Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. The French
Speaker 1: fairy tale Lose Bleue or the Bluebird tells the story
Speaker 1: of Florine, a beautiful princess who is, as so many
Speaker 1: beautiful princesses, are being kept in a tower. Her stepmother
Speaker 1: is seeming to keep her apart from Prince Charming in
Speaker 1: the hopes that the prince will marry her own daughter,
Speaker 1: the of course, spoiled and notably ugly Triton. What this
Speaker 1: stepmother doesn't know, however, is that the prince had been
Speaker 1: cursed for his rejection of Triton by her fairy godmother
Speaker 1: and turned into a bluebird who visits Florine in her
Speaker 1: tower for years. This is one of those happily ever
Speaker 1: after fairy tales. The curse is in the end lifted
Speaker 1: and the lover's marry, but the story doesn't just end there. Instead,
Speaker 1: the Bluebird ends with a rhyming verse moral to drive
Speaker 1: home its message. In English translation, better to be a
Speaker 1: bird of any hue, a raven crow, an owl, I
Speaker 1: do protest than stick for life to a partner like Glue.
Speaker 1: Who scorns you or whom you detest. Too many matches
Speaker 1: of that sort I've seen, and wish now that there
Speaker 1: was some king magician to stop these ill matched souls
Speaker 1: at once and lean on them with force to keep
Speaker 1: his prohibition. Fairy tales are often seen as stories for children,
Speaker 1: but in their sometimes intense darkness and moral dilemmas, they
Speaker 1: can also be fairly adult in their content. Charming choosing
Speaker 1: to defy the fairy godmother's ultimatum and accepting his ornithological
Speaker 1: punishment rather than being forced to marry a woman he
Speaker 1: doesn't love, gains new significance when you learn the true
Speaker 1: story of the woman who wrote his tale. Madame Delnois,
Speaker 1: the Baroness Delnoi's tale, like that of many a fairytale heroine,
Speaker 1: begins in a dark place due to a marriage that
Speaker 1: was arranged against her will, but over the course of
Speaker 1: her life she would build an independent living as a
Speaker 1: well known author who published twelve books, including two collections
Speaker 1: of fairy tales or conde fi, a term that she
Speaker 1: is known today for coining. Despite that her work is
Speaker 1: often forgotten compared to contemporaries like Charles Perrot, with translated
Speaker 1: collections of her stories being few and far between in
Speaker 1: this day and age. Her exclusion from the canon, however,
Speaker 1: doesn't make her work any less impactful.
Speaker 2: Take her rise to literary fame in French society and
Speaker 2: throw in the story of her actual life, including its
Speaker 2: many instances of political intrigue, exile, and murder, and you
Speaker 2: have a tale that perhaps Madame Delnois is the only
Speaker 2: author who would be fit to tell, I'm Danish Schwartz,
Speaker 2: and this is noble blood. Madame del Nois was born
Speaker 2: Mary Catherine le Jumel de Bondeville, of the noble family
Speaker 2: Legumel de Bandeville. She was born in either sixteen fifty
Speaker 2: or sixteen fifty one in a town in Normandy bearing
Speaker 2: her family name Barneville la Bertrand if you were thinking
Speaker 2: her name, potential birth year and place of birth is
Speaker 2: already tmi will, you're in luck. Because that's just about
Speaker 2: all we know of Mary Catherine childhood. We can at
Speaker 2: least assume, however, that an early influence in her social
Speaker 2: and intellectual life was her aunt, Marie Bruno de Loge.
Speaker 2: Marie was a renowned salon holder and a fixture in
Speaker 2: Parisian intellectual life in the early seventeenth century, earning herself
Speaker 2: the nickname the Tenth Muse from poets, authors and academics.
