In the palace of Versailles, at the top of the Questel staircase, there hangs a portrait of Louis XIV as protector of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Figure 1). Henri Testelin painted Louis in royal regalia, surrounded by symbols relating to the arts. More curiously, Louis XIV’s left hand rests atop the head of a person with dwarfism, named Jacques Lutel.Footnote 1 While this style of royal portraiture was not uncommon in early modern Europe, it is to my knowledge, the only example of a French king portrayed in a pair with someone with dwarfism. Lutel’s presence in the painting is all the more surprising because we are often led to believe that Louis XIV disliked people with dwarfism, and that his classical tastes were incompatible with the Renaissance and baroque world to which court dwarfs and jesters supposedly belonged.Footnote 2 The painting’s 1667 production date complicates matters further: the last court dwarf to be officially employed in the king’s household rolls, Louis Pinson, nicknamed Balthazar, had died in 1662. After Pinson’s death, the office of dwarf and its attached salary were transferred to a curator, or garde, of the king’s instrument collection.Footnote 3 To make better sense of Lutel’s presence in this painting it is necessary, then, to take a closer look at the history of the office of court dwarf, the roles people with dwarfism played at court, and their marginalisation there.
Jacques Lutel with Louis XIV. Henri Testelin, Louis XIV Protecteur de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (c. 1667). Versailles, MV6155. © Château de Versailles, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn/Christophe Fouin.
Figure 1 Long description
Portrait of Jacques Lutel with Louis XIV. Jacques Lutel is depicted standing to the left of Louis, who is seated on a throne in royal regalia with his left hand resting on Jacques’s head.
It has long been known that people with dwarfism were employed at princely courts both in France and across Europe, from Spain to Sweden.Footnote 4 Despite this preponderance, surprisingly little has been written about their histories or the roles they played at court. What has been written tends to fall under two strands. The first, relying on medical treatises, festival culture and literature, tends to be concerned with early modern society’s fascination with physical difference. These studies have painted the Renaissance as an age of wonder, when those born with physical differences were viewed as marvels or monsters, whose births could be read as divine portents and whose existence was a sign of the awesome diversity of God’s creation.Footnote 5 Within this context, the princely impulse to employ people with dwarfism mirrored their passion for collecting and was connected to the development of cabinets of curiosities.Footnote 6 A second strand of analysis emerges from art history and royal portraiture. For these art historians, portraits depicting a monarch with someone with dwarfism, like the aforementioned painting of Louis XIV, served to emphasise, via contrast, the physical perfection and grandeur of the monarch.Footnote 7 In this way, court dwarfs through their presence by the monarch’s side (both physically and in portraits) played ‘a crucial role in the forging of princely identity’.Footnote 8
On the whole, however, studies belonging to either strand of analysis have been more concerned with the symbolic meanings attached to people with dwarfism and society’s attitudes towards them, rather than centring their experiences.Footnote 9 This is a problem because people with dwarfism were real people with goals and agency – not merely the focus of people’s wonder or symbols for forging princely identities. Scholars within the field of disability studies have deplored the lack of academic literature focused on the lives and experiences of people with dwarfism. Erin Pritchard, in particular, has demonstrated how society’s focus on symbolic meanings and representations of dwarfism continues to impact in very concrete ways how people with dwarfism are treated in society today.Footnote 10 At the same time, uncovering the real-life experiences of people with dwarfism at court can help us reconsider how significant symbolic meanings were in accounting for their employment at court. It is one of the main contentions of this article that institutionalising processes, linked to the activities of people with dwarfism, provide better explanations for the creation and development of their court offices and roles, as well as the eventual disappearance of these offices, than either their function as princely alter egos or transformations in early modern people’s sense of wonder.
These past approaches largely arise from the primary sources: while there are many plays, portraits and medical treatises produced about people with dwarfism, there are few extant sources generated by people with dwarfism themselves.Footnote 11 Nonetheless, I want to use this article to demonstrate that a meticulous examination of archival sources read against the grain can reveal far more about the activities and experiences of people with dwarfism – and marginalised people in general – than the archive’s apparent silence initially suggests. To accomplish this, I have tracked the careers of people with dwarfism at court over several reigns by drawing on a wide variety of manuscript sources, including household rolls, inventories, official accounts, administrative papers, marriage and baptismal records, wills and notarial contracts. These manuscript sources have been further contextualised by journals, memoirs, chronicles, gazettes and other printed sources. This methodology provides another way of recapturing the lives of marginalised people in the early modern period, alongside more speculative approaches and individual case studies.Footnote 12 One of the main findings that emerges from this archivally driven approach is that the invisibility of people with dwarfism in the archival record is a product of their reluctance to be identified with their offices and positions as court dwarfs. Their complicated relationship with these specific offices led them to divert their energy towards other court positions less explicitly tied to their stature, directly contributing to the disappearance of the office of court dwarf under Louis XIV. The disappearance of this office highlights how marginalisation intersected with processes of institutionalisation in ways that destabilised the lives and careers of people with dwarfism at court.
Historians have given court dwarfs in France particularly short shrift, lavishing far less attention on them than on their Spanish, Italian, English and Polish counterparts. When they appear in studies of the court, they are rarely granted more than a paragraph, often as a passing curiosity along with the animals of the court’s menagerie.Footnote 13 This lacuna is even more striking for the seventeenth century, since court dwarfs are frequently associated with an earlier phase of the development of princely courts. This neglect is not due to a lack of court dwarfs during this time: there were ten to fifteen people with dwarfism employed at the French court for much of the seventeenth century. Instead, this lacuna arises from the historiography of French courts, which remains overly focused on the king’s perspective and the rise of absolutism. I hope this article can serve as another example, alongside my book on Louis XIII’s court, of the rich potential in an approach to court studies that decentres the monarch, his ministers and absolutism to understand the court – its institutions and its culture – in its own right.Footnote 14
This article, focusing on the reigns of the first three Bourbon monarchs, will begin by analysing the different court offices that were held by people with dwarfism in the royal households of the French court, along with the history of these offices. In a second section, it will examine the roles and functions they fulfilled at the court. Finally, this study will consider the visibility of people with dwarfism at the French court alongside their marginalisation to understand how this combination contributed both to their relative absence from contemporary primary sources and to the eventual disappearance of the office of court dwarf – if not people with dwarfism themselves – from the French court.
Court offices and positions
By the seventeenth century, the French court was a highly institutionalised society that attracted into its orbit many princes and princesses, noblemen and noblewomen, each of whom was accompanied by their personal entourage and servants. At the heart of the court was the king’s household, divided into departments ranging from the king’s Chamber to the Hunt, each with its own administrative structures. As such, the shorthand ‘the king’s dwarf’ or ‘court dwarf’ used by historians obscures the wide variety of different positions held by people with dwarfism at the court. Any serious analysis of court dwarfs needs to begin by examining the genesis and evolutions of these positions, the varied forms of remuneration associated with them, the employment of people with dwarfism at court beyond the king’s household, and how recruitment to these positions functioned.
