The Black Nun of Moret

I was delighted to get an email from Lynn Nottage, author of the play Las Meninas, in response to my earlier post on the Queen's black baby.

She wrote:

I'd definitely welcome a conversation about the research I did for my play Las Meninas. The book that I found in the public library (the original copy), was translated into English in the early 1700's from Montespan's Memoir written in the late 1600's. It has been some years, but I will dig through my files and share what I found. If indeed Montespan didn't write the memoir, it is a highly imaginative and detailed account of the Queen's "black" child, detailing her birth, her childhood and her eventual placement
in a convent. I'd love to discuss. If it is an invention, I'd love to
know the reasons behind such an invention in the late 1600s and why this rumor turns up in so many accounts.

Regarding the Memoirs of Madame de Montespan (translated into English and available on-line), they are generally regarded as not, in fact, written by her, but I didn't know more so I turned, as so I often do, to the sage wisdom of Gary McCollim, who wrote:

As to the actual author of the so-called Mémoires of Madame de Montespan, the name generally given as the author is the Abbé Philippe Musoni. They were first published in 1829. This is according to Catherine Decours bibliography at the end of her pseudo-mémoires of La Montespan published in 2001 under the title Aimée du Roi. Jean-Christian Petitfils also includes this notation in his bibliography to his biography of La Montespan.

In my own bibliography, I had noted that these faux memoirs were “Written by Abbé L. Lafont d'Aussonne, d'après Quérard." Gary looked into this and reported back:

A brief search on the Internet reveals that Querard was an early nineteenth century writer who published a guide to writers in the nineteenth century including Lafont d'Ausonne. However, the listing of the books written by Lafont d'Ausonne does not include the memoirs of Madame de Montespan, although he did write a two volume history of Madame de Maintenon. Most of his work was on Marie Antoinette.

So: according to this, Abbé Philippe Musoni is likely the author, and the Memoirs were first published in 1829. This doesn't jive with the memoirs Lynn Nottage read, which were translated in the 1700s.

I did a deep search on the Net, and didn't come up with anything about Musoni or Lafont d'Aussonne, but Wikipedia does have an entry on Louise Marie-Therese (The Black Nun of Moret) which touches on a number of the theories.

(Image at left, Louise Marie-Therese.)

Faux memoirs are interesting historical documents because they frame a view of history as it was seen at that time. The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan are particularly interesting because, in parts, they are full of wit, humor and detail. I had the impression that the author must have been a member of the court. Who was the author -- and how did he or she get such detailed information? It's a mystery that I would love to see solved.

Since then, Lynn Nottage has written me again, giving me the references in the Montespan Memoirs. More on this anon ....

Sun King's fictional diaries mistaken for real

According to an article in the Guardian today (see link below), biographer Veronica Buckley, in her book Madame de Maintenon: The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, quotes from French historian François Bluche’s Le Journal Secret de Louis XIV throughout, assuming that the journals are real. They are not, and although at first I read them with the excitement of discovery, it didn’t take me long to deduce that they had to be fiction, so I’m surprised by her costly and embarrassing error. Buckley is the author of Christina, Queen of Sweden, a respected biography, and I can only imagine how painful this must be.

However, to be fair, she’s not the only one. I’ve read an academic thesis that cited Le Journal Secret as a primary source. Even so, how could this have happened — especially given that Le Journal Secret has tell-tale factual errors? Was Buckley’s work not being checked by historians?

I’d like raise yet another question: how could Bluche himself have made so many errors? He is prominent in the field, a respected historian. My suspicion is that he didn’t have his usual army of fact-checkers for a work of fiction. To give only one example, he claims that the King is present at a wedding on April 15, 1661. The bride in question had left Paris two days before, having been married on the 10th. Because I record facts to a detailed timeline, I caught a number of errors with respect to dates in the work: a wrong day here, a wrong month there, even, in one instance, a wrong year.

For more on this, see Helen Pidd’s article in The Guardian, “Find of Sun King’s secret diaries sounded almost too good to be true. And it was …”

The fuzzy line between fact and fiction

It disturbs me that “fiction” is getting such a bad rap in the U.S. press, that publishers feel they can’t market a novel, but that a “true” story is okay, that readers hunger for “truth” and will pay for it.

Since when has memoir been held to documentary standards? Memoir is a story created from life. I write historical fiction, and in delving into the research, I’ve come to see quite clearly that historians write fiction, as well. The line between fact and fiction is fuzzy, always, and I don’t understand this urge to nail it down. Facts can be misleading, and fiction can be revealing.

Story is how we explain the past—our history—to ourselves. Story is a powerful tool, and it is story that sets us apart from the world of animals (at least insofar as we know!).

Yet I’m guilty myself, I know. I love that “wow” moment when reading historical texts, thinking: Imagine—this actually happened. I think the issue is not whether something is true or false, but the understanding, the contract that is created between the author and reader. The outrage is: “We have been misled.” Frey’s memoir was more fiction than fact, but was marketed as fact. Even so, I have trouble understanding the furor.

One of my first historical reveries was brought on by a diary I read of a Quaker young woman in 18th century England. I was swept away by this “true” account. On my next trip to London, I researched her life; it was there that I learned that the diary was fiction, a novel. I felt disillusioned, let down, but then thought: “What a good novel.” For it drew me into the world of the past in a very real way—and that’s what fiction can do that fact cannot.