Speaker 2: The first recorded detail of Marie Catherine's childhood, however, is
Speaker 2: its abrupt end. On March eighth, sixteen sixty six, fifteen
Speaker 2: year old Mary Catherine entered a marriage arranged by her
Speaker 2: father to a man named Francois de Lameaux, Baron Delnois,
Speaker 2: a Parisian man thirty years her senior. It's possible she
Speaker 2: was being educated in a convent at the time the
Speaker 2: marriage was arranged and had to be abducted by her father,
Speaker 2: but the reliability of that particular anecdote is shaky, and
Speaker 2: it'll become clearer as to why later. Francois, the husband,
Speaker 2: was not born a baron, but worked in the service
Speaker 2: of a duke and accumulated enough wealth during this time
Speaker 2: that he was able to purchase land and title. The
Speaker 2: duke was the illegitimate son of Henry the fourth of
Speaker 2: France and his mistress, but was then created Duke of
Speaker 2: Endome in his own right in fifteen ninety eight, when
Speaker 2: he was four years old. The duke apparently had a
Speaker 2: reputation for roguishness and desoluteness, which seemed to rub off
Speaker 2: on his sidekick, as Marie Catherine's husband would have his
Speaker 2: own reputation as a gambler and a libertine. Details of
Speaker 2: the couple's married life are once again practically non existent,
Speaker 2: but it's not hard to imagine that the marriage between
Speaker 2: a fifteen year old girl from the country and a
Speaker 2: forty five year old notorious Parisian gambler did not inspire
Speaker 2: a great mutual love. We do get whispers of truly
Speaker 2: juicy things beginning to happen, though. In sixteen sixty nine,
Speaker 2: three years and three children into marriage, Mary Catherine and
Speaker 2: her mother would allegedly conspire with their respective lovers to
Speaker 2: bring a charge of high tree against the Baron del
Speaker 2: Nois for speaking out against the king. The story goes
Speaker 2: that the baron, remember Marie Catherine's husband, had been overheard
Speaker 2: swearing in public against the taxes that had been imposed,
Speaker 2: which at the time was considered an offense of lais mageste,
Speaker 2: coming from the Latin leaesa majestus, which literally means injured majesty,
Speaker 2: simply put treason. In mid seventeenth century France, this was
Speaker 2: a crime that the baron would have hanged for had
Speaker 2: he been found guilty. For many, it was likely not
Speaker 2: a leap of the imagination to believe the accusations of
Speaker 2: treason thanks to his association with the scandalous Duke of Endome,
Speaker 2: who had been involved in a number of conspiracies in
Speaker 2: earlier years. But the circumstances surrounding the accusation paint a
Speaker 2: picture that is of a bold act of patriotism and
Speaker 2: more of a bold attempt to get Murray Catherine out
Speaker 2: of her marriage. Additionally, by this point in her life,
Speaker 2: Marie Catherine's mother had made a second marriage, and she
Speaker 2: was now titled the Marquise de Gaudain. We don't know
Speaker 2: when her husband, Murrie Catherine's father, had died, but it's
Speaker 2: worth thinking about that. The fact is Marie Catherine's mother
Speaker 2: could only help her daughter escape her terrible marriage once
Speaker 2: her husband, who had arranged the terrible marriage in the
Speaker 2: first place, was gone. The mother and daughter's plan seemed
Speaker 2: to work initially, but then it spectacularly crashed and burned.
Speaker 2: After three years spent in the bastille, the baron was
Speaker 2: able to convince the court of his innocence and countercharge
Speaker 2: his wife and her mother for conspiracy against him. The
Speaker 2: men suspected to be the women's lovers were captured, tortured
Speaker 2: until they confessed, and then executed. The archives of the
Speaker 2: Bastille document the initial accusation, the counter accusation, and the executions,
Speaker 2: but it's not detailed how Marie Catherine or her mother
Speaker 2: escaped similar fates. We know the marquise fled to England,
Speaker 2: and some versions of the story say Marie Catherine escaped
Speaker 2: by going with her. Other versions of the story, however,
Speaker 2: paint a more dramatic tale in which after a warrant
Speaker 2: went out for Murray Catherine's arrest, she, to quote one
Speaker 2: biographical account quote, managed to escape the officers by jumping
Speaker 2: out of the window at their early morning summons and
Speaker 2: hiding in a church under a convenient briar end quote.
Speaker 2: Bottom line is Marie Catherine made it out of France.
