TY - JOUR
AU - Sanders, Scott M
AB - Zémire et Azor, a lyrical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, was widely successful throughout Europe and the French Antilles from its debut at Fontainebleau in 1771 until after the Revolutionary period. In his memoir, the composer, André-Modeste Grétry, highlighted the comédie ballet’s cross-cultural appeal, citing a Frenchman who had seen three performances of the work on the same day: the original alongside translated versions in Dutch and German. Given Zémire’s long and diverse performance history, the allegory embedded within the comédie ballet likely shifted in meaning as the narrative interacted with local cultures. The inaugural performance of Zémire et Azor on November 9, 1771, that celebrated the Dauphin’s betrothal to Marie-Antoinette in front of Louis XV’s court differed from the performance that took place on December 9, 1784, in Bordeaux’s Grand-Théâtre. These differences cannot simply be attributed to changes in theatrical space and cast. Local culture shaped the reception of the work. A number of scholars have explored the political, philosophical, and cultural impact that opera broadly, and Grétry’s work in particular, had on French culture.1 As a contribution to this body of work, I consider how Zémire et Azor, along with the original version of Beauty and the Beast, implicitly commented on and added to eighteenth-century perspectives on race and miscegenation. In relation to Beauty and the Beast, this analysis differs from previous approaches to the tale that approach it through either a psychoanalytical critique of repressed sexual desire or a feminist critique of paternal authority and the objectification of women.2 In this article, I specifically reconsider Jack Zipes’s analysis of Beauty and the Beast through the lens of race. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Zipes argues that Beauty and the Beast responds to marriage practices in which parents forced young bourgeois and aristocratic women to marry elderly men who lacked physically appealing features.3 Reading Zipes’s analysis of marriage practices alongside two recent studies that uncover the colonial subtext of Beauty and the Beast, I argue that the novelistic and lyrical versions of Beauty and the Beast interacted with the marriage and enslaving cultures of France’s port cities. I trace this cultural interaction through the domestic lives of people living in port cities. At the center of this tale’s racial subtext is the Beast who personifies—through a racialized allegory—the wealthy, European-educated men of color whose presence in France led to singularly visible marriages with white women of aristocratic or bourgeois extraction. I follow variations of the Beauty and the Beast story across genres, time, and space, from the original 1740 tale to a 1771 lyrical adaptation titled Zémire et Azor. For the literary version by Madame de Villeneuve, I offer a textual interpretation of its racial subtext. I then move to the opera to analyze how provincial audiences would likely have interpreted these aspects of the text, based on local circumstances. By approaching theater through the lens of local history, I extend a methodology that Lauren Clay, Jean Fouchard, David Powers, and Julia Prest have established.4 By focusing in particular on Bordeaux’s theater culture, I continue the work of scholars such as Ellen Welch who have reimagined courtly festivals from the perspective of audience members.5 Within Grétry studies, R. J. Arnold has demonstrated how audience reception changed the cultural meaning associated with Grétry’s lyrical works.6 Borrowing from these approaches, I propose that Zémire et Azor implicitly interacted with local cultures of marriage and enslavement and promoted the desires of a paternal, commercial elite: within this local perspective, the allegorical marriage of Beauty to a racialized Beast represents the union of free people of color, especially the legitimate heirs of Bordeaux’s commercial elite, to the French-born daughters of colonial merchants. The Beast as a Human Species Reflecting on the genesis of Zémire et Azor, its librettist, Jean-François Marmontel, explained that he drew inspiration from Beauty and the Beast, and specifically from Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s simplified 1756 version. In fact, Marmontel differentiated his version from Beaumont’s with a sartorial anecdote. Anticipating the upcoming performance, Marmontel peeked at the beast’s costume. “What did I see?” writes Marmontel, “Pants similar to the skin of a monkey, with a short clean tail, a bare back, enormous claws on all fours, two long horns on the hood, and the most misshapen mask with wild boar teeth.”7 Marmontel quickly corrected the costume designer’s vision of the beast: “I asked you for a man’s suit, and not a monkey’s.”8 Marmontel then created a suit with “tiger-print pants, shoes and gloves alike, a purple satin dolman, a black, wavy, and charmingly dishevelled mane, a terrifying mask, neither misshapen, nor snout-like.”9 This sartorial description, along with the 1771 engraving of Zémire et Azor, depicts the beast as a man with animal-like features (see Figure 1). Given the feline lexicon that Marmontel employed, Azor’s costume evoked African wildlife, with its tiger-print pants, lion-like mane, and black mask. The materiality of Azor’s costume thus represented a Beast that married a human form to an African predator. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide 1771 engraving by François Robert Ingouf and Pierre Charles Ingouf of the magic tableau scene from Zémire et Azor. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide 1771 engraving by François Robert Ingouf and Pierre Charles Ingouf of the magic tableau scene from Zémire et Azor. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This costume evoked the speciation of the human race, which Voltaire began in 1744 with a short essay on an African albino, whom Voltaire called “a little white animal,”10 and continued into the 1770s with his article on beauty, in which he imagined a Guinean version of beauty: “Ask a negro from Guinea; beauty for him is oily black skin, sunken eyes, flattened nose.”11 Azor’s costume implicitly imitates a racialized visual vocabulary whose features Voltaire’s article on beauty delineates. This racialized version of beauty (and ugliness) does not problematize European standards of beauty; rather, it relies on a European prejudice against blackness to create a stark contrast with Azor’s inner beauty. Azor’s costume both comments on and contributes to the racialized subtext associated with the Beast. From the original Beauty and the Beast of 1740 to the late-eighteenth-century performances of its lyrical adaptation Zémire et Azor, the Beast embodied anxieties about the colonial expansion first into the Caribbean, and later East toward the Indian Ocean. While this article focuses on the original Villeneuve version and the operatic adaptation, this association between race and ugliness is most explicitly made in Leprince de Beaumont’s version, when Miss Molly likens Beauty’s experience to her own with a young black servant: “When papa took a completely black, little boy to be his lackey, I was afraid of him, I hid from him when he entered, he appeared to me to be uglier than a beast. And well, little by little, I got used to him.”12 Miss Molly’s comment demonstrates how the Beast personifies attitudes toward race that interact with the racial perceptions of white Europeans who had contact with people of color. Beauty and the Beast and its adaptations channel anxieties surrounding the intimate relationships of light- and dark-skinned members of commercial communities who were in direct contact with European colonialism. Whereas Miss Molly transposes the Beast’s identity onto that of a servant of color, the Beast personifies French attitudes toward wealthy, European-educated men of color who married light-skinned women. French Perspectives on Interracial Marriage From the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, miscegenation shifted in what Kimberly Lau calls the “Imperial imagination.”13 In her analysis of fairy tales written by d’Aulnoy, Murat, Villeneuve, and Beaumont, she identifies a shift in the representation of miscegenation: whereas late seventeenth-century depictions of interracial marriage recognized “the centrality of miscegenation in the imperial imagination of New France,” Beauty and the Beast requires that the Beast “be transformed prior to any significant interaction with the virginal maiden and certainly before their relationship is consummated.”14 Adding to Lau’s insight on the geopolitical significance of Nouvelle France and French policies that governed interracial marriage, I want to draw attention to the geopolitical significance of Saint-Domingue and the anti-miscegenation laws that forbade white subjects to marry free people of color. To appreciate how Beauty and the Beast implicitly comments on and contributes to French perspectives on interracial marriage, it is necessary to understand the legal and philosophical attitudes toward race and miscegenation in the mid- to late eighteenth century. A few events in this history are especially relevant to the notion of miscegenation, which I will soon discuss with reference to Beauty and the Beast. The French Crown began to racialize the institution of marriage with the Code Noir of 1724. This