Jacques Cazotte

Cazotte, Jacques (1719–92), French author of fairy and fantastic tales. After serving in French colonies, he pastiched oriental fairy tales with ‘La Patte du chatte, conte zinzinois’ (‘The Cat's Paw’, 1741), whose ironic chapter titles parody Crébillon. Likewise, the supposed publishing house of ‘L'Endormy’ in ‘Baillons' (‘The Sleeper’ in ‘Let's Yawn’) parodically presents ‘Les Mille et une fadaises, contes pour dormir debout’ (‘The Thousand and One Trifles, Tales to Fall Asleep by’, 1742), written for an insomniac princess. Cazotte was later inspired by the fairy‐tale revival of Le Cabinet des fées (The Fairies' Study, 1785) and wrote the Continuation des mille et une nuits (Arabian Tales, 1788–9). Based on genuine folklore, these stories feature good vs. evil jinns, socio‐political criticism, and Cazotte's Illuminism.

He is best known for taking fairy‐tale magic into the realm of the occult. Psychological portraits, the questioning of illusion vs. reality, and the spiritual importance of dreams characterize his masterpiece, Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772), in which the devil (a woman) loves his/her conjuror. It influenced Hoffmann, Gautier, Nodier, and Nerval, who revealed Cazotte's initiation into Martinist theosophy. In later years, the royalist Cazotte was known for his prophecies concerning the Revolution, and foretold his death by guillotine.

Bibliography

• Shaw, Edward Pease, Jacques Cazotte (1942).
• Todorov, Tzevtan, The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (1975).
• Castex, Pierre‐Georges, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (1951).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Cazotte, Jacques (1719-92). French writer, most of whose varied literary output involves the merveilleux and/or the occult. He is chiefly remembered for Le Diable amoureux (1772), the first significant example of the conte fantastique [see Fantastic]. In this case, unlike his previous fiction, the supernatural elements are not rationally explicable. Having fallen in love with Biondetta, the female form assumed by the Devil, the hero eventually manages to resist ‘her’ temptations. The story illustrates Cazotte's anti-rationalist beliefs (he was later a follower, briefly, of Saint-Martin's Illuminist movement). He also opposed the Revolution, seeing it as a manifestation of Evil, an attitude which led to his execution.

[Vivienne Mylne]