7
Man to Man

A Folklorist and a Legend-Teller

In the writings of nineteenth-century European folklorists, gender’s influence is sometimes obvious but often obscure. In a period when male domination of the public sphere and literary writing went largely unchallenged, collectors offered far fewer gendered assessments of their male informants than of the women whose traditions they gathered. Nor did they reflect upon the fact that, with only a few exceptions, folklorists and collectors of the time were men. If it is important to think about how their own masculine identities shaped folklorists’ misogyny and myopia toward female informants (Kodish 1987), a related and more covert challenge is to discover how ideas about gender operated in relationships where they went unremarked or unmarked: those between men. In this chapter, I take up these issues in the work of Gascon fieldworker Jean-François Bladé (1827–1900). In his collections’ introductions, Bladé wrote about female informants in very gendered ways, describing their innocence and purity or reminiscing about the songs and stories of the female servants of his youth (1881). In contrast, there is a telling silence when it comes to characterizing the men he collected from. Here I explore Bladé’s construction of masculinity and consider its impact not only on his collecting but also on his understanding of folkloristic concepts, most notably that of authenticity.

Jean-François Bladé was born into a bourgeois family in the town of Lectoure in southwestern France in 1827 (see Alleman 1930; Courtès and Bordes 1985; Lavergne 1904). Over his lifetime, he worked as a notary and judge and wrote works of fiction and history (see the bibliography compiled by Pic 1985), but today he is best remembered for his monumental collections of songs, stories, and proverbs, which earned him the posthumous title of the “Grimm of Gascony” (Lafont and Anatole 1970, 685). While the Brothers Grimm have been the subject of much academic research, beyond biographies little has been written about Bladé since his death in 1900. Critical analysis of his work consists largely of a colloquium held in his native town of Lectoure in the 1980s and several articles by Patricia Heiniger-Casteret (Arrouye 1985b; Heiniger-Casteret 2004, 2009).

In this chapter I look at Bladé’s relationship with the one informant to whom his name is linked for posterity, the mysterious Guillaume Cazaux. According to the register of births, marriages, and deaths in the Archives départementales du Gers, Cazaux was a former domestique, born in 1782 in St. Mezard. He died in 1868 in Lectoure, just a year after Bladé left the town for good. One of Bladé’s biographers devoted a whole chapter of her work to this octogenarian storyteller (Alleman 1930, 168–211), and the narratives Cazaux told Bladé have even appeared as a separate edition (Lafforgue 1995). The figure of this informant, whom Bladé called his most “defiant” (Bladé 1885, 32) dogs the memory of the folklorist like his shadow.¹

At first glance, the men could not be more different. Bladé attended the seminary in Auch and then law school in Toulouse and Bordeaux before going on to Paris (Alleman 1930, 101–135), where he moved in bohemian circles and became a confessed disciple and friend of the poet Charles Baudelaire (Lavergne 1904, 8). Cazaux, by contrast, was completely illiterate. Bladé left an enormous quantity of written work that mixed autobiography with other genres. Cazaux left no such traces for later researchers and only some sparse archival references document his life. Today we know Cazaux through what Bladé wrote about his “suspicious,” and apparently secretive, narrator, and through the texts of the stories Cazaux told the collector.

Authenticity, Gender, and the History of Folklore Collecting

The legacy of nineteenth-century European folklorists is overshadowed by suspicions of forgery and fraudulence. In France, one of the most popular and influential works of the first half of the century, Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué’s collection of songs entitled Barzaz Breiz or “The Bard of Brittany,” published in 1839, was outed as a “fake” by François-Marie Luzel almost thirty years later, in 1868 (Postic 1997). Despite the best efforts of the generation of determined fieldworkers and theorists between the 1870s and the start of the twentieth century, this taint has never fully been dissipated (Laurent 1989). For writers such as Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel (1986), James Lehning (1995), and Marie-Noelle Bourguet (1976), the rather odd bunch of men who called themselves traditionnistes—there are no well-known French female fieldworkers from this period—were part of a growing romantic obsession with popular culture, an obsession that hinged on the “beauty of death.” Popular culture was first repressed, and then mourned by the very agents who repressed it (de Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1986). Bourguet, along with de Certeau, Julia, and Revel, suggests that in seeking out the purest and most pristine expressions of a disappearing bucolic world, or campaigning to eradicate the dangerous popular “superstitions” that still “survived,” folklorists essentialized the rural populations they studied (Bourguet 1976; de Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1986). If the most obvious essentialization involved class, associating folklore exclusively with agricultural laborers, a similarly essentializing attitude to gender predominated. According to Jennifer Fox, the influence of Johann Gottfried von Herder encouraged male folklorists to see traditions and tradition bearers in dualistic terms based on gender (1987).