collection of laws governing enslavement included explicit language forbidding miscegenation between “white subjects” and “free” or “enslaved people of color” (Article VI, 3–4). This law, mostly symbolic, reflected the French Crown’s uneasiness with the growing number of biracial children in the colonies, who were the product of often violent but sometimes consensual interactions between white French men and enslaved African women. Because so few white French women lived in the French Antilles, a number of French men started families with enslaved and free women of color, and even passed their inheritance to their biracial children, often through a formal deed of gift.15 Among families who lived between the colonies and Metropolitan France, it was not unheard of for white men and wealthy women of color to marry. For instance, in 1741, the Intendant, Paul Lefebvre d’Albon, wrote from Guyana about a young white man who sought the hand in marriage of a widow, a free person of color, eighty years old. While the Intendant expected the marriage to be brief, he outlined the crown’s objections to interracial marriage: the mixing of blood [mélange de sang] and the inheritance of wealth from a free person of color.16 If the widow remained unmarried, the French colonial coffers would receive her wealth. Such stories were far from uncommon. In 1731 an official visiting Bainet in Saint-Domingue noted: “There are few whites of pure blood there because all the whites willingly ally themselves by marriage with the blacks, who, by their thrift, acquire property more easily than the whites.”17 In France, the gender and racial dynamics were slightly different. People of color who immigrated or were brutally transported to France under inhumane conditions were unevenly represented across age and gender lines, with young men and older women representing the largest share of people of color living in Metropolitan France.18 One of the first documented marriages between a French woman and a black man occurred in 1738. Jean Boucaux, an enslaved African who served a Parisian household for ten years, married a French woman. This change in civil status earned M. Boucaux his freedom. Following his 1738 trial, the French Crown became more interested in regulating the movement, marriage, and emancipation of people of color. During the Seven Years’ War, a period of limited commerce and movement across the French Atlantic, the French Crown increased its regulatory efforts, in part because of the growing presence of people of color in Metropolitan France. By 1762, a year before the end of the Seven Years’ War, the procureur du roy, Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, became troubled by the presence of “too great a quantity of negroes in France.”19 As historians have noted, this period marked the beginning of a campaign by members of the French Admiralty to restrict the entrance of people of color into France. A few months after the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Duc de Choiseul, the minister of the Navy, wrote to colonial administrators to ask them to restrict the migration of people of color to France: “The number of slaves has increased so much in France … that it has resulted in a mixed blood [un sang mêlé] which multiplies every day, by the communication [i.e., sexual contact] that they have with the whites.”20 This anti-migration, anti-miscegenation, and racist discourse culminated with the enactment of the 1777 Déclaration pour la police des noirs, which extended the 1762 Ordinance to include the detention and forcible deportation of people of color from Metropolitan France to the colonies. In a report justifying this law, Antoine de Sartine, the lieutenant general of the police and a Naval minister, claimed a public health benefit: “Negroes multiply every day in France by the great number of commercial ties between America and the kingdom. Their marriages with Europeans are favored. The public houses are infected with them. Colors are mixing, and blood is altered.”21 While the number of people of color was marginal as a percentage of the population (between 5,000 and possibly up to 15,000 people of color passed through France22), their presence occupied a symbolic space in the eyes of ancien régime bureaucrats such as Poncet de la Grave, Duc de Choiseul, and Antoine de Sartine. In the above comment, for instance, Sartine constructs race in a way that revolves around the notions of infectious disease and contamination. A year after the 1777 Déclaration, the French Crown issued an Arrêt on April 5, 1778, that was intended to curb miscegenation. It forbade France’s “white subjects … to enter a marriage contract with blacks, mulattoes,” including a proviso warning that interracial couples would be immediately deported to the colonies.23 This edict’s punishment, immediate deportation for interracial couples, makes explicit the warning embedded in Beauty and the Beast: that an exogamous marriage between a light-skinned woman and a dark-skinned, racialized beast will result in the exile of the light-skinned bride. In remarks defending the 1778 prohibition against interracial marriage, Poncet de la Grave even proposed a bestial conception of such relationships. According to him, “the mismatched marriages of negroes with white women & white men with negresses … produce creatures that—neither being of one nor of the other species—take shape with a mismatched colour which will soon strip away the beauty of children of the State.”24 Poncet de la Grave then speculates that without such a prohibition, “we will see them multiply their swarthy race, and change the color of citizens.”25 Here Poncet de la Grave articulates a conception of interracial marriage as a form of interspecies procreation whose existence threatens the European race. The crown’s prejudice against interracial marriage, however, was not shared by provincial bureaucrats, some of whom criticized the Crown’s segregationist policies. In the slave-trading port of Bordeaux, the response to the 1777 Police des Noirs was negative. Le Moyne, the commander of the Navy in Bordeaux, objected to the 1777 Déclaration because it treated individuals free by birth similarly to those who were enslaved. As Peabody notes, Le Moyne praised the “many successful colonists” of color who “owned property in Europe,” sent “their children to France to be educated,” and “had through years of intermarriage made it possible to ‘all but forget their origin.’”26 Beneath Le Moyne’s objections lie two prevalent attitudes regarding free people of color in the colonies. First, white French colonists considered free people of color to be their natural allies, in part because the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue outnumbered the free inhabitants by almost ten to one. By the eve of the French Revolution, the enslaved represented 88 percent of Saint-Domingue’s population, white colonists a little over 7 percent of the population, and free people of color around 5 percent.27 Free men of color even joined armed militias who rounded up escaped enslaved people. Unlike the French Crown, which sought to limit the number of people of color in Metropolitan France, Le Moyne offered a colonial perspective on the presence of people of color in France. Moreover, some French colonists were related by blood to free people of color. Le Moyne’s second objection refers to the colorist notion that darker skin tone fades away with each successive generation, evidenced by the logic of racial hierarchies that categorize skin tone in terms of African ancestry, roughly corresponding to nègre for African ancestry, grifon for three-fourths African ancestry, and mulâtre (bi-racial) and quarteron for one-fourth African ancestry. According to records preserved in the French archive, the French Crown was successful at limiting the number of interracial marriages in Metropolitan France, where such households were rare. Marcel Koufinkana has shown that very few interracial marriages were recorded in Metropolitan France during the eighteenth century. In all, he found twelve marriages between men of African ancestry to women of European ancestry: the inverse was even rarer, with only three marriage contracts.28 From this historical context emerged two types of interracial relationships. On the Caribbean side of the French Atlantic, white French men pursued women of color, often through violence and occasionally through consensual desire. On the European side of the French Atlantic, the French archive records a visible minority of cases in which men of color married white women. This context serves as a backdrop against which to analyze Beauty and the Beast as an allegory that reacts to and comments on the singularly visible marriages between white women and men of color. The Colonial Subtext of Beauty and the Beast In the original Beauty and the Beast, the tale is part of a longer series of stories titled La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins (1740 − 41). In the introduction to the tale, the storyteller, Mademoiselle de Chon, has recently completed her French education and is en route to Saint Domingue, a fictional voyage that the narrator invites the reader to imagine. Mademoiselle de Chon’s voyage is elided into the fairy tale in which the shifting fortunes of Beauty’s family transpose the social economy of colonialism into the fairy realm. Her father, at first ruined by the loss of a maritime vessel, becomes