by others? In the prose, the change happens when she rides into a city and people admire her as a man. The character’s pronouns change from ‘she’ to ‘he’ at this point in every translation, shortly before or with this sentence:
“The Chevalier Fortuné (we will now use this name when discussing Belle-belle)…”
“Fortuné (for so we must call her in future)…”
“Le chevalier Fortuné (car enfin il faut l’appeler ainsi)” [Direct English translation: (after all, that's what we call him)]
What makes Fortuné a man is what makes anyone a man: men’s clothes, a man’s name, manly actions. The king didn’t check Fortuné’s genitals or chromosomes before declaring him the best chevalier in his army. Nor did the queen before she developed a strong desire for him.
The story uses “sex” where we would now use “gender” as, until recently, they were thought of as one and the same. And the divide between the only two sexes/genders was strict. No matter what Belle-belle looked like naturally, it might not have even occurred to onlookers that Fortuné could be a woman because only men wore men’s clothes. Only men were capable of such skills as hunting or leading an army. And maybe they were right: by all measures but biological, Fortuné is a man (by their gender roles of the time).
It is interesting that in this story of cross-dressing and deception that the narrator also changes to not only using his new name but also his pronouns. Other stories might stay ‘in the know’ and continue to tell you about her around people who think she’s a man. But d’Aulnoy chooses, as the storyteller, to make the change to Fortuné and ‘he’. This assertion of Fortuné’s sex/gender begs the question: Is he a transgender man, or is Belle-belle in drag?
Clothes Make the Man
I think Belle-belle is in drag as a male character named Fortuné. She has not changed her own gender identity; this male character is temporary. It’s clear from the beginning that this is a deceit and she (and her sisters, who attempt it first but don’t ‘pass’) is only pretending to be a man enough to get away with taking her father’s place in the army, as his son. While the change in pronouns and name in the narration suggests the gender change is real, it’s made clear in this line that it is not.
“Belle-belle, who had not renounced her sex with her dress, felt fervently drawn to him.”
This comes after the name and pronouns change when Fortuné meets the king. This is a reminder to the reader that although the narrator is using the name and pronouns that the other characters would use, we should know that Belle-belle is still herself underneath the men’s clothes and deception. These days, we know that a woman does not have to renounce her womanhood, or even feel masculine, to wear men’s clothes. (What even are men’s and women’s clothes if anyone can wear anything they want, right?)
The story gets no more specific about how she passes for a man, other than clothes, name, and backstory. As I picture the film adaptation in my mind, I must consider her body shape, including the size of her breasts. They’d have to be small enough to be hidden under layers of fancy men’s clothes, but large enough to be an identifier of her womanhood when exposed. But maybe I’m getting caught up in unnecessary details…
Since she is still a woman under those men’s clothes and name, I wonder what that means for the women who are attracted to Fortuné.
Every Woman is a Lesbian at Heart2
Are all the women crushing on Fortuné queer? Do they have a crush on a man or a woman? I think all the qualities they like about him—his beautiful face, his charm and grace, his skills (from dancing to hunting)—are all Belle-belle, not something she’s faking to be Fortuné. They’re crushing on a man with a female face, no facial hair, and feminine qualities like charm and grace. Do women want feminine men or do they want women?
On the other hand, the king is delighted to find out his favourite man is a woman, so he can marry her. Did he feel that way about Fortuné all along? It’s a real Li Shang & Mulan situation. Straight men get really excited when they find out they can fuck their best friend—no homo.
I see the queerness of this gender-bending, gender-deceiving story, but unfortunately, the story, or its writer, remains steadfastly hetero-normative.
“Belle-belle, who had not renounced her sex with her dress, felt fervently drawn to him.”
This line equates sex (gender) with being attracted to only the opposite sex. To rephrase the sentence: Belle-belle, who had not renounced her attraction to men by dressing like one, felt attracted to the king. She is still a woman, and women are attracted to men.
Fortuné’s indifference to the queen is also received in a hetero-normative world. She cannot conceive that there would be a reason why a man wouldn’t be attracted to her, other than his cruelty. It couldn’t be that he’s not attracted to women, or not attracted to anyone. Men are attracted to women, and women only, so she is the exception, which hurts her feelings.
And, evidently, that is the moral of the story. Madame d’Aulnoy, like her contemporary Charles Perrault, ended her fairy tales with a moral poem to really drive home the lesson of the story. The moral of “Belle-belle” has nothing to do with cross-dressing or sex/gender. It is, essentially, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” And that Belle-belle was saved from the queen’s wrath because she was innocent, not just innocent of the crime Fortuné was accused of, but innocent by nature. Which brings in another gender theme to the story: that women are inherently innocent.
The Great (Gender) Divide
Belle-belle, the woman, is innocent.
“After they tied Fortuné to the stake, they tore off his robe and vest to pierce his heart. Imagine everyone’s astonishment when they uncovered the ivory bosom of Belle-belle! Immediately, the crowd of people realized Fortuné was an innocent girl unjustly accused.”
A girl could not have possibly attacked the queen. Girls aren’t violent. Only a man would do that. The crowd is quick to set their beloved Fortuné free, now that they know s/he is absolved of all crimes, for women are always innocent. It strangely contradicts the whole original sin of Eve that Christianity has going on, but this seems to be specific to men’s crimes. As if women cannot commit men’s crimes. Women are guilty of seducing married men, but heteros could not compute a woman-on-woman sex crime… But I digress.
Gender, as we understand it now, is a set of standards set by society, not something internally connected to one’s biology. As a narrative device, d’Aulnoy uses a deception of social gender to change a character’s trajectory. Only when perceived to be a man could Belle-belle have taken her father’s place in the army, recruited a team of gifted men, become respected by a king, desired by a queen, and put in the position to slay a dragon and defeat an emperor. Like her sisters who tried before her, Belle-belle’s story would have been short and uninteresting if she’d trotted into town to see the king in her own clothes.
Though I, and others, would love to see the dissolution of the completely made-up and unnecessary social construct of gender (binary or spectrum), the binary nature and strict rules of gender, be it once upon a time or in Trump’s anti-trans America, does give fertile playing ground for stories like “Belle-belle” which are built on breaking, bending, and jumping over the rules. If there weren’t a dress code, we couldn’t cross-dress.
I wish a story like “Belle-belle” were more explicitly queer and trans, but that’s why I love fairy tale retellings! Perhaps I will write my own gender-defying tale in which gender is not only defied but broken down, in which Belle-belle is queer and shows all the ladies of the court what they’re missing out on, and the king’s crush on Fortuné helps him realize his buried queer feelings.
Madame d’Aulnoy has laid the groundwork, and we get to interpret, retell, and rethink her work, and all gender-bending tales, into the story we need told today.
I have yet to use “Belle-belle” as inspiration for a story, but you’ll find classics like “Cinderella” and “Snow White” retold with a feminine rage twist in my debut short story collection, Ebony, Blood, and Snow: New Stories from Old Tales.
I read “Belle-belle” in the following books:
The Island of Happiness: The Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, translated by Jack Zipes
The Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (Introduction)
The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: from Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, selected and edited by Jack Zipes
You can read it online in English or French from Wikisource.
This is absolutely wonderful - the story, your insights, your delivery. It was the perfect start to my week, and also gave me a new rabbit hole to dive into. Thank you for walking us through all the layers and nuance with such wicked delight and the perfect dash of mischief. You are fabulous!