Despite the long history of dwarfism at the French court, it is important to understand that the actual office of court dwarf was a new creation of the 1590s during the reign of Henri IV. Before him, people with dwarfism were not employed at court in a consistent manner, with forms of remuneration varying from one reign to the next. Moreover, before the Bourbon era, court dwarfs were often maintained and supervised by a governor, rather than being in possession of an office with clearly defined duties that could be sold or inherited by relatives.Footnote 15 At some point between 1593 and 1599, however, Henri decided that Albert de Xanica; Maurice Peult, nicknamed Merlin; and Marin Noël (sometimes rendered as Nouel or Noué) would be employed as court dwarfs in the king’s household rolls with wages of 300 livres each per year, which were equivalent to the wages paid to the king’s dancing masters (baladins) and pastry makers.Footnote 16 All three were still in office at the accession of Louis XIII in 1610.Footnote 17 Peult died around 1616 and was replaced by Marin Noël’s son, Roger, and 1623 was the last year Xanica appeared on the household rolls, leaving only the two Noëls. Roger seems to have died between 1633 and 1636, because in 1636, Marin’s other son, Claude, is listed in Roger’s stead. Marin and Claude Noël remained in post for most of Louis XIII’s reign. Marin probably died in 1643, shortly before Louis XIII, since while Marin appears with Claude in the rolls drawn up in January 1643, he is absent from the first household rolls for Louis XIV’s reign.Footnote 18 Anne of Austria, in 1644, at the beginning of her regency, attempted to have Claude replaced by Louis Pinson, who had previously been employed in her household, but Claude successfully thwarted her and was reinstated in 1645.Footnote 19 From then on, both Pinson and Claude Noël appeared in household rolls but only Noël was remunerated.Footnote 20 When Claude died sometime between 1656 and 1662, he was succeeded not by another court dwarf but by an usher for the king’s ballets (huissier avertisseur des ballets). After Pinson’s death in 1662, he was also replaced, this time by a curator for the instruments of the Chamber, Pierre Pieche.Footnote 21 In all, the office of court dwarf in the king’s household was in existence for less than seventy years.
Aside from these offices in the king’s household, Henri IV also created in 1595 two positions for people with dwarfism in the Royal Stables.Footnote 22 Henri IV likely created these positions to supplement the income of those he already employed in the household rolls since the same people held both the Stables positions and the household offices.Footnote 23 Indeed, the Stables positions came with payments in kind, which initially were equivalent to 225 écus (675 livres) each.Footnote 24 These expenses were intended to cover the costs of their food, clothes and horses, and were managed by the Stables’ argentiers proviseurs who drew up a monthly expense report for the Stables known as the écroux.Footnote 25 Their maintenance grant suffered an initial devaluation to 450 livres per year sometime before 1613 and again in 1622, leaving them with only 250 livres annually. This maintenance was reappraised to 300 livres per year in 1624, when the number of dwarfs in the Stables was cut from two to one, and this remained the rate until 1640, when court dwarfs disappeared from the Stables écroux altogether.Footnote 26
A second group of court dwarfs was established in 1610, shortly after Henri IV’s assassination, and they were employed in the Chamber, rather than in the rolls of the household or Stables. Pierre du Mont appears to have been recruited as early as June 1610 and was rapidly joined by Louis Pinson. In October, their number was increased to three with the addition of Edme Sornet, nicknamed Mistoudin, who earlier had been in the employ of the Liancourt family.Footnote 27 Sornet had been an early playmate of Louis’s, whenever Roger du Plessis Liancourt came to visit.Footnote 28 In 1610, this group was lodged in rented space, while a room was being prepared for them in the cour des marbres of the Louvre.Footnote 29 The following year, Pinson had been replaced by Raphael du Bois, and in 1614 they were joined by Guillaume du Pont.Footnote 30 Du Mont, du Bois, Sornet and du Pont were all still employed in 1625.Footnote 31
In the king’s Chamber, people with dwarfism were not paid directly: they were placed in the care of a boy of the king’s Chamber (garçon de la chambre du roi), named Jean Beluteau, sometimes referred to as the dwarfs’ governor (gouverneur des nains) and who was paid 1,200 livres per year from the king’s Wardrobe. The 1,200 livres were intended to cover the costs of the maintenance of the dwarfs of the Chamber, at a rate of 300 livres each, with the remaining 300 livres covering Beluteau’s personal wages.Footnote 32 The poor survival rate of Wardrobe and Chamber accounts (argenterie and menus plaisirs respectively) makes it hard to keep track of this group, but their status seems to have evolved in the late 1620s because direct payments to them began to come out of the Exchequer (comptes de l’épargne), first for du Mont in 1627, followed by du Bois and another in 1628, and all four in 1629.Footnote 33 While I was not able to find references to payments to them in the Exchequer accounts for 1639, Pierre du Mont was still signing contracts as ‘the king’s dwarf’ as late as August 1655, which suggests that at least one of these positions was still extant during Louis XIV’s reign.Footnote 34
It might be tempting to assume that the initial employment of a boy or governor to look after the dwarfs of the Chamber and to manage their salaries suggests that people with dwarfism during the Bourbon dynasty were not viewed as being fully mentally capable. However, the fact that Peult, Noël and Xanica were remunerated without an intermediary and that no governor was appointed to oversee them when Henri created these offices in the 1590s shows that it was well known that people with dwarfism were entirely apt. This understanding is further attested to by the signatures of people with dwarfism on notarial acts, since notaries were forbidden from notarising contracts from minors (in the absence of a tutor or guardian), and from those with ‘natural incapacities […] emerging from faults of nature like being deaf and dumb from birth, or being crazy and in dementia’.Footnote 35 Moreover, people with dwarfism could, over the course of their careers, move from one court position to another, which demonstrates that there was no relationship between these different payment types and the perceived mental acuity of specific people.
Part of the reason for the employment of a governor may simply reflect the persistence of older payment practices: during the Valois dynasty, court dwarfs were frequently placed in the care of a governor.Footnote 36 However, there is a second explanation that may shed clearer light on this phenomenon. Given that Louis Pinson died in 1662, almost twenty years after Louis XIII, and that both Pierre du Mont and his father were still alive in 1656, it is not unlikely that they were children of a similar age to King Louis when the Chamber positions were first created in 1610.Footnote 37 In any case, we know Raphael du Bois was born in June 1598, which meant he was around three years older than Louis.Footnote 38 Their youth would also explain why there was a need for court dwarfs in the Chamber despite those already employed on the household rolls: the establishment of young court dwarfs would have provided Louis with playmates better suited to his needs than the much older Peult, Mauderon and Noël. The increasing age of the dwarfs of the Chamber may also be behind the shift toward monetary payments made directly to them from the Exchequer in the 1620s. Indeed, by 1627, Pierre du Mont had moved out of the Louvre into a house on the Rue des Vieils Augustins, had married Légère Rusticq, and had welcomed a daughter, Jeanne, into their family.Footnote 39 All of these milestones would have been unattainable if he were still remunerated in kind and in the custody of Jean Beluteau.