Speaker 2: Over the next decade, Marie Catherine, Madame Delnois would live
Speaker 2: in Spain, England, and Holland, despite or perhaps because of,
Speaker 2: the warrant for her arrest. It's believed that Mary Catherine
Speaker 2: and her mother potentially both worked as spies for France
Speaker 2: during their periods abroad. The details of Marie Catherine's life
Speaker 2: abroad for all of those years, however, are once again
Speaker 2: practically lost to time. That might sound confusing when you
Speaker 2: learn that Mary Catherine published three memoirs, including The Ladies
Speaker 2: Travels into Spain or A Genuine Relation of the Religion, Laws, Commerce,
Speaker 2: Customs and Manners of that Country, and another Memoirs of
Speaker 2: the Court of England in sixteen seventy five. While that
Speaker 2: sounds like a lot of great firsthand information, I'd like
Speaker 2: to quote a sentence from the introduction of a nineteen
Speaker 2: thirteen translation of Memoirs of the Courts of England. Quote,
Speaker 2: although Marie Catherine's autobiography exists, the difficulty of constructing an
Speaker 2: account of her life is so great as to render
Speaker 2: it an almost impossible task. End quote. You see, these
Speaker 2: autobiographies are which refer to today as pseudo memoirs, as
Speaker 2: they are in fact collections of stories Marie Catherine gathered
Speaker 2: from associates and presented as the lived experiences of one
Speaker 2: woman herself. It's likely that some of the experiences were
Speaker 2: her own, but as expressed in the earlier quote, it's
Speaker 2: truly impossible to pick out which stories those were. The
Speaker 2: earlier tidbit about her living in a convent, for example,
Speaker 2: comes from one of these memoirs, so details like that
Speaker 2: are often left out of her biographies on account of
Speaker 2: their existence among any number of false narratives. This wasn't
Speaker 2: Marie Catherine's attempt at becoming the seventeenth century's most notorious
Speaker 2: scammer influencer, but it was a form of literary fiction
Speaker 2: and a reflection of her creativity as a writer. These
Speaker 2: memoirs are like any other reflections of a moment of
Speaker 2: time in a given place, but far more entertaining, as
Speaker 2: their collections of only the most exciting moment that she
Speaker 2: could collect or come up with. The public at the
Speaker 2: time of publication understood and acknowledged this as well. In
Speaker 2: seventeenth century France, readers just wanted to enjoy some good storytelling.
Speaker 2: Later historians would deny her the identity of quote historian
Speaker 2: because of the confusing nature of Marie Catherine's recollections. These
Speaker 2: weren't histories, they were stories. It's, however, agreed upon that,
Speaker 2: while sometimes embellished, the stories she tells seemed to be true,
Speaker 2: even if they happened to a friend of a friend
Speaker 2: a few episodes ago. I actually quoted Memoirs of the
Speaker 2: Court of England for Marie Catherine's account of seeing the
Speaker 2: future King Charles the Second and his lover Lucy Walter
Speaker 2: at court in the Hague. But it might not have
Speaker 2: been Marie Catherine herself who saw them more plausibly, it
Speaker 2: was an acquaintance of hers in Holland. This idea is
Speaker 2: again nicely summed up in an introduction to one of
Speaker 2: the memoirs, this time in an eighteen o eight edition
Speaker 2: of her Memoirs in Spain. Quote that some of the
Speaker 2: stories here may appear marvelous and romantic cannot be denied,
Speaker 2: but succeeding writers and travelers have confirmed almost every particular
Speaker 2: descriptive of the national manners. The historical facts are known
Speaker 2: to be perfectly constant to truth, and the manner of
Speaker 2: narrating them adds an infinite charm. After sixteen years of
Speaker 2: collecting stories across Europe, Marie Catherine was allowed to return
Speaker 2: to France, possibly as a reward for her alleged spy work.
Speaker 2: Her mother was given a pension by the Spanish king
Speaker 2: and instead stayed in Madrid. If you're wondering how Marie
Speaker 2: Catherine's husband reacted to her return will join the club.
Speaker 2: His last mention in any account of her life is
Speaker 2: his accusation against her, so it's possible he either died
Speaker 2: or also left the country. At some point. Marie Catherine
Speaker 2: formally returned to Paris, and her past transgressions, much like
Speaker 2: her husband, in modern historical accounts, seems to have been
Speaker 2: all but forgotten. Instead, she becomes a celebrated intellectual figure.
Speaker 2: At her home at Rue Saint Benois, Marie Catherine began
Speaker 2: to host what would become some of Paris's most popular
Speaker 2: salon gatherings, frequented by aristocrats and princes, among intellectuals, including
Speaker 2: her friend Charles de Saint Evremonde, whom Wikipedia describes as
Speaker 2: a quote French soldier, hedonist, essayist, and literary critic. To
Speaker 2: give you an idea of the kind of circle that
Speaker 2: she was surrounding herself with, as told by Marina Warner
Speaker 2: in her book From the Beast to the Blonde on
Speaker 2: fairy Tales and their Tellers quote cultivating the polite arts
Speaker 2: she and her friends told fairy tales and over raspberry
Speaker 2: or gooseberry cordials and hot chocolate dressed up to play
Speaker 2: the parts. In other words, my understanding of a dream party.