financially whole when the Beast offers him extravagant gifts in exchange for Beauty. Her father then buys slaves who “dispense us of the work to which necessity obliged us.”29 Beauty’s narrative dramatizes the quotidian aspects of colonialism: family members dispersed across the French Atlantic, familial wealth that is dependent on maritime commerce, and an indifference to the enslavement of people. In Villeneuve’s version, the representation of marriage also contributes to the construction of racialized identities. The frame narrative begins with the tale of a young French chevalier, Robertcourt, who leaves France to make his fortune in Saint Domingue, where he meets his future wife, the daughter of M. du Charoy—a wealthy American, which is to say a French colonist from the Antilles. Robertcourt’s marriage leads to an unforeseen consequence: his exile from France. As the narrator notes, Robertcourt “therefore preferred to renounce the gentleness of seeing his country again, than to return there by mortifying a wife so worthy of his consideration, and who even might have caused her death.”30 Just as Beauty is separated from her family, Robertcourt must leave his family and homeland out of love for his spouse and concern for her safety. The narrator of the frame narrative also explains: “When Creoles do something that absolutely forces their inclination, they fall into an untreatable sickness that is commonly called piller fantaisie (plundering imagination).”31 Like the Beast, whose appearance is a supernatural malediction, Robertcourt’s wife, once abandoned, might fall into an untreatable illness. This would occur if Robertcourt left his wife to return to France. While the narrative focuses on the French émigré’s sacrifice, it does not explain why his Creole wife cannot leave Saint-Domingue. The frame narrative represents one side of a diptych; Beauty and the Beast is its mirror image. The island-bound Creole wife is replaced by the Beast, whose malediction prevents him from leaving his castle. These two narratives effectively represent exogamy as a form of exile for the European spouse whose partner’s well-being is anchored to an “exotic” location. From the frame narrative to the fairy tale, the narrator explains that the bodies of the exiled spouses bear physical marks of their condition. Their symptoms manifest as an uncurable illness that alters their behavior. This pattern is easiest to recognize in the Beast, whose body is transformed from the inside out by a supernatural malediction. The narrator even hears in his “frightening voice … an accent caused by organs.”32 In the frame narrative, incurable illness is associated with the intense and possibly capricious desire of Creoles. To the psychological illness of creolization, the narrator adds a physical illness that afflicts French colonists: “a type of dysentery that disgusts, weakens and that often becomes fatal.”33 The American climate becomes the source of physical and psychological ailments. The pathologization of creole identity was not unique to Villeneuve’s fiction. By the early eighteenth century, natural philosophers had begun to pathologize the behavior of white Creoles and even to racialize their appearance. From Père Labat in the early eighteenth century until Moreau de Saint-Méry in the late eighteenth century, white Creoles inhabited an identity that was distinct from that of their French counterparts.34 As Garraway notes, “French immigrants underwent a dramatic change as they adapted to each other, the tropical environment, and the near total absence in the colonies of traditional codes of conduct regulating social, civil, and cultural life.”35 Villeneuve’s version of Beauty and the Beast reimagines exogamous relationships as an allegory of miscegenation. In the frame narrative, the French-born Robertcourt marries a Creole wife. While he cannot leave his wife and return to France, he does send his progeny back to Europe to receive a French education.36 The frame narrative thus fictionalizes and mirrors a central motive for the migration to and from France: to instil a French cultural identity through education. Beauty and the Beast complements the transatlantic family romance with a slightly different exogamous relationship. A Beast of fairy origin marries Belle, who, the narrator notes, is from “the race of Adam.”37 The frame narrative and Beauty and the Beast speak to a cultural anxiety regarding colonial contact with the Caribbean and its inhabitants of Native American and African descent. Villeneuve’s story represents this concern as centering on a form of miscegenation: it comes from a belief, which is to say the intermarriage of two species, of two cultures, of the race of Adam with the fairy species, and of the French-born with the Creole. Tales of miscegenation often allude to the sexual desires and reproductive aims of French colonists. Doris Garraway argues that colonial discourse found in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s late eighteenth-century ethnography imagines Saint-Domingue through the lens of a family romance in which enslavers, the enslaved, and free people of color are bound in a regime of “sexual domination and reproductive violence.”38 This discourse, however, does not completely capture the nuanced gender and power dynamics among and within colonial families like Madame de Villeneuve, whose acquaintances presumably included the enslaved and enslavers living between the slave-trading ports of France—La Rochelle, Nantes, and Bordeaux—and the French Antilles. Indeed, according to Jennifer Palmer, the household interactions between the enslaved and their enslavers slightly complicate narratives of race in which intimacy at times disrupted the French Crown’s attempt to maintain a segregated and hierarchical social order.39 In Beauty and the Beast, the allegory of miscegenation does not explicitly evoke contemporaneous discourses surrounding the movement and marriage of enslaved and free people of color. The Beast’s situation, however, personifies a generational transformation that was occurring in Saint-Domingue and was beginning to occur in France. For French colonists, the arc of this generational transformation ended with the progressive whitening of biracial progeny.40 Across the French Atlantic diaspora, the collective experiences of interracial couples present a two-panelled mosaic in which gender, power, and race interacted with each other differently in France and the colonies. As I noted earlier, in the French Antilles, many enslaved and free women of color had biracial children born of violent, coerced, or consensual relationships with French men. Occasionally, a French colonist would name his children as heirs,41 and some even sent their sons to France to receive an education.42 This movement of young men of color to France altered the situation in Metropolitan France. Although in the 1740s there were relatively few cases of men of color marrying white women, the visible presence of these interracial couples contributed to the Metropolitan French experience of the French African diaspora. The French archive holds very few records of these interracial marriages, in part because the Catholic Church and the French Crown did not want to document their existence. While the French government forbade people of color to marry, local authorities permitted some individuals to marry, and twenty-one interracial marriages were recorded in Bordeaux and thirteen in Nantes.43 In Bordeaux and Nantes, forty percent of marriages that involved people of color were marriages between black and white inhabitants. Of those marriages, two thirds of those in Bordeaux were between black men and white women, and in Nantes, all of them were between white women and men of color. Beauty and the Beast implicitly comments on concerns associated with interracial marriage at a moment when proto-racist discourses were emerging. In this sense, Villeneuve’s story participates in a new discourse on race that was not yet widely known. During this early period, the scientific community included figures such as Voltaire, who believed that there were several human species. In his essay on the albino African boy, Voltaire referred to human races as different animal species. The character of the Beast likewise reflects contemporaneous discourses on the animal-like identity of racialized others. Covered in scales, with internally modified organs and a voice that pierces a black veil, the Beast personifies the cultural anxiety about racialized identities. Beauty and the Beast, in short, fictionalizes a discourse on human speciation and frames this narrative within an allegory of miscegenation. A light-skinned woman marries a racialized male figure, and through the myth of generational whitening, she transforms him into a white prince. Azor as a Marker of a Racialized “Other” The lyrical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast moves the tale from the French Atlantic to the Middle East. Zémire et Azor, a musical comedy set in Persia, alternates between a fairy castle and a bourgeois countryside estate near the strait of Hormuz. The story revolves around a cursed prince, Azor, who ensnares a merchant called Sander. Azor gives Sander a choice: he will spare the merchant’s life in return for one of his daughters. Sander is unwilling to make the trade, but his daughter Zémire willingly offers herself. During the final two acts, she becomes acquainted