Welcome to Noeple Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Erin Manky,

listener discretion advised.

The French fairy tale, La Céblue, or The Bluebird,

tells the story of Florene, a beautiful princess who is,

as so many beautiful princesses are, being kept in a tower.

Her stepmother is seeming to keep her apart from Prince Charming,

in the hopes that the prince will marry her own daughter,

the, of course, spoiled and notably ugly Triton.

What this stepmother doesn't know, however, is that the prince had been cursed for his rejection

of Triton by her fairy godmother and turned into a Bluebird who visits Florene in her tower

for years. This is one of those happily ever after fairy tales.

The curse is in the end lifted and the lovers marry, but the story doesn't just end there.

Instead, the Bluebird ends with a rhyming verse moral to drive home its message.

In English translation, better to be a bird of any hue, a raven, crow, an owl, I do protest,

then stick for life to a partner like glue, who scorns you or whom you distest.

Too many matches of that sort I've seen, and wish now that there was some king magician.

To stop these ill-matched souls at once and lean on them with force to keep his prohibition.

Fairytales are often seen as stories for children, but in their sometimes intense darkness and moral

dilemmas, they can also be fairly adult in their content. Prince Charming, choosing to defy the

fairy godmother's ultimatum and accepting his ornithological punishment rather than being forced to

marry a woman he doesn't love, gains new significance when you learn the true story of the woman

who wrote his tale, Madame de la Nois. The Baroness de la Nois tale, like that of many a fairy tale

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