This selectivity renders collections of songs, stories, and proverbs like Bladé’s problematic, but should it make them unusable? I want to suggest that this outcome is not only unsatisfying, it also sidesteps the interest and importance of even the most suspect folklore collections. If all literature is written by authors in conversation with other writers and acquaintances, folklore collections offer an extreme case, not simply composed by the person whose name appears on the cover but by other storytellers, singers, and informants. Criticisms about the authenticity of folklore collections are built on an understanding of authorship that gives all agency and all responsibility for their contents to the men who published them. No leeway remains for the ways that the results refract conversations between the folklorists and the folk.

Giuseppe Cocchiara’s The History of Folklore in Europe remains a standard account, examining how early modern period ideas about “primitives,” “savages,” the “Orient,” the New World, and national identity coalesced into an interest in the traditions of “the people” (1981). Originally published in Italian in 1952, Cocchiara’s book deals with ideas and theorists, and takes little interest in the practices of folklore collecting. His list of “folklorists” includes a number of thinkers who never undertook fieldwork, many of whom did not call themselves folklorists, not least because the term folklore did not appear until 1846. Such an intellectualized focus on the history of the discipline ignores two important issues. The first is the possibility, central to the study of popular history, that the folk themselves and their traditions were constantly changing, rather than a timeless culture to be discovered outside of elite culture. The second is the insight that contact between fieldworkers and performers was not a fixed situation but an evolving conversation.

Three strands of the history of folklore—the history of ideas, the history of popular culture, and the social history of collecting folklore—cannot be dissociated. On its own, the history of ideas loses its grounding in the ways that informants, folklorists, publishers, and readers behaved. The history of popular culture also suffers from this severance; no “popular” culture can be independent of its “invention” by elites (see P. Burke 1978, especially 65–87; S. Kaplan 1984). Between these two diverging research threads stands the story of how collectors and informants oriented themselves to one another, and how such relationships changed. The fact that the fieldworkers were men stands at the center of this knot, silently coloring their attitudes to authenticity and authority. Rather than portraying fieldworkers as what Diane Tye has called an “invisible force,” objectively recording authentic traditions (1993, 115), this chapter focuses on how masculinities operated in the interactions between men like Bladé and Cazaux.

The “Cause of Folklore”: Authenticity and Bladé’s Combative Masculinity

Bladé’s biography points to a man who embodied culturally specific ideals of masculinity. As a notary and part-time judge, Bladé belonged to a provincial elite of notables, the French term for the well-to-do (see Singer 1983). He mixed with the bourgeoisie and aristocracy at a local salon (Larrieu-Duler 1981, 100). His professional status conferred legal authority on him, and he bolstered this with a series of publications on history and folklore, which established him as the point of reference for subsequent Gascon folklorists (Lafont and Anatole 1970, 685). He married, and his son Étienne went on to a successful career in the bureaucracy. In the different spheres of law, family, and local and national erudition, Bladé possessed an easy authority. And yet, it is striking how insecure this authority appears in his writings. Regina Bendix has written that “invocations of authenticity are admissions of vulnerability, filtering the self’s longings into the shaping of the subject” (1997, 17). Bladé described a reassuringly authentic and stable concept of popular traditions, a concept intertwined with ideas about gender. But his writings appear to be a constant battle against male adversaries, as if the power he wielded as a wealthy and successful man was not secure but had to be constantly defended.