Speaker 2: Speaking of fairy tales. The sixteen nineties also marked the
Speaker 2: formal beginning of Marie Catherine's literary career, publishing under the
Speaker 2: name Madame Delnois. Her first contribution seems to be her
Speaker 2: editing the anthology Collection of the Most Beautiful Pieces by
Speaker 2: French Poets. As an author, early published works included her
Speaker 2: quote Memoirs Abroad, and they were hugely successful, providing Marie
Speaker 2: Catherine with quite incredibly a stable income to herself and
Speaker 2: her daughters. As a single mother, Marie Catherine actually had
Speaker 2: six children in total. Her first two children with her
Speaker 2: husband had died young, leaving only a surviving daughter. She
Speaker 2: would go on to have three more daughters, likely all
Speaker 2: born while she was abroad and therefore born out of wedlock,
Speaker 2: but unfortunately we don't have more details about that. Marie
Speaker 2: Catherine's most popular works were, and remain, of course, her
Speaker 2: Contest DeFi, published in sixteen ninety seven, and her Conte
Speaker 2: nouveaux la fille a la mode or New Tales or
Speaker 2: Fairies in Fashion from the following year. While taking inspiration
Speaker 2: from common tropes in folk and fairytale traditions, which researchers
Speaker 2: now date as having begun in the Bronze Age. Madame
Speaker 2: Desnoi's stories were all original tales. Their style was directly
Speaker 2: influenced by her experience as a selonier and the plays
Speaker 2: she did with her friends. They were translated onto the
Speaker 2: page in a conversational style, a reflection of the oral
Speaker 2: tradition telling a story over a drink at a party.
Speaker 2: For example, in the White Cat, she writes, it would
Speaker 2: take far too long to recount the adventures of all
Speaker 2: three princes, so I shall tell you only those that
Speaker 2: befell the youngest. The White Cat is a story similar
Speaker 2: to The Bluebird, which we opened the episode with. They
Speaker 2: are both classified under the type the animal as bridegroom,
Speaker 2: as made distinct by the Arne Thompson Uther Index, which
Speaker 2: is a catalog used in folklore studies to categorize tales.
Speaker 2: The animal as the ridegroom was Donoi's favorite trope, appearing
Speaker 2: as the foundation of a great number of her stories.
Speaker 2: In The White Cat, the youngest of three princes, the
Speaker 2: only one we have time to talk about, of course,
Speaker 2: is sent on a series of tasks by his father
Speaker 2: aided by a talking cat, the queen of a whole
Speaker 2: society of talking cats, who wears a locket containing a
Speaker 2: portrait of a man who looks strikingly like the young prince.
Speaker 2: As Marie Catherine would say, it would take far too
Speaker 2: long to recount the adventures, so let's skip till the end. Eventually,
Speaker 2: the prince is told by his father that the son
Speaker 2: who finds the most beautiful princess to marry will become king.
Speaker 2: The cat, aiding him once again, tells him that she
Speaker 2: can present him with a beautiful princess if he agrees
Speaker 2: to cut off her head like any good friend. And
Speaker 2: cat lover refuses at first, but she's able to eventually
Speaker 2: convince him, and after the deed is done, she, in
Speaker 2: a shocking twist, turns into a beautiful princess. She tells
Speaker 2: the prince her tale. Her mother was a queen who
Speaker 2: promised her first born in exchange for fairy fruit. The
Speaker 2: fairies raised her in a tower that was impossible to
Speaker 2: enter except through a high window, which means the story
Speaker 2: is also classified as a maiden in the tower type
Speaker 2: in the ATU Index. As an aside Rapunzel, obviously the
Speaker 2: most famous tale of that subtype derives from Percinet, a
Speaker 2: French fairy tale published the same year as The White Cat. Anyway,
Speaker 2: the princess fell in love with a human king who
Speaker 2: passed by her tower and planned to escape with him,
Speaker 2: but the fairies were arranging for her to marry and
Speaker 2: ugly fairy king. When they caught her human lover in
Speaker 2: the tower, they killed him and transformed the princess and
Speaker 2: all of the people in her kingdom into cats, with
Speaker 2: the condition that she would only be free when she
Speaker 2: found a man identical to her dead lover. The verse
Speaker 2: moral of the White Cat is not as obvious a
Speaker 2: denouncement of arranged marriage as the Bluebirds was, instead emphasizing
Speaker 2: the importance of friendship in a relationship. The youthful prince
Speaker 2: was fortunate to find beneath a cat's skin and illustrious
Speaker 2: fair worthy of adoration, and inclined the throne her friendship
Speaker 2: won for him to share by two enchanting eyes. On
Speaker 2: conquest bent, the willing heart is easily subdued, and still
Speaker 2: more power to the charm is lent when love's soft
Speaker 2: flame is fanned by gratitude. The last stanza is particularly
Speaker 2: interesting in the context of the fairy tale genre, where
Speaker 2: many princes and princesses fall in love based seemingly on
Speaker 2: nothing more than a first glance. While Delnois employed versions
Speaker 2: of the love at first site trope, even in The Bluebird,
Speaker 2: we still also see a love built over years of
Speaker 2: mutual trust. The White Cat is once again a tale
Speaker 2: of true love torn apart by a forced, incompatible marriage
Speaker 2: and the consequences that one faces when one tries to resist.