It does seem that by Pinson’s death in 1662, there were no longer any positions for people with dwarfism in the king’s household, in the Stables, or in the Chamber. But one should not confuse the disappearance of the office of dwarf with the disappearance of people with dwarfism from the court. Firstly, Louis XIV did in fact replace Louis Pinson after his death – just without granting the new court dwarf an official position. Starting in October 1662 and until mid-1668, payments for the ‘maintenance and food’ of a newly hired person with dwarfism, Jacques Lutel, were issued from the king’s Exchequer.Footnote 40 While the payments were initially variable, by 1665 they had stabilised at a rate of 75 livres per term, or 300 livres per year – which was the same wage that Noël had been entitled to as the king’s court dwarf. So, while it is true that Louis XIV allowed the office of court dwarf to vanish from household rolls, he continued to be served by a person with dwarfism for another six years after Pinson’s death. This decision to recruit and maintain Lutel for royal service calls into question the notion that Louis XIV actively disliked people with dwarfism. Moreover, even after 1668, Louis XIV continued sporadically to hire people with dwarfism: Vagne, for instance, was paid 300 livres in 1675.Footnote 41 Nor had the Ancien Regime taste for entertainment involving people with dwarfism abated by the end of Louis XIV’s reign: in January 1714, Pierre Gallois went to Versailles to ask Louis for permission to ‘show in public’ two people with dwarfism – Pierre and Jacques Brunelle – a permission which Louis happily granted.Footnote 42
In any case, monarchs were far from alone in employing people with dwarfism. This point is worth emphasising because it demonstrates that interest in people with dwarfism extended far beyond the monarch’s person and that their presence at court was never dependent on his personal tastes or patronage. Indeed, there were positions for people with dwarfism within the households of the queens, of royal siblings, and of other prominent courtiers. Henri IV’s sister, Catherine de Bourbon, employed François Lalo, nicknamed Boulon, as well as Jeanne.Footnote 43 Marie de’ Medici, Henri IV’s queen, was not only served by Peult, Xanica and Marin Noël but also by Marguerite Xanica (Albert’s sister) and a woman called Catherine, who was later replaced by Marin’s sister, Marguerite Noël (known by the diminutive Marine) (Figure 2).Footnote 44 Marguerite Xanica had previously worked for Catherine de’ Medici and, after her death, for Louise de Lorraine, Henri III’s widow. Marie de’ Medici additionally brought into her service Jean Mauderon, nicknamed Mandricart, who had previously been employed as an usher (huissier) by Queen Louise. Louise’s death in 1601 freed them up for service in the new queen’s household.Footnote 45 Marguerite Xanica was not replaced by Marie de’ Medici when she died in 1611, nor was Peult, leaving in her service in 1623, Albert de Xanica, Jean de Mauderon, Marin Noël, and his sister Marguerite.Footnote 46
Woman with dwarfism, possibly Marguerite Noël.Footnote 51 Nicolas Lagneau, Femme naine de profil à droite (seventeenth century). BnF, RESERVE NA-21 (B,7)-BOITE FOL.
Figure 2 Long description
The drawing depicts a woman with dwarfism in profile facing right. She is wearing a dress, her hair is styled up, and she is wearing a large earring. Her hands are clasped together in front of her chest.
When plans for Anne of Austria’s household were drawn up in 1616, there were two positions intended for people with dwarfism. In 1626, one of the two was held by Louis Pinson.Footnote 47 It is not clear exactly what happened to Pinson between his short-lived employment as a dwarf of the Chamber in 1610 and the arrival of Anne of Austria in France, but I suspect that he was the person with dwarfism employed in the household of the king’s brother, Gaston, from at least 1612 onwards.Footnote 48 Queen Anne also maintained women with dwarfism in her household: Elisabeth Anne Motta, known as Done Isabelle, and if Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux is to be believed, Ysabeau du Fossé.Footnote 49
Louis XIV’s queen, Marie-Thérèse, also employed court dwarfs.Footnote 50 In fact, Marie-Thérèse is indelibly associated with dwarfism at court because of a rumour that she had slept with a Black person with dwarfism. When her short-lived daughter was born prematurely after a dangerous pregnancy in November 1664, she was perceived or portrayed by court gossips as being Black. Some, including the duchess of Montpensier, suggested the infant resembled ‘a little dwarf’ who was in Marie-Thérèse’s entourage.Footnote 52 The story was later tied by the infamous memorialist, Louis de Rouvroy, duke of Saint-Simon, to the rumours surrounding the identity of a Black nun, who lived in a convent in Moret, and further developed by nineteenth-century writers, who attributed the name ‘Nabo’ to the person with dwarfism which whom Marie-Thérèse supposedly had had an affair.Footnote 53 The invention continues to fascinate: it was the subject of Lynn Nottage’s play, Las Meninas (2002), and was even featured in the first two episodes of the 2015 television series Versailles. This is a testament to the extent to which fascination with dwarfism continues to impact how people with dwarfism are represented in our media.Footnote 54 Other royal family members continued to employ people with dwarfism under Louis XIV. Gaston’s daughter, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, duchess of Montpensier, for instance, retained Elisabeth Motta’s sister, Ursule, whom she married in 1645 to Jacob Schultz, a man with dwarfism who was living at the time in her Tuileries palace.Footnote 55
Aside from the people with dwarfism hired by queens and royal siblings, those retained by great lords and princes complicate the narrative advanced by art historians like O’Bryan that people with dwarfism helped to forge princely identity due to their role as monarchs’ alter egos.Footnote 56 One finds people with dwarfism employed in the households of princesses of the blood: Edme Souppé, nicknamed Darinot, was retained in 1615 in the household of Anne de Montafié, countess of Soissons, while Daniel de Villepelée was employed as the court dwarf of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, princess of Condé, until his death in 1625.Footnote 57 A person with dwarfism employed by Duke Henri de Montmorency performed in a ballet the duke organised in 1619 to celebrate the wedding of Louis XIII’s sister, Chrétienne, with the prince of Piedmont.Footnote 58 During the Sun King’s reign, someone with dwarfism nicknamed Don Pedro worked for Joseph-Marie, marquis of Boufflers, while Jacob, was employed in the household of Artus de Lionne, bishop of Gap.Footnote 59
It is hard to know for certain how people with dwarfism were recruited to royal and noble households. Janet Ravenscroft describes in her study of people with dwarfism at the Spanish court a ‘competitive market’ where people with dwarfism were exchanged as high-value gifts.Footnote 60 Such a market may have existed in France during the sixteenth century, when household accounts are replete with mentions of court dwarfs being sent to France by foreign monarchs.Footnote 61 But if this were still the case under the Bourbons, it is not apparent from the sources. The only such example I have found is Elisabeth Anne Motta, who was sent to Anne of Austria by the Infanta Isabella Eugenia.Footnote 62 In fact, the lack of turnover among court dwarfs – many serving across two or three reigns – goes counter to the notion of a competitive market. A competitive market would lead either to a substantial increase in the number of court dwarfs or to a high turnover rate as the king, his family members and other courtiers vied to hire particularly desirable people with dwarfism. Such a market would also inevitably lead to more people with dwarfism moving between households in response to potential employers’ attempts to poach each other’s court dwarfs. Conversely, at the Bourbon court, where such movement occurred, it was usually upon the death of a royal family member, when new employment for the people with dwarfism retained in the deceased’s household became necessary. Albert de Xanica, for instance, seems to have begun his court career in the household of François d’Alençon, moved following his death in 1584 to Catherine de’ Medici’s household, then to Henri III’s after her death in 1589, before finally finding his way into Henri IV’s.Footnote 63
Instead of a competitive market, family dynamics and court connections seem to have been key for securing employment as a court dwarf, as with other court positions. The number of siblings with dwarfism retained at court is particularly striking: Albert and Marguerite Xanica, Marin and Marguerite Noël, and Elisabeth and Ursule Motta. While some transmission of dwarf offices occurred from father to son – as in the case of Marin Noël and his two sons, Claude and Roger – this seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. It is important to remember that the children of people with dwarfism were far from guaranteed to inherit dwarfism, especially if only one of the parents were a person with dwarfism. This reality probably complicated any attempts to pass on these offices to children, since being a person with dwarfism was a prerequisite for holding them. At other times, people with dwarfism born to parents without dwarfism who held positions in the household of a prince, or a princess could be hired as a court dwarf within that prince or princess’s household. This seems to have been how Raphael du Bois came to be one of Louis XIII’s dwarfs of the Chamber: Raphael was the son of Claude du Bois, one of Henri IV’s court painters and was also related to André du Bois, Henri’s and subsequently Louis XIII’s signaller of the Kitchens (avertisseur ordinaire de la bouche du roi).Footnote 64 Similarly, Daniel de Villepelée, who was retained by the princess of Condé, was the son of an officer in the household of Henri de Bourbon, prince of Condé, named Jean, while his brother, also named Jean, was apprenticed to the princess’s tailor.Footnote 65 But given the rare incidence of dwarfism, this was probably not the most frequent way for people with dwarfism to end up in courtly employ.