Bladé was forthright about his attitudes to popular traditions, referring to “our peasants” as the bearers of the traditions he sought out (1885, 35). In his thinking, this stability was associated with a sense of place, class, and education. The best informants were peasants from the countryside, illiterate men and women with stable memories, rather than those who changed their materials from performance to performance:

A critic of the reliability of his predecessors, Bladé also struggled with his own conception of where authenticity resided. Composed in the period after Villemarqué’s ballad collection had been denounced by Luzel, Bladé’s writings on history and folklore refer to fakes and frauds and the “reprehensible practices” of the Barzaz Breiz (1885, 22). Bladé’s first academic writings were denunciations of falsified historical documents, and he continued to publish vitriolic articles on medieval manuscripts and the origins of the Basques (1861, 1862, 1869).

Perhaps this vehemence stems partly from projected guilt (see especially Salles-Loustau 1985; Traimond 1985). In a poem reproduced after his death, Bladé referred to one of his enemies as “haunted by the demon of literature” (quoted in Lavergne 1904, 14). He castigated rival folklore collections for “smel[ling] of provincial romanticism from a mile away” (Bladé 1885, 25). Similar accusations were later applied to Bladé himself (see for example, Arrouye 1985a, 8; Lafont and Anatole 1970, 365). By locating the authenticity of the stories he collected in the anonymity of “our peasants” and yet simultaneously preferring certain skilled narrators, many of whom were dead by the time his collections were published, Bladé founded his publications’ credibility on his own romantic sensibility. He wrote of his deep, affective link to his native Gascony in terms that stressed his nostalgia and pain as well as a world in the process of disappearing: “For more than a quarter of a century I have traveled through the pale world of memories, haunted by visions of the ancestors. Many times dreams of the past consoled me for the sorrows of the present. The select few [can author] individual works of genius. As for me, I am a good witness. I listen and retell the old songs and legends of times gone by. It is enough to gild my declining life, and to raise a poor researcher to the powerful and calm joys of the great poets” (1885, 42).

Subsequent researchers have pointed out that this self-image licensed Bladé to modify and touch up the narratives he collected (Lafforgue 1995; Salles-Loustau 1985; Traimond 1985). But the question of recasting or rewriting is complicated. Bladé was caught between his role as a special witness to the dying traditions and his belief in an intangible, ephemeral, and disappearing rural memory. This dilemma led him to a strangely self-defeating conclusion; Bladé wrote that the “veritable traditions” had in fact been destroyed by his own work. He suggested the scenario of “a critic . . . [coming] to investigate my aptitude and sincerity as a collector.” This critic would discover all of the tales and legends Bladé collected, but only because his published works were so successful that they had been read to all of the “little peasants” of the region. Authenticity resided in the anonymous oral tradition uncontaminated by literacy, but Bladé imagined that his own fieldwork would destroy this aural purity. The critic who heard the stories “would have taken simple echoes for the sounds of the first origin” (1885, 29). His ideas on these issues were clearly confused, as if Bladé still clung to an “outdated” romanticism (Anatole 1985, 14) at the same time as he wanted to be a part of the new, more rigorous group of collectors, such as Luzel and Félix Arnaudin. Bladé spoke of his “brutal fidelity” (1885, 32) to the words of his informants and his role as a “good witness” (42).

If his folklore collections’ instroductions are structured around fond childhood memories and romantic descriptions of Gascony, the footnotes in his more academic Études sur l’origine des Basques [Studies on the Origins of the Basques] are characterized by aggression. He refers to his two greatest scholarly rivals, Augustin Chaho and Justin Cénac-Moncaut, as variously “old,” “mad,” “infectious,” “liars,” “worthless,” and “beneath criticism” (1869, 61, 62, 70–71, 215, 229, 265, 286). He labels their work “mirages,” “trickery,” and “etymological fantasies” (339). At one point, he refers to Cénac-Moncaut’s “innate penchant for falsehood” (465). These accusations are tempered by sudden outbreaks of heroic generosity on Bladé’s behalf, mitigated with snobbery: “M. Cénac-Moncaut is no doubt an excellent man; but it is a complete waste of time trying to discuss any point of political or literary history with him” (449).