with Azor’s cursed existence, for which she first feels pity. By the end, her feelings toward Azor develop into a selfless form of love whose power reverses Azor’s curse. For this comédie ballet, Marmontel collaborated with the composer André Grétry. The librettist adapted aspects of Leprince de Beaumont’s version of Beauty and the Beast and blended them with characters from La Chaussée’s comedy Love for Love. The play’s intertext alludes to Azor’s Persian ancestry. His name, however, was common among enslaved people living in Saint-Domingue and Metropolitan France. From 1776 to 1790, the Affiches américanes published seventy-nine advertisements of escapees named Azor, and between 1815 and 1829, six advertisements for four individuals named Azor appeared in the Gazette officielle de la Guadeloupe.44 In 1805 Le Moniteur de la Louisianne reported on an escaped Azor whose appearance—a “black and rather handsome man”—incorporated both blackness and attractiveness.45 In Metropolitan France, fifty-eight individuals named Azor lived in or passed through a number of cities, with a third passing through Bordeaux and a third through Nantes.46 Only two Azors are recorded before the 1770s, one in 1743 and another in 1763; the vast majority (65 percent) appear in the 1777 census of people of color. While the individuals named Azor had diverse backgrounds—they included individuals from Congo, Senegal, Bengal, and Madagascar—they shared a few demographic similarities. These records include information about their age, status, and profession: 50 percent were boys under the age of fifteen, 57 percent were enslaved, and 82 percent worked as servants. Almost 70 percent of the individuals named Azor came from sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly 90 percent are racially identified as Nègre or Négrillon. The version of Azor that these records construct is a dark-skinned, enslaved boy from sub-Saharan Africa. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Louis Joseph Azor, dit Ferrand, who signed the Déclaration des hommes de couleur in 1789 and joined the Légion des Américains on April 22, 1793.47 The nickname Ferrand raises an important question: Were these individuals given the name of Azor by the enslavers who bought and traded them? Given the geographic and ethnic diversity of the Azors recorded in France’s archives, this name was likely given by the enslavers.48 While a few individuals who lived or passed through France had the nickname Azor, which may suggest a chosen name with a connection to an individual’s cultural origin, Azor appears to be an exoticized name that enslavers imposed on young boys of African descent. Considering the period during which the archive retains records of people named Azor, Grétry’s comédie ballet may have contributed to the name’s popularity. Zémire, moreover, appears in the Affiches Américaines from 1778 until 1789 in connection with eleven individuals of that name.49 In Metropolitan France, five individuals named Zémire lived in or passed through France from 1776 to 1807.50 These individuals may have received their names as a form of ridicule. As Vincent Cousseau argues, heroic names from antiquity, such as Cesar, mocked the enslaved status of individuals “by playing with the difference between the receipt of a prestigious name on one hand, and the enslaved condition on the other hand.”51 Enslavers may have chosen Azor, as a sobriquet for racialized ugliness, to reinforce racial stereotypes. As Miss Molly noted in Leprince de Beaumont’s version of Beauty and the Beast, she at first thought of the young black servant boy in her father’s employ as an ugly beast. By attributing the full agency in naming to the enslaver and associating Azor with Grétry’s comédie ballet, I am suggesting that the lyrical version directly influenced the naming practices of enslavers. The name Azor became a racialized stereotype that marked an enslaved child as a racialized beast. While the power to name was squarely in the hands of enslavers, the cultural agency of an enslaved person could also influence, on a local level, the name’s racialized connotation. In particular, the exceptional lives of men named Azor may have slowly changed the cultural connotation associated with this name. In detailing the lives of men who were possibly named after an operatic character, I am reversing the flow of identarian construction from the cultural object, the operatic character named Azor, to the flesh-and-blood boys who were given this name. This local, granular approach to identarian construction attempts to give agency to the men whose lives may have been touched by the fictional beast’s name. For instance, late-eighteenth-century theatergoers who encountered Louis Joseph Azor, dit Ferrant, may have reimagined the beastly image of Grétry’s Azor and incorporated into their composite depiction of the beast the heroic military exploits of Louis Joseph Azor, dit Ferrand.52 His revolutionary heroics, in other words, may have modified theatergoers’ perception of the racialized Beast. This granular and local history, however, would have been an ephemeral legacy, lost to the archive and to subsequent generations of French theatergoers. By reversing the flow of cultural agency from the creators and producers of dramatic works to the people of color named after dramatic characters, I am revisiting and reinterpreting the visible and symbolic presence that people of color occupied in French port cities. In Bordeaux, for instance, the ceiling fresco in the Grand-Théâtre’s auditorium depicts the commercial goods that contributed to Bordeaux’s wealth, from its production of wine to its involvement in colonial commerce (see Figure 2). In its depiction of colonial wealth, the painter Jean-Baptiste-Claude Robin shifts away from the fresco’s personified symbology—such as Bacchus, who represents Bordeaux’s wine production—and toward a literal representation of commercial goods. Specifically, the ceiling fresco depicts enslaved Africans in chains alongside men, possibly men of color, working in the port (see Figure 3). Robin’s representation of the port makes explicit the role that free and enslaved people of color played in the creation of Bordeaux’s maritime wealth. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ceiling Fresco of the Auditorium by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Robin, 1780, Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ceiling Fresco of the Auditorium by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Robin, 1780, Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of Enslaved Africans from the Ceiling Fresco of the Auditorium by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Robin, 1780, Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of Enslaved Africans from the Ceiling Fresco of the Auditorium by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Robin, 1780, Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Below this copula were patrons who participated directly or indirectly in colonial enterprises, including slave trading. The archive offers glimpses of Bordeaux’s ties to colonial commerce. In one review written for the Journal de Guienne, a Creole writes admiringly of the Grand-Théâtre’s performance.53 What’s more, two of the shareholders whose financial support made possible the construction of Bordeaux’s Grand-Théâtre were the Gradis and Lamolère de Feuillas families, whose households included servants of color.54 In M. Lamolère de Feuillas’s employ was a free woman of color, Brigitte, who worked as a seamstress. Finally, among the patrons who received free tickets from the theater’s administration, a lawyer working for the Bordeaux Parlement, M. Dupin, owned an enslaved man named Philippe.55 By emphasizing the connections that theatergoers had to people of color, and possibly even to boys of color named Azor, I am suggesting that cultural objects such as novels, plays, and operas are not self-contained. The free and enslaved people of color who encountered theatergoers might have modified the latter’s perception and interpretation of Grétry’s racialized beast, Azor, insofar as the lives of people of color contributed to the construction of French racialized identities. In the theater, the Azor of Grétry’s opera, on the one hand, suggests the need to tame a racialized beast through interracial marriage, a process that magically transforms a racialized beast into a light-skinned prince. During the Revolutionary period, the heroics of Louis Joseph Azor, on the other hand, likely implicitly and imperceptibly complicated the racialized connotation of his name. Louis Joseph Azor’s life constructed another version of Azor, one in which blackness and heroics existed without the proto-racist intervention of a light-skinned savior. Interracial Marriages: Real and Allegorical Beyond the complex questions surrounding the racialized origin of the name Azor, the lyrical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast likely contributed to cultural attitudes surrounding interracial marriage. In Bordeaux, Zémire et Azor existed as a cultural object whose interaction with local influences blended the tale’s allegory of miscegenation with the social reality of Bordeaux’s residents. In this regard, it is worth considering two remarkable couples whose relationships shaped attitudes toward interracial marriage in Bordeaux. The first couple directly confronted the French Crown’s laws