It is also worth noting that there do not seem to have been any attempts to breed people with dwarfism at the court during the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. In earlier times, Catherine de’ Medici had attempted without success to breed people with dwarfism by marrying them to each other. But according to the physician Louis Guyon, none of the three couples had had any issue.Footnote 66 An engraving by Antoine Caron depicts Catherine receiving the famous artists Pierre and Étienne Dumonstier while signing a marriage contract for two court dwarfs, which attests to the personal interest she took in their marriages (Figure 3). By contrast, there is no evidence of royal involvement in the marriages of people with dwarfism employed at Henri’s, Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s courts. Edme Sornet’s marriage to Charlotte Danglade in February 1639, for instance, did not have any royal witnesses, which one would expect had Louis been involved in arranging the marriage.Footnote 67 Nor did Louis XIII or Anne of Austria seek to be godparents to any of the children who were born from the marriages of Pierre du Mont and Légère Rusticq, and Guillaume du Pont and Marie Ferret.Footnote 68 There is no evidence either that any of their wives were people with dwarfism.
Catherine de’ Medici signing the marriage contract of two court dwarfs. Antoine Caron, Catherine de Médicis recevant Etienne et Pierre Dumonstier (sixteenth century). BnF, RESERVE B-6 (A, 2)-BOITE ECU.
Figure 3 Long description
A drawing of an interior scene featuring Catherine de’ Medici, the brothers Pierre and Étienne Dumonstier, Chrétienne d’Aguerre, countess of Sault, and two unnamed people with dwarfism: a man and a woman. The two people with dwarfism are centred in the foreground. The woman has her hand on the back of the man. Étienne Dumonstier glances down at the two people with dwarfism as he hands Catherine a quill to sign the marriage contract. His brother is standing at the far left of the scene holding a draped cloth. Meanwhile, the countess of Sault is at the bottom right sitting on the floor and playing with a dog.
Exoticism was a prized quality when recruiting people with dwarfism, which is consistent with the idea that their otherness was intended to elicit wonder. Albert de Xanica’s name, for instance, was so exotic that royal accounts never wrote the name the same way twice: Sanica, Xanica, Janiche, Zanizanca, or even Saniçinca.Footnote 69 In the absence of a competitive market, however, it was not always possible to hire someone at court with truly exotic origins. When such origins were lacking, they could always be invented. Louis Guyon remarked that even though the people with dwarfism he had encountered in Catherine de’ Medici’s household were all born in the kingdom of France, many people at court claimed they had come from the land of pygmies.Footnote 70
For people with dwarfism who had very French-sounding names, a nickname could be deployed to heighten their exoticism, or otherness. The addition of the nickname Balthazar to the very French name Louis Pinson evoked the three magi, who visited Jesus on the Epiphany. The nickname Balthazar might indicate that Pinson was Black, since the magus, Balthazar, was at this time most frequently depicted as a Black king.Footnote 71 Maurice Peult’s nickname, Merlin, can only have been a reference to the magician of Arthurian legend, who was depicted in French retellings as a child of the devil, born covered with hair and with the ability to speak.Footnote 72 Jean Mauderon was given the nickname Mandricart, a reference to Mandricardo, a character from Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1483) and Ariosto’s sequel Orlando furioso (1516). In the epic poems, Mandricardo was the Saracen king of the Tartars and emperor of Mongolia.Footnote 73 Raphael du Bois was sometimes referred to as Hannibal, no doubt a reference to the Carthaginian general.Footnote 74 The use of royal, heroic nicknames for Mauderon and du Bois should not surprise us: it was common practice at European courts for grand nicknames to be given to fools and people with dwarfism. Such nicknames were intended ironically and heightened the contrasts that amused Renaissance audiences.Footnote 75 Referring to Elisabeth Motta, who was neither Spanish nor a lady, as Done Isabelle served a similar purpose.Footnote 76 Nicknames could also be used to reference physical characteristics: Mistoudin, for instance, meant ‘a neat fellow’ or ‘a spruce companion’, though whether this was meant ironically in the case of Edme Sornet is unclear.Footnote 77
The systematic imposition of nicknames on people with dwarfism employed at the court – whether exoticising, magical or inviting humorous contrasts – was a crucial aspect of their marginalisation at court. Magical and exotic nicknames were inherently othering, while humorous nicknames invited people to laugh at people with dwarfism. More fundamentally, the widespread use of these nicknames suggested that the real identities of people with dwarfism were not sufficient. These naming practices would later find their echoes in the names imposed on victims of the slave trade.Footnote 78
There was clearly a significant number of people employed as dwarfs at the French court across various departments of the king’s household, the households of royal family members, and those of the court nobility more generally. While there had always been dwarfs employed in the royal household, Henri IV’s creation of court offices for dwarfs, supplemented with payments from the Stables, stabilised and institutionalised their position at the French court. This stability and institutionalisation meant that apart from the newly instituted dwarfs of the Chamber under Louis XIII, most people with dwarfism employed at the courts of Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV were inherited from previous reigns or were relatives of people with dwarfism who were already employed at the court. As a result, the French court was less dependent on gifts from foreign monarchs to sustain its population of people with dwarfism. Thus, despite the extraordinary and exotic origins at which their nicknames hinted, their presence at court resulted from far more prosaic pressures.