These polemics over documentary authenticity have less to do with the “analytical method” that Bladé laid claim to in the introduction (1869, i) than a form of competitive masculinity in which he professed his own sincerity and honor while pouring insults on his literary enemies. Robert Nye has suggested that nineteenth-century French bourgeois masculinity owed more to an aristocratic, even ancien régime model of honor than to the contemporary ethic of hard work (1993).² Bladé’s comments about toil and determination in his historical works seem to fit this model, emphasizing heroic efforts rather than simple laboriousness. He describes his “ardor,” the “size of the obstacles” to be overcome, “attacking the difficulties” and the “difficult and perilous” nature of this work (1869, i, 364). Behind these comments, it is always possible to identify a model of Bladé the academic warrior, engaged in combat for the “cause of folklore” (1881, 2:x).

A Vision of Cazaux

Bladé perceived the man he considered his most important informant through his own combative vision of masculinity. Most readers first meet Guillaume Cazaux not through the words of his stories but in the visual and personal description Bladé wrote in the introduction to the collection:

Aside from the importance this description ascribes to the markers of class, such as rustic clothing and a body molded by the vicissitudes of labor, the clearest message that emerges is Bladé’s concern with domination and resistance, suspicion, honor, and worthiness.

This element of competition and struggle is less evident, if not completely absent, in Bladé’s descriptions of his female informants. Unlike in his treatment of Cazaux, Bladé emphasized the purity and innocence of the women who sang for him and told him stories, regretfully writing that he knew Catherine Sustrac when she was “young, simple, naive,” but that the forty-year-old had lost her “most precious gifts” and “virginal clarity” from her exposure to the world (1885, 31). The importance of feminine innocence to his idea of authenticity finds its most extreme representation in the figure of Sereine, the possibly fabricated young girl whom Bladé described in the introduction to his collection of folksongs. “All of the poetry of my pays [region], Gascony, came to life, fresh and rejuvenated, in the soul of this child” (1881, 1:xxviii). One evening, when they were alone, Sereine told the young Bladé that she would be dead by the next day. Under the influence of his grandmother, Bladé resolved to collect the poetry of his pays as a tribute to the now-dead girl (xxix–xxx). This apparently autobiographical episode has aroused the suspicions of Jean Salles-Loustau, who points out that it bears a striking resemblance to a short story by Gérard de Nerval published many years before (Salles-Loustau 1985, 198).

Collecting Practices: From Bladé’s Vision to Cazaux’s Speech

Bladé’s statements about the authenticity of his collections and his attitudes to gender are troubling, but there are clear dissonances between Bladé’s statements about his collecting and the materials actually found in Contes populaires de Gascogne [Folktales of Gascony]. An obvious one concerns class. Bladé’s informants were nowhere near as socially homogenous or as illiterate as his reference to “our peasants” suggests. In fact, he collected stories from his uncle, who was a relatively well-off local priest as well as from his aristocratic grandmother, the local judge with whom he worked in his professional capacity as a notary, and even his own son, Étienne, who went on to a career in the Parisian administration.

Even more crucially, comparing Bladé’s statements about his informants to the materials he published reveals that Cazaux plays a disproportionate role in Bladé’s self-representation as a folklorist. Cazaux, who earns a longer description than the rest of Bladé’s informants put together, is an important male storyteller but, contrary to what subsequent writers have assumed (Lafforgue 1995), he was by no means Bladé’s most prolific narrator. Cazaux told Bladé nineteen stories, while Pauline Lacaze told twenty-seven. Bladé’s judgments about the importance of his narrators were not a reflection of how many stories or songs they gave him. In the case of Cazaux, they seem paradoxically opposite; he was an important storyteller because of what he refused to say (see Pooley 2012).

