Les Vieilles Fées ou un «bizarre assortiment»

In the almost-forgotten original version (1740) of La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), Gabrielle de Villeneuve tells a far more complicated and erotic tale than does Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont in her later, shorter version of 1756. Along with Belle and her bestial lover, the prime actors are the fairies, young and old, whose illicit loves are at the origin of the plot. Villeneuve creates a complex society of long-lived fairies, a sort of proto-feminist community where age, not beauty, confers power, and where fairies attain their vétérance and establish their authority only at the age of 1000. But even so, the happy union of Belle with the transformed Bête, and the disgrace of the lustful old fairy (who had changed the young prince into a beast for scorning her amorous advances), celebrate passion in very young women and, in line with contemporary views, censure it in the old, whether fairies or women.