Speaker 2: While Murray Catherine managed to avoid arrest in escaping her
Speaker 2: own marriage, her supposed lover did not. It was all
Speaker 2: so not the last time Marie Catherine would see these
Speaker 2: consequences of defying an arranged marriage first hand. The scandalous
Speaker 2: trial of Angelique Nicole Cartier Tiquet was on the lips
Speaker 2: of every Parisian in sixteen ninety nine. Angelique's parents died
Speaker 2: when she was only fifteen, and her father, a wealthy bookseller,
Speaker 2: left a sum of a million livre to be split
Speaker 2: between her and her brother. Described as beautiful, spiritual, and graceful,
Speaker 2: Angelique entered the Parisian social scene and soon attracted a
Speaker 2: number of suitors. A friend of her aunt, Claude de Quay,
Speaker 2: was among them. He was a counselor at the Parliament
Speaker 2: of Paris, and he carried a social currency, but had
Speaker 2: no great monetary fortune after he squandered his inheritance that
Speaker 2: was left by his father. Wanting to acquire both Angelique
Speaker 2: and her money, he managed to convince the girl and
Speaker 2: her aunt that he was actually a man of great fortune,
Speaker 2: using the classic swindler tactic of enchanting her with extravagant gifts,
Speaker 2: likely bought with borrowed money. In sixteen seventy six, when
Speaker 2: Angelique was eighteen and Claude was over forty, the couple
Speaker 2: married in Paris. The first years of their marriage were
Speaker 2: allegedly happy. The couple had a son and a daughter,
Speaker 2: but that happiness dissolved when Angelique was suspected of infidelity
Speaker 2: and she discovered the truth of her husband's wealth or
Speaker 2: lack thereof. The tensions in their relationship played out messily
Speaker 2: and publicly. Claude complained several times directly to the King,
Speaker 2: trying and failing to have his work arrested. Angelique ordered
Speaker 2: a legal separation of goods to protect her fortune from
Speaker 2: her husband. After his creditors began to hound their family,
Speaker 2: Claude became at least a bully, if not an abuser
Speaker 2: of his wife during this period, so a plot was hatched.
Speaker 2: On April eighth, sixteen ninety nine, after leaving dinner at
Speaker 2: a friend's house, Claude de Quet was accosted by two men.
Speaker 2: One apparently said there you are. I've been waiting for
Speaker 2: you a long time. You must die, and shot him
Speaker 2: twice with a pistol. Clearly the screenwriting wasn't a part
Speaker 2: of this arrangement. The other man followed up by stabbing
Speaker 2: Claude several times with a sword. A servant quickly found him,
Speaker 2: and he miraculously survived. The police opened an investigation, and
Speaker 2: because the couple's hatred for each other was so well known,
Speaker 2: Angelique was immediately implicated, along with her porter, who acted
Speaker 2: as one of the assassins. In June, the servant was
Speaker 2: sentenced to hanging and Angelique was sentenced to beheading. She
Speaker 2: maintained her innocence until she was tortured on the day
Speaker 2: of her death, escaping conviction once again. Was Angelique's other
Speaker 2: accomplice in the plan, her friend Marie Catherine Denis. It's
Speaker 2: not known when the two women met, but as a
Speaker 2: woman in Parisian society. It's likely that Angelique attended Marie
Speaker 2: Catherine salons, perhaps even acting in her plays. And Marguerite Denier,
Speaker 2: a famous early eighteenth century French journalist, include in a
Speaker 2: seventeen oh two publication an account of the Tiquet affair
Speaker 2: from an anonymous correspondent written at the time of the
Speaker 2: trial and execution. The correspondent details that the day after
Speaker 2: the attempt on her husband's life, Angelique visited Marie Catherine
Speaker 2: and exclaimed, Saint moi conna assassinat how should we apologies
Speaker 2: for my French? I promise I tried my best. The
Speaker 2: tricky thing about French, aside from the pronunciation, is that
Speaker 2: the sentence could either be translated to mean it's me
Speaker 2: who we have murdered today, meaning we the two women,
Speaker 2: or it is me who they have murdered today meaning
Speaker 2: the public. The French court was actually never able to
Speaker 2: connect Angelique directly to that sixteen ninety nine murder attempt,
Speaker 2: so she was technically convicted for what they believed was