Evidence of Bladé’s fieldwork methods is based largely on Patricia Heiniger-Casteret’s 2009 discovery of some of his fieldnotes, all of which were thought to have been destroyed. Heiniger-Casteret suggests that Bladé recorded some materials verbatim while he sketched only outlines of others. In order to supplement this understanding of Bladé’s practices and how they interacted with the world of his informants, I turn to the example of a legend that Bladé recorded from Cazaux. Instead of starting from a default position that questions whether the text is absolutely faithful to the words of the informant—surely a chimeric ideal in any case—I want to ask what kinds of conversation are enacted by the words of the story and the scholarly apparatus that Bladé builds around them. If the visual description of the preface speaks in Bladé’s voice about the “defiance” of Cazaux, what message do the words Bladé printed in the name of Cazaux convey?

The following is my own translation from Bladé’s French text, supposedly itself a translation from the “birth dialect” of Cazaux, Gascon. Bladé placed a series of factual notes and corrections throughout the text that merit attention for the ways in which they interact with Cazaux’s story.

Half dead with fright, my uncle made the sign of the cross. But the spirits kept on singing as they danced:

Differential Nostalgia

The problem in studying “My Uncle from Condom” is the deceptive monovocality of the text. It appears as an uninterrupted and coherent flow of stories in Cazaux’s voice, when in reality this polished piece of writing is a result of the processes of entextualization and translation by Bladé, in which the illiterate Cazaux would have been unable to fully participate. Folklorists who study legend materials today, such as Linda Dégh, have criticized such texts: “The [historical] collector’s interest was usually focused on publishing a smooth story, rather than one that was whimsically interrupted by comments and set in a situational context. But it is precisely these circumstances that bring legends to life, and the omission of them in legend transcripts unfortunately renders legend texts almost unrecognizable and fit only for variant documentation” (2001, 53).

For many contemporary folklorists, the essence of the legend is debate (Bennett 1999, 32–36; Dégh 2001, especially 2–3; Dégh and Vázsonyi 1971; Goldstein 2004, 8; Tangherlini 1994, 7). Dégh writes that “legends appear as products of conflicting opinions, expressed in conversation . . . Disputability is not only a feature of the legend, it is its very essence, its raison d’être, its goal” (2001, 2–3). Timothy Tangherlini differentiates legends from tales by suggesting that while tales are more often narrated by one person, legends are a “negotiated process” (1994, 7).

How smooth is Cazaux’s text really, and how much conversation with his audience might he include in his narration? This is, after all, a highly personal string of related narratives, whose protagonist is the teller’s own uncle. The events are set in nearby, named places that both Cazaux and Bladé knew. They concern a period of history, the years of the Revolution, which posed significant problems of commemoration to the nineteenth-century population, who had lived under emperors, kings, and democratic republics. A narrative that raises all of these questions, not to mention ones about the existence of fairies and whether cannibals really live in the mountains, demands an answer from its original audience, Bladé. Perhaps it is even a challenge to his credulity, a typically Gascon tall tale to test how much he can be trusted, or how much he can be fooled, or whether he will get the joke (see Mark 1991).

The recurring footnotes that Bladé inserts into the text are one way to answer; they enact a conversation that focuses on shared acquaintances, language, and place. Cazaux, like modern legend narrators, bolsters the reliability of his account by referring to as many details as possible that corroborate what he is saying (Goldstein 2007). Bladé cannot resist destroying these claims in his footnotes. The language of the men of Capcir, Bladé tells us, is clearly wrong. The abbé de Ferrabouc or Herrebouc gave no indication to Bladé that the adventure Cazaux relates ever happened to him. Bladé calls into question the vision of history that Cazaux presents in his fantastical legend. If the message of Cazaux’s story is about how disrupted and dangerous the revolutionary period was, Bladé refuses to engage on paper in the discussion.