Duties
Despite their numbers and visibility, there is a relative dearth of historical sources illuminating court dwarfs’ duties. In this respect, they are not unlike other marginalised figures, whose difference warranted being made visible and emphasised on stage, but whose association with performance and entertainment led to their partial erasure from the historical record.Footnote 79 Consequently, it has been hard to pin down what exactly the functions of court dwarfs entailed beyond a vague association with entertainment.
Perhaps because of our own cultural tendency to associate dwarfism with humour and ridicule, it is often assumed that court dwarfs played a similar role to court fools, with a licence to mock everyone indiscriminately and to serve as a reminder of social and moral order.Footnote 80 After all, there were examples of court fools with dwarfism, such as Mathurine (Figure 4), and it is also true that in court plays and ballets people with dwarfism could be cast in the role of fools (Figure 5). Nonetheless, it is worth noting that at the French court, fools were institutionally distinct from court dwarfs. At the end of Henri IV’s reign and at the beginning of Louis XIII’s, the king’s fool (fol du roi) was Guillaume Le Marchant. He was looked after by a governor, Philippe de Lobier, who had a yearly pension of 1,800 livres that was intended to serve both as remuneration for Lobier and to clothe and feed his charge, Guillaume.Footnote 81 Notably, court fools appear with greater frequency in contemporary memoirs than court dwarfs. Much was made, for instance, of the fact that Henri IV’s fool, Antoine d’Anglerais, nicknamed Chicot, had captured Henri de Lorraine, comte de Chaligny, during a combat at Bure in February 1592.Footnote 82 Moreover, the fools’ roles as mockers of court society made them useful voices to employ in polemical literature. Guillaume Le Marchant, Mathurine and Marguerite de Valois’s fool Tristan Guérin were all recurring characters in the pamphlet literature of Marie de’ Medici’s regency government.Footnote 83 Had court dwarfs played a comparable role, one would expect them to similarly feature in both pamphlet literature and court memoirs.
Engraving of Mathurine for the title page of La Cholere de Mathurine contre les difformez Reformateurs de la France (Lyon, 1616). Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Rés 315299.
Figure 4 Long description
The engraving shows Mathurine, a court fool with dwarfism, standing within an archway. She is wearing a robe with a hanging belt and holds a horn in one hand and an embroidery hoop in the other. The archway is supported by two columns, framing Mathurine's figure.
Person with dwarfism dressed as a fool accompanying the fairy Macette in the court ballet Les Fées des forêts de Saint-Germain (1625). Daniel Rabel, Macette La Caprioleuse (1625). BnF, RESERVE QB-3-FOL.
Figure 5 Long description
The costume sketch depicts two figures. The first is a woman dressed as the fairy Macette, holding a wand. The second figure, a person with dwarfism dressed as a fool, is wearing a colorful outfit with a pointed hat.
Additionally, people with dwarfism were more readily associated with larger-scale entertainment, in a way that court fools were not. At the carousel performed on the Place Royale to celebrate Louis XIII’s betrothal to Anne of Austria in 1612, four people with dwarfism participated in the entry of the ‘knights of the universe’ team.Footnote 84 People with dwarfism also frequently performed in court ballets: such as those staged in 1605, 1610, 1621 and 1635.Footnote 85 Under Louis XIV, the week of partying organised at Versailles in May 1664 known as Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée featured four people with dwarfism performing alongside six people with gigantism.Footnote 86 It is difficult to identify who these participants with dwarfism were because their names are never mentioned. It is conceivable that some of them might have been specially hired entertainers rather than court dwarfs. People with dwarfism retained by courtiers could occasionally be mobilised for these performances as well: the person with dwarfism performing in the ballet La vieille Cour & les habitants des rives de la Seine viennent danser pour les triomphes de sa majesté (1635), for instance, was a member of the household of Roger du Plessis, sieur de Liancourt, at the time one of Louis XIII’s first gentlemen of the Chamber.Footnote 87
This is not to say that people with dwarfism could not play an entertainment role in more intimate settings. Louis XIII’s first physician (premier médecin), Jean Héroard, in his journal, often recorded how Louis, as a child, played with court dwarfs. Already in April 1608, when Liancourt visited six-year-old Louis with Edme Sornet in tow, Louis enjoyed pretending to be a footman. In these games, he took orders from Sornet, who rode in the carriage, which was pulled by Louis’s half-brother, Alexandre, chevalier of Vendôme.Footnote 88 On 12 June 1610, Louis gave his meat to Pierre du Mont, whom he had served by his gentlemen.Footnote 89 Fourteen days later, Louis entertained himself by organising a mock marriage between du Mont and Marguerite Noël.Footnote 90 One should not read too much, however, into the specific games Louis played with people with dwarfism, since Louis indulged in very similar pastimes with all his close attendants.Footnote 91
Du Mont was also part of Louis XIII’s earliest hunting endeavours. Throughout 1611, Louis XIII took great pleasure in eating the finches, sparrows, turtledoves and other small birds – which du Mont killed with an arquebus – sometimes after having them turned into pâté by his Kitchen officers.Footnote 92 This hunting aligned with practice at the Medici court where court dwarfs practised bird hunting (Figure 6).Footnote 93 Louis also wanted the dwarfs of his Chamber to be able to perform music and in 1614 he paid his lutenist, Florent Indret, to teach them how to play the lute.Footnote 94 It should be noted that mentions of people with dwarfism in Héroard’s journal are limited to Louis XIII’s childhood. So, while court dwarfs were employed in the household throughout the reign, it may be that their role as private entertainers of the monarch became less significant as the king moved into adulthood. This association with childhood might also help to explain why people with dwarfism do not feature in French royal portraiture as prominently as in other European courts.Footnote 95
Agnolo Bronzino, Ritratti del Nano Morgante (1552). Uffizi Gallery. © Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.
Figure 6 Long description
The image shows the recto and verso of a nude portrait of Morgante, a person with dwarfism employed at the Medici court. In the recto painting he is portrayed from the front, holding a bird of prey on his right hand with another bird flying nearby. In the verso portait, he is shown from the front holding an arquebus in his left hand and birds he caught in his right hand. A bird of prey is perched on his shoulder.