against miscegenation. In 1780 Louis Collet, the servant of the wealthy merchant Grenier, married a white French woman. According to a 1778 edict signed by Antoine Sartine, people of color were technically not allowed to marry white French subjects. Seizing on this royal decree, Collet’s employer, Grenier, reported the marriage to the authorities. The French Crown quickly mounted a case against Collet until the Bordeaux public became involved. Criticizing Grenier for denouncing Collet, the public threw its support behind the newlywed couple. This high-profile case suggests that Bordeaux’s public was more open to interracial marriage than was the French Crown. In addition to Collet’s marriage, there was another betrothal that attests to the complex geographies that left a mark on the French public’s attitude to interracial marriage. Hugues de Montbrun, the heir of Vincent Brisset-Monbrun and Marie-Thérèse Morino, a free woman of color, married Radegonde Angélique Borie, daughter to the lord of Haut-Pomarède. In the Revolutionary period, Hugues de Montbrun participated in the election of nobles to the États Généraux. A year later, while serving as a colonel, he signed a formal protest to a project proposing the abolition of slavery.56 Hugues de Montbrun’s biography brings to life the fictional dénouement of Beauty and the Beast, a racialized gentleman who marries a light-skinned woman: a gentleman, moreover, who holds onto and condones a colonial system of power that enslaves people. Given that Zémire et Azor is, according to Judith le Blanc and Patrick Taïeb, a moral work that integrates the domestic concerns represented in the drame bourgeois,57 marriage is central to its cultural meaning. From these local histories, a complex geography of attitudes toward interracial marriage influenced the ways provincial audiences interpreted Zémire et Azor. Whereas Azor, with his dark-skinned face and mane-like wig, embodies the anxieties of the French Crown, and especially of bureaucrats in the French Admiralty who considered miscegenation a corruption of French blood, his appearance in provincial cities may have been interpreted as embodying the prestige of men such as Hugues de Montbrun. Within the elite cultural milieu of port cities, Azor personifies apprehensions about wealthy, European-educated people of color while also dramatizing the potential for their social integration. To achieve integration, the darker-skinned Azor must fall in love with the lighter-skinned Zémire, whose marriage to Azor will lighten the skin tone of their children, who presumably will be members of the commercial elite. A painting titled Scenes from Everyday Life that depicts a cosmopolitan man of color represents the ambiguous attitude to aristocratic (or bourgeois) men of color in the provinces (see Figure 4). This painting, housed at the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, portrays a dandy whose presence in the shadows is further obscured by the darkness of his skin. At the periphery, the painting brightens to illuminate the astonished, fascinated, and slightly apprehensive expressions of working-class white women. This illustration visualizes Beauty and the Beast’s allegorical representation of a racialized beast and translates this figure into a late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century visual vocabulary. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Scene from everyday life, the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Musée d’Aquitaine. Courtesy of the Musée d’Aquitaine. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Scene from everyday life, the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Musée d’Aquitaine. Courtesy of the Musée d’Aquitaine. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 1. Grétry et Jean-François Marmontel, “Ah laissez-moi la pleurer,” Zémire et Azor, act 3, scene 6, mm. 13 − 17. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 1. Grétry et Jean-François Marmontel, “Ah laissez-moi la pleurer,” Zémire et Azor, act 3, scene 6, mm. 13 − 17. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 2. Grétry and Marmontel, “Azor, en vain ma voix t’appelle,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 4, mm. 125 − 28. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 2. Grétry and Marmontel, “Azor, en vain ma voix t’appelle,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 4, mm. 125 − 28. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 3. Grétry, “Symphonie qui exprime le vol du nuage,” Zémire et Azor, act 1, scene 2, mm. 1 − 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 3. Grétry, “Symphonie qui exprime le vol du nuage,” Zémire et Azor, act 1, scene 2, mm. 1 − 3. This explicit representation of a cosmopolitan man of color adds context to my reading of the allegory of race and miscegenation embedded in Grétry’s comédie ballet. The work itself displaces the site of interracial marriage outside of Metropolitan France. As an allegorical treatment of cross-cultural contact, Zémire et Azor uses a common framing device in which colonial encounters with the French Antilles are exoticized within a Middle Eastern context. As Madeleine Dobie argues in Trading Places, eighteenth-century writers displaced “Caribbean colonies and their regimen of race-based slavery … onto Oriental culture.”58 The displacement of the French Atlantic toward the Middle East, while a common trope in French literature, also mirrors a development in colonial interests that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Here the East becomes the site of France’s new colonial aspirations. After the Seven Years’ War, the French began to expand their empire toward the Indian Ocean. By the 1780s, Bordeaux merchants were exploiting resources in colonies off the coast of East Africa and even extending their trade into India. While this comédie ballet portrays Persia and the Middle East, in doing so, it transposes racialized French Atlantic identities onto Persian and Arabian bodies. By the late eighteenth century, this displacement of French Atlantic slavery toward the Middle East was both a veil, obscuring French involvement in Atlantic slavery, and a colonial aspiration, directing attention toward France’s desire to expand its empire eastward. Even through the veil of exoticism, the characters’ experience would have resonated with the “élite du commerce” for whom the Grand-Théâtre was built.59 Sander’s maritime profession would also have been meaningful to the commercial elites who attended theatrical performances. In general, they prized the spirit of commerce and production while shunning the opulent lifestyle of the capital. For instance, David Gradis, a relative of one of Bordeaux’s theater shareholders and a member of an important slave-trading family, wrote a memoir on the benefits of plantation wealth over the unproductive opulence of Parisian aristocrats.60 This attitude toward opulence trickled down into literary and theatrical criticism. For instance, on December 11, 1784, the Journal de Guienne published a review of Zémire et Azor and specifically criticized the performer playing Zémire, Mlle Clairville, for her decision to wear an elegant and opulent costume that undermined her character’s identity as the modest and frugal daughter of a merchant.61 By identifying the importance of Zémire’s modesty, the Journal de Guienne drew attention to her role as a moral educator. As a tale about Azor’s transformation, Grétry’s comédie ballet casts Zémire in the role of moral guide. Evoking Sophie’s relationship with Émile in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education, Zémire completes Azor’s moral education first by awakening desire in him and then focusing that amorous energy toward Azor’s development as a morally rounded man. Zémire, however, is not guiding Azor from adolescence to manhood. She instead serves as a catalyst for transforming a racialized beast into a human being. The comédie ballet first offers a glimpse of this transformation at the moment when Azor recognizes his awakening desire for Zémire, a scene in which Zémire comments on an alteration in Azor’s voice. Upon considering the passion that animates Azor’s melody, she begins to recognize him as a person, an individual who has endured suffering and a man for whom she feels compassion. This moment occurs after Azor performs the aria “Du moment qu’on aime.” Zémire remarks: “That voice there is surely not the sign of a savage heart. And his ugliness without a doubt is an enchantment.”62 In this regard, Azor’s voice becomes a signifier of his hidden humanity. Marmontel even explains in his Mémoires that Azor’s aria is the means through which he washes away the last remnants of his ugliness. After hearing the actor Clairval sing “Du moment qu’on aime,” women in the audience, according to Marmontel, “said to each other, he is no longer ugly, and, a second later. He is handsome.”63 The playwright even acknowledged: “Music’s charm masterfully contributed to produce such effects.”64 In his nod to Grétry’s music, Marmontel makes lexical choices, specifically with the terms merveilleusement and charme, that gesture toward the supernatural aura of Grétry’s score. What is noteworthy here is that Marmontel presages the organ that is instrumental in Azor’s magical transformation, namely the voice. It is Zémire’s voice, specifically, that transforms Azor from a racialized beast into a light-skinned prince. Her