Bladé’s footnotes concerning places in the other legends Cazaux told are also revealing. Whenever Cazaux mentions a village, stream, or valley, Bladé provides the reader with geographical and historical details to locate these places in a world of scholarly knowledge. Cazaux’s attitude to these places is of a much more intimate kind. In a memorate he told about his own childhood, called “L’homme vert” (“The Green Man”), for instance, the young Cazaux falls asleep on the rocks by the hospital in Lectoure (Bladé 1885, 344). In “Les sirènes” (“The Sirens”), the river Gers is not just a geographical landmark, it is a workplace for the boatmen and a fishing opportunity for the hero of the legend (369–371). In “Les sept belles demoiselles” (“The Seven Beautiful Fairies”), a stream named the Esquère is a path to be followed by the Deserter, anxious to avoid meeting the police (341). Cazaux knew landmarks and regions, such as the forest at Ramier or the rocks at the hospital, from long-term intimacy. He walked these places for eighty years, and they belonged to his acquaintances and family, themselves anchored to specific locations, like the uncle who lived “out of town on the road to Nérac.”

Like modern ghosts (Thomas 2007, 32), Cazaux’s spirits have a fondness for liminal places around the house, but it is also important to notice that their peregrinations match the seasonal movements of male agricultural workers. These spirits spend the summer in the fields and meadows, and the winter locked up in “the loft, in the oven and in the holes in the wall,” just the same as the men who would have done most, if not all, of the work further from the home (Segalen 1983, 86–114, especially 99).

If Bladé has little interest in this intimate and gendered sense of place, he pays similarly little attention to the sense of time that Cazaux seems to invite him to share through his legends. For Cazaux, the time of the legends is personal and cyclical: personal in that it refers back to his childhood, as in the case of “The Green Man,” or recent family history, as in “My Uncle from Condom,” and cyclical in that fairies in both “My Uncle from Condom” and “The Seven Beautiful Fairies” always appear at the same time of year, perhaps reassuring storytellers and audiences about the possibility of stability during the upheavals of the Revolution and Napoleonic period. If the political and social changes of the time were radical and irreversible, the language of the supernatural grounds them in a sense of continuity with the traditions of the past. This sense of time is silently homosocial: Cazaux’s stories evoke the memories and traditions of his uncle, father, and other men, but at no point does he tell a legend from a woman’s point of view.

This cyclical men’s time goes unmentioned by Bladé, whose efforts within the text and the introductions to his collections were focused on a different view of time, one emphasizing a faded, revolved world, which associates childhood with regional traditions and innocence. In this context, it is worth thinking about Ray Cashman’s (2006) idea that not all nostalgias are the same. If Cazaux’s nostalgia is for his own childhood and the men of his family and social life, Bladé’s nostalgia is a more generalized longing for the innocence of a rural world threatened by modernization. When Cazaux mentions landmarks such as the rocks at the hospital, Bladé points out: “These rocks were north of Lectoure near to the old fountain of Saint-Esprit. The new road [chemin de ronde] built there destroyed all of it” (1885, 343). This intrusion of “modernization” into the countryside, which has been an important narrative for historians at least since the work of Eugen Weber (1976), is not something that Cazaux raises; Bladé interjects it into the text.

Cazaux does reminisce about times gone by, even suggesting that some of the supernatural beings in his legends have now disappeared, but the emphasis is on seasonal cycles. Although Gargantua and the Horned Men have left the region, Cazaux never claimed they have ceased to exist. Gargantua is probably in Spain, and the king of the Horned Men is trapped underground (Bladé 1885, 347, 359). Cazaux admits that even when he was “little, people already said that the Green Man didn’t show himself as often as in the past,” but this does not mean that he no longer exists. Cazaux himself saw him twice and, as he points out, “In Lectoure, there has always been and there always will be a Green Man” (343).

Richard Bauman urged folklorists to turn their attention away from a conception of folklore as belonging to homogeneous groups. He wrote that “folklore performance does not require that the lore be a collective representation of the participants, pertaining and belonging equally to all of them. It may be so, but it may also be differentially distributed, differentially performed, differentially perceived, and differentially understood” (1971, 38). In the case of Cazaux’s performance to Bladé, it seems that the two men had different concerns and different ways to understand places and time, both of which could be called nostalgic, but in diverging ways: personal and homosocial in the case of Cazaux, and historical and combative in the case of Bladé. These differential nostalgias clash at times, but the overwhelming impression reading the text is of interplay, misappropriation, and translation, not least since both men presented a world where men were the most important agents, performers, and audiences.

Whose Masculinity?