The duties performed by people with dwarfism employed in royal households were not limited to entertainment roles: they also acted as ushers. In fact, the office of the king’s dwarf in the general rolls of the king’s household emerged, when the ushers of the cabinet were split between those with and those without dwarfism. General household rolls for 1593, though fragmentary, include the sections where court dwarfs would later be listed. While no office of dwarf was listed, there were three ushers of the cabinet – two of whom were people with dwarfism: Albert de Xanica and Maurice Peult.Footnote 96 By 1599, however, court dwarfs were listed separately from the ushers. This differentiation was also expressed financially, since in 1599, Xanica, Peult and Marin Noël were only paid 100 écus (300 livres), while wages for the ushers of the cabinet amounted to 166 écus (498 livres).Footnote 97 Despite this titular and financial distinction, there is evidence that the court dwarfs listed in the general household rolls continued to fulfil the function of usher. A partial account book for the 1623 expenses of Louis XIII’s household lists the king’s dwarfs right after the official ushers of the king’s cabinet, but when listing the three people with dwarfism, two of them (Marin and Roger Noël) had ‘usher of the cabinet’ written next to their names.Footnote 98
This practice seems to have originated in Catherine de’ Medici’s household. The names of Peult and Xanica appear for the first time in her household rolls in the 1580s, though Peult had been in her service since 1578. There, Peult and Xanica are listed not as court dwarfs but as ushers of Catherine de’ Medici’s Chamber, though it is clarified next to Xanica’s name that he is ‘for the cabinet’.Footnote 99 It is probably after her death in January 1589 that they were brought into the king’s general household rolls, as they are listed for the first time as ushers of the king’s cabinet in the rolls drawn up for Henri III in 1589.Footnote 100 This duty carried over to Marie de’ Medici’s household where Mauderon was usher for both the queen’s Chamber and her cabinet, while Peult and Xanica were ushers for her cabinet only.Footnote 101
Women with dwarfism in queenly households often performed duties as maids of the Chamber (femmes de chambre), even when they were not officially employed in this role. Both Marguerite Xanica and Marguerite Noël dined at the table of Marie’s maids of the Chamber and were frequently listed alongside them when it came to ordering pensions.Footnote 102 Later, Marguerite Noël would officially be added to the list of maids of the Chamber, a position she held until her death.Footnote 103 The maids of the Chamber were ranked third among the groups of ladies that typically served queens in France, the others being the ladies of honour (dames d’honneur) and the maids of honour (filles d’honneur). While the ladies and maids of honour were from the nobility – the former to serve as companions for the queen and the latter to be educated and married off – the maids of the Chamber were employed in what was a more explicitly service role.
People with dwarfism employed at court frequently doubled up their office as dwarf with other household offices. Marin Noël, for instance, was able to acquire the position of coat-bearer (portemanteau) in Marie de’ Medici’s household when she arrived in France.Footnote 104 To reward him for his service, Marie de’ Medici granted him in 1611 the right to pass on his coat-bearer office to his son, Claude.Footnote 105 When a household was constituted in 1616 for Anne of Austria, Marin Noël was again awarded the position of the queen’s ordinary coat-bearer, and his son Claude held the position until 1622.Footnote 106 Court dwarfs could even perform the function of coat-bearer without holding the office. Louis XIII’s first commission as king was entrusted to the dwarf of the Chamber, Pierre du Mont, though he was accompanied in his mission by the actual coat-bearer Joseph d’Escluzeaux.Footnote 107 That people with dwarfism performed duties as ushers and coat-bearers should not surprise us. It was, after all, the perceptible nature of their difference that explains why they were employed at the court in the first place, and these functions were highly visible roles, ensuring people with dwarfism were always in sight.
The accumulation of offices in several households allowed people with dwarfism at the court under Henri IV and Louis XIII to significantly increase their social status and improve their finances. In 1617, Marin Noël was entitled yearly to 300 livres as one of the king’s dwarfs, maintenance worth 450 livres thanks to his position in the royal Stables, and 180 livres from his position as coat-bearer in Marie de’ Medici’s household. He also had dining rights in Queen Marie’s household (and likely in the king’s as well), free wood for heating his rooms, and access to healthcare at the queen mother’s expense.Footnote 108 Marin was not unduly affected by Marie de’ Medici’s exile in 1631, since as late as 1639 Louis XIII was still paying his wages as her coat-bearer.Footnote 109 Marin’s sister Marguerite was able to leverage her position in Marie’s household to negotiate a favourable marriage with Charles de Trocy, lord of Hardivilliers, who was captain of the flock for kite hunting (vol pour milan) in the king’s Falconry. The marriage broke down shortly before her death in 1630, however, and they separated.Footnote 110 Marin and Marguerite were also able to advance family members: they surely were instrumental in helping their nephew Guillain Noël acquire the position of groom of the Wardrobe in Gaston’s household.Footnote 111
Thanks to Anne of Austria’s patronage, Elisabeth Motta was able to join the Faubourg Saint-Jacques convent of the Ursulines in a ceremony witnessed by Queen Anne and the entire court in March 1633.Footnote 112 The Faubourg Saint-Jacques convent was heavily patronised by the court elite and counted among its nuns Isabelle Testu (the widow of one of Louis XIII’s masters of ceremonies) and Marie Coton (a niece of the royal confessor, Pierre Coton).Footnote 113 It appears that Queen Anne’s support was key in gaining her access: in an entry of the convent’s register for the month of May 1632, the chapter admitted to having reservations about allowing Motta to join the novitiate because they did not trust that her dower would be paid by the queen.Footnote 114 She had to wait until November of that year to take the habit, and she was fully accepted into the order on the 4 May 1636.Footnote 115 For Motta, who was the daughter of Louis Motta and Pasquette Geoffroy from Reinsberg Germany, this represented a significant social advancement.Footnote 116
The functions fulfilled by court dwarfs were thus far more expansive than easy associations of dwarfism with fooling would allow. While they did not mock and criticise court society, they did perform in court ballets, were featured in large-scale spectacles, and served as royal playmates during the king’s youth. Moreover, far from being limited to the entertainment sphere, court dwarfs were often employed in highly visible service roles, which made them an inescapable presence at the French court. At the same time, many were able to take advantage of these multiple roles to raise their families’ social status and finances.
Visibility and marginalisation
Given the prevalence of people employed as dwarfs at the French court and their visibility and importance to court society, one might be tempted to attribute their absence from historical studies to an act of erasure by historians. After all, people with dwarfism were employed at the court because of their physical difference, and their roles as entertainers, ushers and coat-bearers were designed to maximise their visibility. How else can we explain, then, their invisibility in historical studies? This invisibility, however, results largely from a lack of contemporary sources discussing their offices. This silence is particularly striking because the early seventeenth century saw an explosion of histories of various court offices and departments that help to shed light on the roles of some of the lowliest household officers.Footnote 117 Where we lack such histories, the gap can usually be filled thanks to judicial disputes or contracts signed in front of notaries. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any such documents shedding light on the functions of court dwarfs. This lacuna is surprising: given how many were employed at the French court and the existence of various types of court positions for people with dwarfism, there would have been ample opportunity for such disputes to break out. One would expect friction to flare up between the dwarfs of the king’s Chamber and those employed on the general rolls of the household, conflict to arise between the court dwarfs of the various royal family members, and also between the ushers of the king’s cabinet without dwarfism and the people with dwarfism who served as ushers by virtue of their office as court dwarfs.