voice’s power flows from a unique blending of sensibility with the supernatural,65 and is represented through Grétry’s orchestration. To appreciate how Zémire’s voice transforms Azor, it is important to understand how Grétry’s orchestration often serves to imitate and sustain the affective tone of singers. This relationship between voice and instrument is part of a broader musical phenomenon that started in the mid-eighteenth century. As Emily Dolan notes, “singing tone was imperative in good instrumental playing, and it was manifest as well in treatises on instrumentation that began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century.”66 In Grétry’s Mémoires, he identifies a shift in the role of wind instruments: “When music did not declaim, a flute, a trumpet, a horn, meant love, glory, or the hunt. It is now necessary that these various instruments contribute to the expression.”67 In this passage, “declaim” and “expression” refer to a style of vocal and melodic expression that convey affective meaning. In Zémire et Azor, wind instruments serve to heighten, sustain, or supplement the singer’s melodic line. For instance, Grétry explains how a bassoon line from the aria “le Temps est beau” imitates the yawning of Ali, Sander’s enslaved servant.68 Here bassoons add an affective character to a sound, yawning, that resists any semantic meaning. The bassoon, according to Grétry, is one of the instruments that “approaches the voice of nature”: these instruments, which also include the clarinet, “act less on the imagination” so much so that “listening” to them, “you think you hear the moans of a man or a woman.”69 For Ali’s scene, the affective tone of bassoons, plaintive and pathetic, parodies, to comic effect, Ali’s condition: he is not suffering emotionally, instead he is intoxicated. Grétry, however, later deploys the bassoon to showcase its affective register. In this scene, Sander mourns his separation with her. Bassoons along with clarinets and horns accompany Zémire’s father, Sander. At first, the wind ensemble accompanies a mute scene. According to Grétry, the repeated three-note descending figure imitates the declamation of Sander’s lyric, “Ah! Laissez-moi, laissez-moi”70 (see Ex. 1). When Azor finally agrees to allow Zémire to hear her family, the first clarinet performs in unison two octaves above Sander’s line while bassoons harmonize on a minor third, perfect fifth, and octave below Sander. With the clarinet doubling Sander, it appears to convey a sort of pain, an affect that Grétry associated with the clarinet.71 The bassoon line may serve as an instrumental amplification for the moaning gestures that Zémire’s sisters perform. To represent the separation between Zémire and her family, Grétry placed the wind ensemble backstage. Given that these instruments accompany and amplify the pathos of Zémire’s family, their position backstage reinforces her family’s distance. As Deirdre Loughridge notes, “the muted tone of the Trio, moreover, is tied to the visual as much as to the auditory experience of the picture.”72 This magical tableau is a much commented on scene whose significance to Opéra-comique aesthetics is often debated. For some scholars, the televisual aspects of this scene are central to its supernatural aura and gesture toward German Romanticism,73 or draw on a tradition of audiovisual effects, seen in theatrical and boulevard performances.74 For another group, this scene demonstrates the importance of identification and sensibility in Opéra-comique aesthetics.75 The audiovisual distance that the tableau represents becomes a key element in its capacity to engage spectators in an act of identification.76 For my analysis, I would like to pause on the supernatural power that the voice possesses in Grétry’s orchestration. First, voices are sublimated through the instrumental line. Then, instruments accompany and amplify the pathos of Sander’s melodic line. Once Zémire hears her father’s accompanied voice, she fails to recognize the distance that separates her from her family. Near the end of the opera, the voice returns to naturalize a supernatural event. Preceding Azor’s transformation, French horns echo Zémire’s call for Azor (see Ex. 2). The scenography, depicting a cave, represents reflective surfaces that contribute to the echo illusion. The orchestration here aligns with Emily Dolan’s descriptions of horns. As background, the horn adds “warmth … to create a full orchestral sonority,” and in isolation, it gestures toward “its origin as a hunting instrument … a tool of communication in the context of the hunt.”77 According to Grétry, the French horn has a “heterogeneous sound,” with C, E, and G resonating with clarity and D, F, A, and B sounding muted.78 In Grétry’s estimation, the register, an octave above middle C, resembles a falsetto, and notes at the upper end of the tessiatura, D and E, sound very beautiful.79 In this passage, French horns modify the timbre of Zémire’s call, first echoing two beautiful pitches, E to D, followed by a muted F and then back to the clear and beautiful E. The last echo—moving from a muted F to a clear and beautiful E—conveys to the listener the development of Zémire’s pathos. It first depicts the pain that Zémire feels for Azor’s condition, and then expresses the beauty of her selfless love. In addition to using orchestral color that amplifies and modifies the affective tone of Zémire’s call, Grétry’s score rhythmically gestures toward Azor’s metamorphosis. When supernatural events occur in the comédie ballet, violin tremolos often highlight the moment. In previous scenes, tremolos accompanied naturalistic depictions of the supernatural, a type of supernatural that Catherine Kintzler theorizes.80 In Examples 3 and 4, violin tremolos accompany meteorological forms of the supernatural. Example 3 is a sonic marker that presumably accompanies the movement—on stage—of a mechanistic cloud. Example 4 likewise increases the listener’s sense of speed in such a way that amplifies the onstage movement of a fiery chariot. For both examples, the violins depict a preternatural movement with sixteenth-note arpeggios, accompanied by bass tremolos. In addition to sixteenth-note tremolos, triplet and sextuplet tremolos add another layer to the supernatural event. For instance, in the aria “J’en suis encore tremblant,” triplet eighth notes quicken the pace of Ali’s aria at the precise moment when he is consumed by doubt (see Ex. 5). The shift from a duple to a triplet or sextuplet rhythm, in Grétry’s score, appears to convey a change in a character’s emotional state. This rhythmically inflected form of the marvelous returns in act 4, when Zémire sings “je t’aime” (see Ex. 6). For this example, Grétry’s score shifts to the rhythmically inflected supernatural of Examples 3 and 4. Grétry slightly modifies this rhythmically inflected supernatural, which is associated with Azor’s meteorological power. At the moment when Azor’s appearance changes, violins shift from duple rhythms to sextuplet sixteenth notes. This third version of the marvelous depicts a moment of transformation. In Azor’s case, he is shedding his hideous form and reclaiming his handsome appearance. The catalyst of this miraculous transformation, Zémire’s voice, has properties that eighteenth-century natural philosophers associated with music. As Bettina Varwig argues in the German context, music, during the eighteenth century, hovered between a dialectic—simultaneously possessing the power to transform individuals into bestial or divine creatures.81 In the French context, the Montpellier School of Medicine included practitioners who associated both physical and spiritual benefits with music. In 1758 Jean-Joseph Roger, for instance, published a treatise on the effects of music on the human body. In it, he describes the vibration that sound transfers through the fibrous tissues to nerves, bones, and muscles.82 He later explains how music can cure a person of their irrationality (i.e., aliénation d’esprit).83 In this passage, Zémire’s voice becomes the sonic medium through which she cures Azor of his bestial, irrational form. Zémire’s voice serves as the supernatural force whereas the tremolo passages heighten the audience’s perception of supernatural events. The three versions of the marvelous discussed above—which generically depict meteorological power, emotional vitality, and moments of transformation—are not intrinsically racialized or even supernatural. These musical figures could appear in different locales, for other characters in dissimilar situations.84 But by considering the reception of Zémire et Azor in the slave-trading port of Bordeaux, we can recognize Zémire’s supernatural expression of love as the transformative agent that provincial elites associated with interracial marriage. Zémire serves as the moral educator whose love for the dark-skinned Azor completes his European education and transforms him into a compassionate human being. That this transformation leads to the lightening of Azor’s skin reflects the belief that moral education was both psychological and physiological. Azor’s lightened skin serves as a guarantor of his moral maturity. The allegory of miscegenation that is embedded within Beauty and the Beast dramatizes a myth about generational transformation that underpinned French provincial attitudes toward interracial marriage. The leaders of provincial cities believed that by promoting the marriage of light-skinned and dark-skinned members of the commercial elite, they could cause the skin tone of their small black population to gradually become lightened. Zémire et Azor appears to have contributed to a version of this myth. Its legacy precariously inhabits the proto-racist theories of the provincial elite: by justifying racial stereotypes that depict dark-skinned individuals as racialized others, the Beauty and the Beast tale and its lyrical adaptation reinforced these stereotypes. Through a proto-racist imaginary, this tale promotes a path toward racial integration through the erasure or whitening of black skin. By offering a local history of Zémire et Azor alongside the individuals whose names were entangled with Grétry’s comédie ballet, I hope to complicate the proto-racist legacy of Beauty and the Beast. Might the Azors who were given this name have constructed a new version of the Beast for spectators whose lives were touched by these men? Might they have remembered the martial presence of Louis Joseph Azor, who was among the seventy-five signatories to the Déclaration des hommes de couleurs? By imagining new versions of Azor, I treat their unheard and sparsely documented stories as a faint echo accompanying the character’s voice, an echo whose presence in provincial cities complicated and contested Beauty and the Beast’s proto-racist legacy. