Mailly, Jean, chevalier de (?–1724), French writer. A military officer and godson of Louis XIV, Mailly published widely, including a collection of 11 fairy tales, Les Illustres Fées, contes galans (The Illustrious Fairies, Galant Tales, 1698). (It is uncertain whether or not he contributed to a later collection, Nouveau recueil de contes de fées (New Collection of Fairy Tales, 1730). ) In The Illustrious Fairies Mailly displays a wide knowledge of the literary (and perhaps folkloric) sources of the 17th‐century French ‘vogue’ of fairy tales. For example, at least three of the tales in this volume (‘Fortunio’, ‘Blanche Belle’ (‘White Beauty’), and ‘Le Prince Guerini’) are versions of stories found in Straparola's Pleasant Nights; the plots of ‘White Beauty’ and ‘Guerini’ are also retold by his contemporaries d'Aulnoy and Murat; and four of Mailly's tales have discernible folkloric traces (the aforementioned, plus ‘Le Bienfaisant ou Quiribirini’ (‘The Benefactor or Quiribirini’)). In addition, his stories feature a wide range of the motifs commonly found in fairy tales of the period, including chivalric adventures, cabbalistic magic, enchanted islands, metamorphosis, and metempsychosis. Mailly makes frequent and deft use of the last two. In both ‘Le Prince Roger’ and ‘Le Roi magicien’ (‘The Magician King’), for example, a main character changes form to pursue love interests. And in ‘The Benefactor or Quiribirini’ the power of souls to travel from body to body is central to the plot. Metamorphosis of a more figurative kind occurs in ‘Le Prince Guerini’ when the hero, an uncouth but gentle ‘savage’, blossoms into a predictably incomparable hero‐prince. Without being parodic, many of Mailly's tales treat fairy‐tale scenarios with humour. Indeed, his tales often make use of ‘galanterie’, a refined but light‐hearted deference for women that is none the less androcentric; hence, the tongue‐in‐cheek criticism of husbands who do not tolerate their wives' extramarital affairs in ‘White Beauty’. For their variety and humour, Mailly's fairy tales evince a conception of the genre shared by d'Aulnoy, La Force, and Perrault.
Bibliography
- Hannon, Patricia, ‘Feminine Voice and the Motivated Text: Mme d'Aulnoy and the Chevalier de Mailly’, Merveilles et Contes, 2.1 (1988).
— Lewis C. Seifert
