Melusine of Lusignan

The house of Lusignan claimed descent from a water-fairy, and the story is usually told as if nobody had written it. Somebody did. On 20 November 1392 a clerk named Jean d'Arras began putting it into prose for Jean de Berry, who had taken the fortress of Lusignan from the English eighteen years earlier; he finished in August 1393, and it is in that book that the fairy is first called Mélusine, that the forbidden day is Saturday, and that the duke is named her rightful heir. Before it, the pieces belong to other people: the bath, the spy-hole and the dragon to Walter Map before 1200; the nudity taboo, a husband called Raymond and the nightly return to the children to Gervase of Tilbury around 1214, in Provence; the castle of Lusignan itself only from Pierre Bersuire, who died in 1362 and left the fairy unnamed. Follow the chain and a famous folk tale turns into something better documented and far stranger: a title deed with a dragon on it.

The page you are reading is not folklore that nobody wrote. It is a book, and the book has a date, an author, a patron and a purpose. On the Wednesday before Saint Clement's day in the winter of 1392 — that is 20 November 1392, since Saint Clement fell on a Saturday that year — a clerk named Jean d'Arras began "to put this history into prose". He finished in August 1393 and presented it to the man who had ordered it: Jean de France, Duke of Berry, brother of King Charles V. D'Arras says so twice, in his prologue and in his epilogue, and he names the person for whom the commission was really meant: Berry's sister Marie, daughter of King John of France, Duchess of Bar and Marquise du Pont, who had begged her brother to get her the story. A cousin, the Margrave of Moravia, asked for a copy. The timing is the whole point. Lusignan had been the last English stronghold in Poitou; its garrison surrendered in 1374, and Jean de Berry received Poitou in apanage. Nineteen years later he commissioned a book that made the fortress he had just conquered the foundation of a fairy, and made himself her heir. That is not a legend collected in a village. It is a claim of title, written to order. What was there before 1393? Less than the page implies, and it is worth walking backwards through it, because every famous detail of the story turns out to have an owner. The oldest layer is the peephole and the bath. In "De nugis curialium" (Distinctio IV, chapter 9), written at the court of Henry II Plantagenet in the last decades of the twelfth century, the Welsh clerk Walter Map tells of Henno cum dentibus, who finds a beautiful weeping girl at midday and marries her. She shuns holy water. It is Henno's MOTHER, not Henno, who makes "a small and secret hole" into the bedchamber and lies in wait — and at daybreak on a SUNDAY, with Henno gone to church, she sees the bride step into her bath "and from a most beautiful woman become a dragon". Sprinkled with holy water, she flies off with a great howl. Bath, spy-hole, transformation, flight and cry: all present, a good two centuries early, with no Lusignan and no Saturday. The second layer is the husband's name and, most surprising of all, the ending. In the "Otia Imperialia", compiled for Emperor Otto IV around 1209-1214, Gervase of Tilbury reports that a few miles from Aix-en-Provence stands "castrum Russetum", overlooking the valley of Trets, and that its lord was "Raimundus nomine" — Raymond by name. Riding by the river, he meets a lady of unequalled beauty who greets him by his own name though he has never seen her. She marries him on one condition: that he never see her naked. Years of prosperity follow, and sons and daughters. Then one day, coming back from hunting, he pulls away the linen that covers her bath — "statimque domina in serpentem conversa", and at once the lady was turned into a serpent, put her head under the water and vanished. And then Gervase writes the sentence that our short entry threw away: she was never seen or heard again, "except sometimes at night, when she came to visit her little children, in the hearing of the nurses". Gervase adds that the daughter of that lady married a kinsman of his own, and that her line has come down to his day. Only in the third layer does any of this reach Poitou. The Benedictine Pierre Bersuire, who died in 1362, wrote in his "Reductorium morale" — around 1342-1350, the first written attestation of the Lusignan version — that "in my country, Poitou, they tell that the powerful castle of Lusignan was founded by some knight and the fairy he had married", that from her descend the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus and the counts of La Marche and Parthenay, that after her husband saw her naked she changed into a serpent, and that even now the serpent can be seen in the castle WHEN IT IS TO CHANGE MASTER. The fairy still has no name. She had to wait for Jean d'Arras to be called Mélusine. Read the romance itself and the flattening is worse. Raymondin is not merely "lost in a forest": while hunting a boar he has just killed his own lord and uncle, Aimery, Count of Poitiers, when his boar-spear slipped and ran the count through. He rides half-mad by moonlight, and at the Fountain of Thirst there are THREE ladies, not one; the noblest seizes his bridle, rebukes him for riding past ladies without a greeting, and — d'Arras says it plainly — "she knew well who the young man was". The Saturday taboo is a curse laid on Mélusine by her own mother Présine, and it has two clauses, not one: he must never see her on a Saturday, and he must never denounce her to anyone. She is a serpent "du nombril en aval", from the navel down. Raymondin bores the hole in the door with the point of his sword, sees her in a marble basin combing her hair with a tail "as thick as a herring barrel", and plugs the hole again with wax from an old letter. He is undone not by a vague "jealous kinsman" but by his brother, the Count of Forez. And it does not end with a flight. Mélusine leaves from MERVENT, not Lusignan, when Raymondin publicly calls her "tresfaulse serpente" after their son Geoffroy the Great Tooth has burned the abbey of Maillezais with a hundred monks inside, his own brother among them. She becomes a serpent fifteen feet long, circles the fortress three times crying out in a woman's voice, and only then flies to Lusignan and falls upon the Tour Poitevine. D'Arras claims the windowsill she pushed off from still exists with her footprint in it. After that she comes back EVERY EVENING to warm her two youngest sons at the fire, and the nurses see her and dare not speak — Gervase's ending, kept. Raymondin has their monstrous son Horrible smothered with the smoke of wet hay in a cellar, as she instructed, and buried at Poitiers; he is never seen to laugh again; and he ends his life as a hermit at Montserrat in Aragon, where the King and Queen of Aragon and the counts of Empúries, Urgell, Cerdanya, Prades and Cardona attend his funeral, and where his great-nephew Bernardon stays behind to marry the heiress of Cabrera. Around 1401 a second author, Coudrette, put the story into verse for Guillaume VII l'Archevêque, lord of Parthenay, and on his death that year continued it for his son Jean II — a rival family commissioning its own version of the same ancestress. The Limbourg brothers painted Lusignan for the Duke of Berry in the March page of the "Très Riches Heures" around 1411-1416, with a winged dragon over the Poitevine tower. And in August 1478 Adam Steinschaber printed d'Arras at Geneva: the first edition of the romance and the first illustrated book ever printed in the French language, 193 leaves and 63 full-page woodcuts. That is how a house's title deed became everybody's fairy tale.