That such disputes did not occur – coupled with the lack of histories – suggests a deep ambivalence towards their position at court. I have demonstrated elsewhere that court disputes and the penning of histories of court offices are reflective of courtiers’ efforts to shape court structures to fit their needs and interests.Footnote 118 Even people at the lower end of court hierarchies were protective of their privileges and frequently sought to expand the function of their offices.Footnote 119 That court dwarfs do not seem to have done so is instructive. It is perhaps not chance, then, that some court dwarfs preferred to refer to their offices in ways that avoided the word ‘dwarf’ when signing notarial contracts.Footnote 120 Already in 1604, in an inventory after death for Durand Chasteau, Marin Noël – one of Chasteau’s creditors – is described as usher of the king’s cabinet, even though by this time it had been at least five years since the name of his office had been changed to ‘dwarf’ in household rolls.Footnote 121 Thirty-four years later, his son Claude was also still choosing to describe himself as usher of the king’s cabinet, rather than dwarf of the king’s household.Footnote 122 Edme Sornet in his marriage contract with Charlotte Danglade elected to identify himself as an ‘officer of the king’s chamber’ rather than using his official title, ‘dwarf of the king’s chamber’. While in the same contract, Pierre du Mont and Louis Pinson were comfortable highlighting their role as the court dwarfs of the king and queen, Guillaume du Pont, who was also a witness for the groom, followed Sornet’s example.Footnote 123 Raphael du Bois, for his part, began to describe himself in official documents as ordinary signaller of the king’s Kitchens as early as May 1630, an office whose main responsibility involved informing the Kitchens when the king planned to take his meals.Footnote 124 Thus, the relative invisibility of court dwarfs in the historical record is in part a product of their own lack of engagement with their offices, and the privileges and prerogatives attached to these offices.
This disengagement serves as an important reminder that the position of people with dwarfism at court was indeed marginal. When seeking to recapture marginal voices, it can be tempting to overamplify their role or acceptance in society. Ravenscroft, for instance, in her study of Spanish court dwarfs, pushes credulity by suggesting that nicknames for people with dwarfism such as ‘louse’, ‘worm’ or ‘flea’ are ambiguous because they could have either been patronising or terms of endearment.Footnote 125 She also contends that the longevity which people with dwarfism enjoyed at the Habsburg court implies that they were ‘astute enough to negotiate the choppy waters of court politics’.Footnote 126 In France too, court dwarfs were able to retain their positions for decades: Xanica and Peult served three successive kings, despite the political turbulence of the Wars of Religion. But this longevity was less the result of their acumen as it was of their political irrelevance. Because early modern courts tended to be politically unstable, longevity within royal households was often inversely related to political importance. During Louis XIII’s reign, the royal household and the households of his relatives were periodically purged by Richelieu of anyone who had influence over the king and his family members because they could pose a threat to his political dominance and his ability to control royal patronage.Footnote 127 That no person with dwarfism ever fell afoul of such machinations reveals their lack of political influence.
This is not to say that it was categorically impossible for someone with dwarfism to play an important role at court. Salvador Salort Pons and Susanna Kubersky-Piredda have made a convincing case that Gonzalo de Liaño, who was sent by Philip II of Spain on several occasions to Italian states on a mission to bring back both Italian works of art and artists interested in working for the Spanish court, was a person with dwarfism.Footnote 128 But this example showcases why individual case studies are often misleading when we are trying to understand the history of marginalised groups. In such case studies, individuals are chosen as subjects for study because an unusual number of primary sources relating to them survive. However, the reasons for this greater survival are largely tied to the exceptional nature of the individual in question. In the case of Liaño, his noble ancestry almost certainly played an important part in explaining this expanded role. In any case, there is no evidence that any person employed as a court dwarf in France ever played any comparable role.
One should not forget either that in France at this time, ‘dwarf’ was routinely used as an insult to make fun of short people. Antoine Godeau, bishop of Grasse and Vence, was derisorily referred to as ‘Julie’s dwarf’ (nain de Julie) by his friends of the salon of Rambouillet due to his short stature (Figure 7).Footnote 129 A projected marriage between Henri II d’Orléans, duke of Longueville, and Henri IV’s illegitimate daughter, Catherine-Henriette de Bourbon-Vendôme, broke down in part because Longueville’s mother, Catherine de Gonzague, insinuated to him that the reason Henri IV did not want to marry him with one of his legitimate daughters was because of Longueville’s ‘extremely short’ height and that Henri had sneered that he ‘did not want to put dwarfs within his race’.Footnote 130 Piqued that Henri would not consider him for one of his legitimate daughters because of his physical stature, Longueville refused to marry the illegitimate ones as well.Footnote 131 Michael Magnanus, the person with dwarfism employed in the household of Charles de Créqui, duke of Lesdiguières, would later be featured in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (History of Monsters), alongside fishmen and men with a crane’s head (Figure 8).Footnote 132 The situation in France may not have been as bad as in Rome, where a person with dwarfism who fled the court with his family was brought back by force, but they were nonetheless marginalised and treated contemptuously by court society.Footnote 133
Antoine Godeau speaking in the Rambouillet salon. François Debon, L’Hôtel de Rambouillet (1863). Musée d’art et d’Histoire de Dreux, 863.001.002. © François Lauginie.
Figure 7 Long description
The painting shows Antoine Godeau standing on a raised step in the centre of the painting, gesturing with his right hand and holding a book in the left. He is surrounded by an audience of salon devotees and salonnières, including the host, Catherine de Vivonne, marchioness of Rambouillet.
Engraving of Michael Magnanus. Giovanni Battista Coriolano, ‘Nanus Illustris. & Excellentiss. D. Ducis Caroli de Creqy’. In Aldrovandi, Monstrorum Historia, i, 40. BnF, FB-1057.
Figure 8 Long description
The engraving depicts Michael Magnanus in court attire. He stands with one hand resting on a table. The text above reads 'Nanus Illustrissimi D. Ducis Caroli de Creqy'.
An indication of this can be found in Charlotte de Louvencourt’s lack of a court career. Charlotte’s father, Antoine, was treasurer general of the king’s household (trésorier général de la maison du roi) from 1608 to 1632. His position allowed him to place his brother Claude as a master of the king’s household (maître d’hôtel du roi) and his cousin, Charles, as a serving gentleman (gentilhomme servant).Footnote 134 Given his connections, it would not have been difficult for Antoine to place his daughter as a court dwarf or a maid of the Chamber in the queen’s household. Instead, she was placed as a child in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques convent of the Ursulines, where she became ‘the smallest nun in terms of body […] but also one of the greatest in spirit, grace, and virtue’.Footnote 135 Antoine may have been reluctant to place her at court where her dwarfism would have been subjected to ridicule, at a crucial time for the family’s social ascent.
Indeed, even people with dwarfism who found social success could not escape the ridicule their height engendered at court. The Gazette de France – the court’s official periodical – in its narration of Elisabeth Motta’s social triumph could not help reminding readers that she had first been presented at the French court in a parrot’s cage as part of a practical joke played on the queen by the Infanta Isabella Eugenia.Footnote 136 The periodical did not resist either contrasting Motta’s stature with the social heights of her success: ‘Everything grows so well in France, that […] [even though] she was so small that she was brought there comfortably in a parrot’s cage: she now finds herself one of the high and powerful maids of the court.’Footnote 137 The tone of the text indicates that the readership was intended to find amusement in the idea of someone so small rising to such heights.