When dealing with a text like “My Uncle from Condom,” whose relationship to the original oral performance of Cazaux is impossible to prove, I am drawn time and time again to write in terms of Bladé’s concerns. But the conversation or dissonance about senses of place and time between the words of the legend and the footnotes points to a more important disjuncture. Where, in all that Cazaux said, is the “defiance” that Bladé visualized as such an important part of his character? Is Cazaux, like his uncle, “so simple no one suspected a thing?” Coded threats (Radner and Lanser 1993) did make up a part of Cazaux’s attitude to Bladé (Pooley 2012), but in the case of “My Uncle from Condom,” the message of an invitation to share in a homosocial form of local memory seems clearer, even if Bladé’s notes suggest that he misinterpreted or ignored these implications. Cazaux’s invitation offers what he knows to Bladé. It makes him a participant in the same intimate relationship to the landscape and local men that Cazaux speaks from, and invites the folklorist to reflect on the existence and significance of strange, supernatural beings in the recent past.

Cazaux did not exist simply as a product of Bladé’s writings. In the archives of the Gers department, his birth and death were recorded by the French state, and his will was preserved by the notary who succeeded Bladé in Lectoure. These archival documents confirm that Cazaux was a bachelor, but they also reveal that he was hardly poor; he owned 132 acres of land. This does not necessarily conflict with Blade’s image of the former domestique, although it seems Bladé deliberately underplayed Cazaux’s wealth. The term domestique could have referred to anything from a day laborer to a man responsible for managing a large farm for an absent owner, and his wealth when he died suggests that Cazaux was much closer to the latter than the former.

Cazaux’s legend about his uncle presents a vision of masculinity that is particularly well suited to the life of a bachelor who worked for others. The story is about male solidarity, at the complete exclusion of women, just as Cazaux’s life depended on work solidarities and involved no marriage. It is also about independence, a hero who looks out for his client and friend, the abbé, but is just as happy wandering the Landes on his own. This ability to be independent and this invitation to solidarity fit well with the biographical picture of Cazaux the man, but it is also noticeable that what Cazaux actually says in his legends fits poorly with what Bladé says about Cazaux’s narrative repertoire. These are not the heroic stories that Bladé described as possessing such a “proud shape” in the introduction to the collection (1885, 30). Cazaux’s legend protagonists display a noticeable lack of courage, running away from monsters and surviving by their wits. Stories like “My Uncle from Condom” deal in uncertainty and fear, male bodies under threat of cannibalism or, in other narratives, witchcraft (Pooley 2012). And perhaps it cannot be emphasized enough that all of these tales of surprise and fear are stories about men. Cazaux told Bladé just one legend, “Les treize mouches” (“The Thirteen Flies”) that featured a female character who took any proactive role.¹⁰

Conclusion: Masculinity and Authenticity

How can Cazaux’s distinctly unheroic legends be reconciled with the vision Bladé presented of his defiant narrator? Rather than a choice between an authentic account of Cazaux’s masculinity or a fake constructed by Bladé, what readers encounter in Cazaux’s legend text and Bladé’s ways of recording it is a conversation about place, time, and language that is colored by gender. This is no fixed portrait of what it meant for men of different classes at the time to be masculine. As Judith Butler writes: “Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time” (1999, 22). Stories like “My Uncle from Condom” are not Cazaux’s explanation of what it means to be a man but his discussion with Bladé of how men are in the world, how they react to revolutions, untrustworthy hosts, surprising fairies, or the persistence of folklore collectors.

In the text of “My Uncle from Condom,” Bladé’s unrecorded questions and prejudices seem to bump up against Cazaux’s vision of how the world is. If, as Fox suggested (1987), gender operated in tandem with discourses about authenticity in the writings of folklorists, I have tried to show that the critique of masculinity in this legend text reveals more than just the regrettable misogyny of the intellectual history of the discipline. It also offers lessons about the contact between different social experiences of masculinity and the ways that even, or especially, a fraught relationship between two men from very different backgrounds depends on an unmentioned silence: the erasure of women’s experience from this conversation, man to man.