Lusignan is in the Vienne, about 25 km south-west of Poitiers, and the first thing to say is that the castle is not there. It was besieged by the Duke of Montpensier over the winter of 1574-1575 during the Wars of Religion; the razing was ordered immediately and carried out between February 1575 and March 1577, Louis XIII ordered the last remains pulled down in 1622, and the ditch was filled with the rubble by 1627. Nothing you can climb survives of the Tour Poitevine on which Mélusine is said to have alighted. What occupies the site is the Promenade de Blossac, laid out from 1774 by La Bourdonnaye de Blossac, intendant of Poitou, who levelled what was left and planted a formal garden of lime avenues on the spur above the Vonne valley. It is a public park: free, open, reachable on foot from the tourist office at Place du Bail, with a picnic area and paths that follow the foot of the ramparts. Grassed banks, some foundation courses and the outline of a flanking tower are what remain legible; guided visits of the remains are by appointment through the tourist office. The eleventh-century priory church of Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Junien in the town is worth the detour and is open without charge. If you want to stand inside a tower that bears her name, go to Vouvant in the Vendée, about 60 km west, one of the towns d'Arras credits her with building. The Tour Mélusine is the circular keep of the old castle, dated to the very end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century, 36 metres high, with two domed vaulted chambers and a view over the medieval village, the river Mère and the forest edge. You collect the key from the tourist office on the Place du Bail in Vouvant, from April to All Saints' Day; admission was 3 euros for adults and 1.50 for children at the time of writing, with young children free, payable in cash or cheque. There are 122 steps and no lift, the stair is a medieval spiral, and it is not suitable for anyone unsteady on their feet. Check current hours before travelling: the office closes over lunch. For the sources themselves, two are online and free. The Limbourg brothers' March page, with Lusignan under snow and the winged dragon above the Poitevine tower, belongs to the "Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry" at the Musée Condé in Chantilly; the manuscript itself is far too fragile for permanent display, so plan on the museum's facsimile and reproductions rather than the original, and check the Musée Condé's programme before making a special journey. The illumination reproduced on this page — Raymondin discovering Mélusine in her bath — is folio 19 of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Français 24383, a parchment copy of Coudrette's verse version made in the fifteenth century; it can be consulted in the BnF's digital collections without leaving home. A last practical note. There is no ticketed "Mélusine attraction" anywhere in Poitou, no site that will show you evidence, and nobody at Lusignan claims otherwise. What the region offers is a walk on the spur where the fortress stood, a tower you can climb in Vouvant, and a fourteenth-century book you can read in full — which is a good deal more than most legends leave behind.