The anecdote was pleasing enough that it was recycled in Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes in a chapter on people with dwarfism – though in association with a different person. In his telling, though the Flemish origin, the parrot cage, and the jokes contrasting height with social success were retained, the person with dwarfism in question was no longer Motta, who joined a Parisian convent of the Ursulines, but a maid of the queen’s Chamber, who married an Irish man named Lavau. According to Tallemant des Réaux, this person with dwarfism died shortly after her marriage for lack of children.Footnote 138 Tallemant Des Réaux is confused about a few details. Firstly, the queen’s man nicknamed Lavau was not Irish but was named Bonaventure Irland from a family whose origins were in Scotland but long since established in France.Footnote 139 Secondly, the maid of the Chamber he married was Ysabeau du Fossé, who prior to marrying Lavau had been married to Louis Le Gay, a secretary of Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine, princess of Conti.Footnote 140 There is no indication that du Fossé had been in the service of Isabella, or that her family had originated anywhere other than the kingdom of France. When she died in 1631, she was survived by a daughter, Anne Le Gay, from her first marriage, which gives the lie to the idea that she died due to a lack of children.Footnote 141 It is certainly possible that Ysabeau du Fossé was a person with dwarfism, in which case the association of someone else’s story served to insert humour and fill out an anecdote that would otherwise be quite banal. Whatever the case, the anecdote – and indeed Tallemant des Réaux’s entire chapter – indicates that court dwarfs, whatever their status and success, were not taken seriously.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, I have endeavoured to demonstrate just how numerous men and women with dwarfism working at the court were during the reigns of the first three Bourbon monarchs. Interest in hiring people with dwarfism extended far beyond the monarch, with court dwarfs employed in royal, princely and noble households. They were an integral part of court life, not just because of their numbers but because of their highly visible roles: they acted in carousels and ballets, and performed service duties as ushers, coat-bearers and maids of the Chamber.
But why were there so many people with dwarfism at the French court? It is hard to believe, as art historians once claimed, that they served to emphasise through contrast the physical perfection of their princely alter egos. Had they played such a role in France, one would expect them to be more frequently portrayed with monarchs, as Lutel was in the Testelin painting. Furthermore, the presence of people with dwarfism in the households of lords like Liancourt shows that the phenomenon extended well beyond the circle of the royal family. Outside of portraiture, it is not clear why courtiers observing people with dwarfism should contrast their physique with the monarch rather than with anyone else who was present at court, nor why this should make them believe in the physical perfection of the monarch – especially when the imperfections of a king like Louis XIII were in any case visible to courtiers on a daily basis.Footnote 142
While in earlier times, people with dwarfism might have inspired wonder at the diversity of God’s creation, at the courts of Henri IV, his son and his grandson, their number probably meant that they came to be seen as banal. The absence of commentary on people with dwarfism from courtiers, diplomats and visitors to the court belies any notion that they were amazed by their existence. Besides, if wonder at the diversity of God’s creation were truly the primary reason for the employment of people with dwarfism at court, one would expect court offices to be created for people with other bodily differences. The oft-discussed example of Petrus Gonsalvus and his children who had hypertrichosis and who were maintained at court by Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici is a case in point: while the court was no doubt fascinated by them, no attempt was ever made to create an office for them, or to replace them when they left the French court.Footnote 143 People with gigantism were also occasionally present at the court: a group of them performed during the 1612 carousel and another was employed as a guard of the gateway (garde de la porte) during Louis XIII’s reign.Footnote 144 But these appearances never engendered institutionalising processes either.
It is equally difficult to tie the waxing and waning of the fortunes of people with dwarfism at court to changing tastes in entertainment. While historians have contended that the seventeenth-century disappearance of fools from the court was linked to a growing preference for literary humour and comedy over the coarser humour in which fools engaged, it is hard to see why this should be extended to people with dwarfism. As we have shown, it is not clear how much they really engaged in this kind of entertainment at court in the first place. In any case, Tallemant des Réaux’s gleeful retelling of the parrot anecdote certainly suggests that in 1657 appetite for humour and practical jokes involving people with dwarfism had not abated. The fact that courtiers, such as the marquis of Boufflers or the bishop of Gap, continued to employ people with dwarfism further casts doubt on the notion that there was a substantive shift in courtiers’ tastes. As for the idea that Louis XIV had a personal aversion for people with dwarfism, Louis’s own actions contradict this idea: not only did he go out of his way to replace Pinson in 1662 with Lutel, maintaining him at court until 1668, but he continued to hire people with dwarfism for the court’s entertainment even after he stopped retaining court dwarfs on a permanent basis.
The story of the court dwarfs’ disappearance from the king’s household rolls is perhaps then less a story about Louis XIV’s personal tastes – or even the evolving tastes of the court in general – as of the increasingly unstable and transient status of court dwarfs brought about by institutional pressures. Indeed, there is an institutionalising logic both to the creation of the office of court dwarf under Henri IV and to its disappearance under Louis XIV, which intersected with the marginalisation of people with dwarfism in interesting ways.
Firstly, the continuous presence and increasing number of people with dwarfism at court generated a need to find roles for them to play at court beyond entertainment. These new roles came with offices and wages that allowed them to improve their social status as well as that of their families. At the same time, the stigmatising nature of their role at court meant that people with dwarfism were more likely to invest their energy in court offices that were less explicitly tied to their stature. These other offices had the added advantage of being more firmly established and more easily transmissible to relatives without dwarfism than the office of ‘dwarf’ Henri IV had created for them. Their comparative lack of investment in the office of dwarf, however, weakened the office in the long term: in the absence of father-to-son transmission or energetic lobbying for the position, the onus increasingly fell on the king to expend resources to find a suitable replacement whenever a person with dwarfism died in office. Given their complicated feelings towards the office of dwarf, one might fairly wonder whether people with dwarfism at the court would have been upset by the office’s disappearance. But once the office was gone, their existence at court became more precarious, and it became more difficult for them to attain the offices of usher, coat-bearer and maid of the Chamber that they preferred and had been accustomed to holding.
My purpose in emphasising these dynamics is not to shift the blame for the disappearance of the office from Louis XIV to people with dwarfism, but rather to bring to light how marginalisation and institutionalisation interacted at the court. Courtiers were often the engine powering the creation of new offices and their development.Footnote 145 People with dwarfism struggled to provide such an engine – not just because they lacked power – but because the very office that needed to be at the centre of their activities was a constant reminder of their marginal status at court.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tom Hamilton, Toby Osborne, David van der Linden and Ruben Verwaal for reading earlier versions of this article and for sharing their keen insights with me. Sherilyn Bouyer, Sarah Barthélémy and Alexander Robinson engaged me in fruitful conversations and contributed judicious advice, while Mélanie Lafrance and Victoire Maignan-Watson provided invaluable assistance for navigating the archives of the Ursulines. The attendees of the seminar of the Royal Studies Network, where I presented a version of this article, have my gratitude for their perceptive comments. Finally, I am indebted to the peer reviewers of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society for their penetrating comments and suggestions.
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