Speaker 2: evidence of a murder attempt three years prior, with no
Speaker 2: evidence tying her to either the sixteen ninety nine attempt
Speaker 2: or the alleged earlier one, Marie Catherine once again escaped
Speaker 2: a dark fate. It seems that after the trial, Marie
Speaker 2: Catherine withdrew from Parisian social life, likely ceasing to hold
Speaker 2: her beloved salons. She died six years later in seventeen
Speaker 2: o five, leaving behind twelve published works, including twenty four
Speaker 2: fairy tales that would change the genre forever. While Murray
Speaker 2: Catherine's story might have been reflected in The Bluebird and
Speaker 2: the White Cat, Angelique is more closely seen in Delnoit's
Speaker 2: The Yellow Dwarf, in which the heroined love is killed
Speaker 2: by the dwarf attempting to marry her and she dies
Speaker 2: of grief. For Delnois, the Yellow Dwarf represented the evils
Speaker 2: of man, while animals represented escapism from those evils. To
Speaker 2: once again quote Marina Warner, Madame del Noi seized the
Speaker 2: opportunities which the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis offered her
Speaker 2: to create a world of pretend in which happiness and
Speaker 2: love are sometimes possible for a heroine, but elusive and
Speaker 2: hard one. That's the story of Madame Delnois. But keep
Speaker 2: listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little
Speaker 2: bit more about her legacy. Despite her fameuring her time,
Speaker 2: reprints and English translations of Marie Catherine's works became less
Speaker 2: and less common over time, favoring the works of her
Speaker 2: contemporary Charles Perrault instead. Parrault wrote specifically with his children
Speaker 2: in mind, popularizing the identity of mother Goose as a storyteller.
Speaker 2: His tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are inarguably feats
Speaker 2: of storytelling that have stood the test of time, but
Speaker 2: they don't carry within them the same adult headiness of
Speaker 2: Madame Delnois's tales, which were written for an audience of
Speaker 2: salon goers. It wasn't all roses for Paroult, though. There's
Speaker 2: a reason his Donkey skin, about a king trying to
Speaker 2: marry his own daughter hasn't gotten a Disney adaptation, But
Speaker 2: I digress. In twenty nineteen, the independent US publisher Blackcoat
Speaker 2: Press published a long awaited two volume collection of Mary
Speaker 2: Catherine's work, and in twenty twenty, Princeton University Press published
Speaker 2: a collection entitled The Island of Happiness as a decidedly
Speaker 2: feminist work featuring illustrations and an essay by the artist
Speaker 2: Natalie Frank, known for her work exploring gender and sexuality.
Speaker 2: It most prominently features one of Marie Catherine's earliest stories,
Speaker 2: the Tale of Mira, which didn't appear in either of
Speaker 2: her fairy tale collections. Anyone who saw her fell desperately
Speaker 2: in love with her, Delnoir writes, however, her pride and
Speaker 2: indifference made all her lovers die. In an ironic ending,
Speaker 2: Mira falls for a man indifferent to her. Frank's essay
Speaker 2: calls it a feminist ghost story, worry for the ages,
Speaker 2: explaining that quote, a traditional fairy tale warns of the
Speaker 2: dangers of unrequited love, this one warns of the violence
Speaker 2: that occurs out of unreciprocated lust, poking fun at the
Speaker 2: seriousness of a tragic fairytale story end quote. Even feminist
Speaker 2: icon Gloria Steinem voiced her thoughts on the collection, saying,
Speaker 2: in giving us back the women, heroines, and images and
Speaker 2: lives that were once the heart and soul of the
Speaker 2: oldest stories, Natalie Frank is giving back to female readers
Speaker 2: the right to honor and tell our own stories. Noble
Speaker 2: Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild
Speaker 2: from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is created and hosted by
Speaker 2: me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
Speaker 2: Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The
Speaker 2: show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima
Speaker 2: Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers
Speaker 2: Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts
Speaker 2: from
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