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 4. Grétry, “J’en suis encore tremblant,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 1, mm. 13 − 21. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 4. Grétry, “J’en suis encore tremblant,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 1, mm. 13 − 21. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Grétry and Marmontel, “J’en suis encore tremblant,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 1, mm. 132 − 48. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Grétry and Marmontel, “J’en suis encore tremblant,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 1, mm. 132 − 48. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Continued Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Continued Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Continued Open in new tabDownload slide Example 5: Continued Open in new tabDownload slide Example 6: Grétry and Marmontel, “Azor, en vain ma voix t’appelle,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 4, mm. 126 − 35. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 6: Grétry and Marmontel, “Azor, en vain ma voix t’appelle,” Zémire et Azor, act 4, scene 4, mm. 126 − 35. Open in new tabDownload slide Example 6: Continued Open in new tabDownload slide Example 6: Continued Scott Sanders is an assistant professor of French at Dartmouth College. As a scholar of early modern French literature and history, he specializes in British and Caribbean influences on French performance culture. For his first book, he started researching literary depictions of singers, which developed into a study of the voice and its representations in literary and philosophical texts. As he was completing his research on vocal science, he came across a troubling anecdote concerning enslaved men. The anatomist Denis Dodart gave as proof of his vocal theory the suicides of two enslaved men who had suffocated themselves by closing their glottis. From this anecdote, he began to consider how stories, texts, reports, plays, and people from Africa and the Windward Islands began to influence conceptions of music and vocal performance in Metropolitan France. This preliminary question led to the topic of his second project, which investigates the influence of the Black Atlantic on French performance culture. He would like to extend his gratitude to the archivists who helped to navigate three archives in Bordeaux: Archives Bordeaux Métropole, Archives départementales de la Gironde and Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux. For the figures in this article, he is indebted to Marina Pangrazi at the Musée d’Aquitaine as well as Laurent Croizier at the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. An especial thanks to Laurent Crozier for offering a personal tour of Bordeaux’s theater. Finally, he would like to thank Graziella Parati and the Leslie Center for the Humanities for their generous support. Footnotes 1 Olivia Bloechl, Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); David Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Julia Doe, The Comedians of the King: “Opéra-Comique” and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); R. J. Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public: From the Old Regime to the Restoration (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jacqueline Waeber, “Grétry Héritier de Rousseau: L’Intégration Du Récitatif Dans l’Opéra Comique,” in L’Amant Jaloux d’André Ernest Modest Grétry et Thomas d’Hèle: Livret, Études, Commentaires (Wavre: Mardaga, 2009), 231–62; Philippe Vendrix, L’Opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Liege: Editions Mardaga, 1992). 2 Jacques Barchilon, “Beauty and the Beast from Myth to Fairy Tale,” Pyschoanalytic Review 46, no. 4 (1959): 19–29; Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1976); Tatiana Korneeva, “Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve and Leprince de Beaumont’s ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” Marvels & Tales 28, no. 2 (2014): 233–51, https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.28.2.0233; Marina Warner, “Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I,” in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), 272–97. 3 Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 1st edn. (London: Routledge, 2011), 49. 4 Lauren R. Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jean Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue: prix de l’alliance française (Port au Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955); David M. Powers, From Plantation to Paradise?: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789 (East Lansing, MI: MSU Press, 2014); Julia Prest, “Iphigénie en Haïti: Performing Gluck's Paris Operas in the French Colonial Caribbean,” Eighteenth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 13–29, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478570616000282. 5 Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 6 Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 18–19. 7 “Que vis-je? un pantalon tout semblable à la peau d’un singe, avec une longue queue rase, un dos pelé, d’énormes griffes aux quatre pattes, deux longues cornes au capuchin, et le masque le plus difforme avec des dents de sanglier.” Jean François Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, ed. Maurice Tourneux, vol. 2 (Paris: Librarie des bibliophiles, 1891), 348. 8 “Je vous demandais un habit d’homme, et non pas de singe.” Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, 2:348. 9 “Un pantalon tigré, la chaussure et les gants de même, un doliman de satin pourpre, une crinière noire ondée et pittoresquement éparse, un masque effrayant, mais point difforme, ni ressemblant à un museau.” Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, 2:348. 10 “Un petit animal blanc.” Voltaire, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, in Relation touchant un maure blanc amené d’Afrique à Paris en 1744, vol. 17 (Paris: Hachette, 1860), 532. 11 “Interrogez un nègre de Guinée; le beau est pour lui une peau noire, huileuse, des yeux enfoncés, un nez épaté.” Voltaire, “Beau,” in Questions sur l’Encyclopedie: distribuées en forme de dictionnaire, vol. 3 (London, 1771), 52. 12 “Quand papa prit un petit garçon tout noir pour être son laquais, j’en avais peur, je me cachais quand il entrait, il me paraissait plus laid qu’une bête. Et bien, petit à petit, je m’y suis accoutumée.” Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Magasin des enfans, ou Dialogues d’une sage gouvernante (Lyon: Chez Pierre Bruyset Ponthus, 1770), 83. 13 Kimberly J. Lau, “Imperial Marvels: Race and the Colonial Imagination in the Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy,” Narrative Cultures 3, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 141 − 79. 14 Lau, “Imperial Marvels,” 165, 167. 15 J. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Springer, 2006), 65. 16 Paul Lefebvre d’Albon, “Letter,” September 18, 1741, ANOM, C 14, v. 18, 90r−91r. 17 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 48. 18 Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 78. 19 Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France, 74. 20 “Le nombre des Esclaves s’est augmenté si fort en France, et depuis, qu’il en résulté un sang mêlé, qui se multiplie tous les jours, par la communication qu’ils ont avec les Blancs.” “Lettre du Ministre aux Adminisrateurs, qui defend d’accorder aucun passage pour France aux Esclaves et aux Negres libres.” June 30, 1763, in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le Vent, vol. 4 (Paris: chez Quillau, 1784 − 1790), 602. 21 “Les nègres se multiplient chaque jour en France par la grande communication de l’Amérique avec le royaume. On y favorise leurs mariages avec les Européens. Les maisons publiques en sont infectées. Les couleurs se mêlent, le sang s’altère.” Pierre H. Boulle and Sue Peabody, Le droit des Noirs en France au temps de l’esclavage (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2014), 96. 