The Comtesse d'Aulnoy and Her Voy age d'Espagne

Throughout the course of the seventeenth century the general public in France was relatively uninformed concerning the manners and morals of the people of her neighbor Spain, while in Spain a similar ignorance was to be observed concerning France. For this state of affairs we discern several reasons, the first of which, of course, was the natural barrier of the Pyrenees, an obstacle surmounted infrequently, and then only by the most hardy or highly motivated travelers. Then, too, a rough calculation shows that Spain and France were actively or indirectly engaged in armed conflict for nearly three quarters of the century. This prolonged state of hostility worked to arouse in the people of each country an interest in learning something of the ways of life of the other, but also prevented any mass exchange of ideology. This situation authorized the literate tourists of the time to publish accounts of their travels, and assured them that their works, however scant in literary worth, would find a ready and favorable reception. The travelers who did not publish such accounts were probably as few as the number of language professors who have not attempted an elementary grammar!' As a result of many of these travels, therefore, we have written accounts of the strange and beautiful sights and the exotic and eccentric mores to be observed in each country. It is always a very real problem for the student to determine the extent to which the imagination and nationalistic bias of a given author have colored or distorted the society he describes. When dealing with Spanish authors, we might well recall that some of the phenomena of the New World, reported with perfect seriousness by the official chroniclers of the several expeditions, were so bizarre and fantastic as to be incredible, surely, even to a reading public weaned on the magical novels of chivalry. In this article we are primarily concerned with a French visitor to Spanish soil. She is the Comtesse d'Aulnoy, who published a lengthy description of Spain and things Spanish under the title La cour et la ville de Madrid. Relation du voyage d'Espagne.2 This work appeared in 1691, but the fifteen letters which form the volume are dated from 1679-80. No autobiographical details (naturally enough, as we shall see) are found in the work itself, and in order to identify the comtesse and explain the reasons for her voyage, we look elsewhere. Marie Cataline, the comtesse, as we shall call her from now on, was the only daughter of Nicole le Jumel and Judit Ang61lique le Coustelier. After the death of Le Jumel, the mother married a Monsieur de Gudannes. The comtesse

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• Voyage en terre colonisatrice

  Valentine Balguerie•Early Modern French Studies•2024

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