Jean-François Bladé

His best-known work in France is his three-volume Contes populaires de la Gascogne (1886), a collection of folk tales supposedly taken down verbatim from illiterate narrators in the Gascon language, though Bladé provides only a 'translation' into French.

His information about his oral sources is confused and unconvincing (the chief of them, le vieux Cazaux, appears to be a fictional creation) and much of his collection betrays a nineteenth-century writer much indebted to the European tradition of high literature; 'La Reine châtiée', for example, one of his finest stories, is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

1) have a highly distinctive style and also a bleak atmosphere that is wholly alien to the spirit of genuine folk tales.

Bladé emerges as a forger, but one who deserves recognition as, admittedly within a narrow range, a writer of near genius.

But the failure of the stories he published in his own name in his youth, which were too old-fashioned to win favour, led him to present his later fictions as oral folk tales of which he was the mere transcriber.