22 Erick Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne: Paris et son bassin (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2011), xviii. 23 “Sujets blancs … de contracter mariage avec les noirs, mulâtres.” Boulle and Peabody, Le droit des Noirs en France au temps de l’esclavage, 121. 24 “Les mariages bigarrés des noirs avec des blanches & des blancs avec des négresses … procré[ent] des créatures qui n’étant ni de l’une ni de l’autre espèce forme une bigarrure qui déparera bientôt les enfants de l’État.” Boulle and Peabody, Le droit des Noirs en France au temps de l’esclavage, 121–22. 25 “Nous les verrions multiplier leur race basanée & changer la couleur des citoyens.” Boulle and Peabody, Le droit des Noirs en France au temps de l’esclavage, 122. 26 Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France, 121. 27 Robert Stein, “The Free Men of Colour and the Revolution in Saint Domingue, 1789 − 1792,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 14, no. 27 (1981): 12, https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/view/37971. 28 28. Eric Saugera, Bordeaux port négrier (XVIIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris: KARTHALA Editions, 2002), 299. 29 “Nous dispensent des travaux auxquels la nécessité nous assujetissait.” Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, ed. Élisa Biancardi (Paris: Champion, 2008), 142. 30 “Aima donc mieux renoncer à la douceur de revoir sa patrie, que d’y retourner en mortifiant une épouse si digne de ses égards, et qui même il eût peut-être cause la mort.” de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 86. 31 “Lorsque les Créoles font quelque chose qui force absolument leur inclination, ils tombent dans une maladie incurable qui se nomme communément piller fantaisie.” de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 86. 32 “Voix épouvantable … un ton forcé par les organes.” de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 124. 33 “Une espèce de dysenterie qui dégoûte, affaiblit … et qui devient souvent mortelle.” de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 88. 34 Doris L. Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2005), 240. 35 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 134. 36 de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 84. 37 “La race d’Adam.” de Villeneuve, La jeune américaine et les contes marins, 202. 38 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 275. 39 Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 16. 40 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 223–24. 41 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 65. 42 Erick Noël, Etre noir en France au 18e siècle (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2006), 133. 43 Marcel Koufinkana, Les Esclaves noirs en France sous l’ancien régime: XVIe - XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Harmattan, 2008), 70. 44 “Corpus,” Le Marronage dans le monde atlantique: sources et trajectoires de vie, accessed November 30, 2020, http://www.marronnage.info/fr/corpus.php. 45 “Noir et assez bel homme.” “Louisiane, Le Moniteur de La Louisiane - 1805-11-16,” Le Marronage dans le monde atlantique: sources et trajectoires de vie, accessed November 30, 2020, http://www.marronnage.info/fr/document.php?id=12188. 46 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 1:167, 179, 179, 186, 191, 196, 199, 227, 255, 274, 289, 343, 362, 422, 441, 444, 462; Erick Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne: Volume 2, La Bretagne (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2013), 487, 529, 530, 531, 538, 539, 544, 554, 569, 587, 612, 617, 619, 638, 656; Collectif and Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 518, 551, 562, 574, 575–76, 587, 591, 602, 606, 611, 652, 664, 673, 881, 883, 918: Erick Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne : Volume 3, Le Midi (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2017), 518, 551, 562, 574, 575–76, 587, 591, 602, 606, 611, 652, 664, 673, 881, 883, 918. 47 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 2011, 274. 48 For more on naming traditions, see Vincent Cousseau, “Nommer l'esclave dans la Caraïbe XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles,” Annales de Démographie Historique, no. 1 (131) (2016): 37–64. 49 Le Marronage dans le monde atlantique: sources et trajectoires de vie, http://www.marronnage.info/fr/document.php?id=12188. 50 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 1:248; Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 2:574, 620; Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 3:688. 51 “En jouant du décalage entre l’octroi d’un nom préstigieux d’une part, et la condition servile d’autre part.” Cousseau, “Nommer l'esclave dans la Caraïbe XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles,” 52. 52 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 1:274. 53 “Lettre d’un Créole aux Rédact. du Journ.,” April 19, 1785, Séjourné edition, sec. Spectacle. 54 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 3:49, 579. 55 “Etat des personnes,” June 11, 1780, GG 1004 a, 56 - 61, Archives Bordeaux Métropole; Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 3:563–64. 56 Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 3:280–81. 57 Judith Le Blanc, “Merveilleux et réalisme dans Zémire et Azor: un échange entre Diderot et Grétry,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 43, no. 1 (July 1, 2011): 186–87, 198. 58 Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 11. 59 “Lettre anonyme,” August 12, 1780, GG 1004 a, 46 r, Archives Bordeaux Métropole. 60 David Gradis, “Mémoire sur le système des économistes,” Patrimoine, Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, accessed July 19, 2019, https://selene.bordeaux.fr/notice?id=h%3A%3ABordeauxS_B330636101_Ms828_022_029&locale=fr. 61 “Review of Zémire et Azor,” Journal de Guïenne, December 11, 1784, sec. Spectacles. 62 “Cette voix-là sûrement n’annonce point un cœur sauvage! Et sa laideur sans doute est un enchantement.” Jean-François Marmontel and André Grétry, Zémire et Azor (Paris: Chez Didot, 1774), 25. 63 “Disaient entre elles: il n’est déjà plus laid, et, l’instant après, il est beau.” Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, 2:350. 64 “Le charme de la musique contribuoit merveilleusement à produire de tells effets.” Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, 2:350. 65 For scholarship on the combination of sensibility with the supernatural, see Tili Boon Cuillé, “Marvelous Machines: Revitalizing Enlightenment Opera,” Opera Quarterly 27, no. 1 (August 18, 2011): 66–93; for scholarship on the importance of sensibility in opera, see Downing Thomas, “Heart Strings,” in Aesthetics of Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 179–200; and Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 66 Emily I. Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 66. 67 “Lorsque la musique ne déclamoit point, une flûte traversière, une trompette, un cor, vouloient dire amour, gloire, ou la chasse. Il faut à présent que ces divers instrumens concourent à l'expression.” Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 1796, 1:237. 68 Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 1796, 1:224–25. 69 “Les instrumens à vent sur-tout, sont les plus parfaits d'autant qu'ils se rapprochent des voix de nature. En écoutant un basson, une clarinette, on croit entendre les plaintes d'un homme ou d'une femme.” André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, vol. 3 (Paris: la Republique an V, 1797), 256. 70 Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 1796, 1:225–26. 71 Ibid., 1:238. 72 72. Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 42. 73 Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 103–4. 74 Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow, 36–43. 75 Stefano Castelvecchi, “From ‘Nina’ to ‘Nina’: Psychodrama, Absorption and Sentiment in the 1780s,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996): 91–112; Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647 − 1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 251–62. 76 Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647 − 1785, 262. 77 Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution, 155–56. 78 Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 1797, 3:374. 79 Ibid. 80 Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l'opéra français, de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991), 296. 81 Bettina Varwig, “Metamorphosis and the Beast Within,” Journal of Musicological Research 40, no. 3 (2021): 269. 82 Joseph-Louis Roger, Traité des effets de la musique sur le corps humain (Paris: chez Brunot, 1803), 183. 83 Roger, Traité des effets de la musique, 212. 84 Grétry, for his part, was keen on depicting identity through music. In his Memoirs, he mentions how he imitated the sound of a slave yawning in Zémire. Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 1797, 1:224-25; Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution, 155–56. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Beastly Variations: Allegories on Race, Migration, and Marriage
JF - The Opera Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/oq/kbac002
DA - 2022-05-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/beastly-variations-allegories-on-race-migration-and-marriage-SmN5FSpy2H
SP - 190
EP - 220
VL - 36
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -