Dames Blanches

Also Known As: French, “White Ladies”; singular Dame Blanche; grouped in regional French with the bonnes dames and the dames vertes
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She takes possession of a narrow crossing and sets a small price on it, usually a dance or a bent knee.
Role in Mythos: She is the unfriendly half of the French fairy population, the one who turns an ordinary walk home into a negotiation.
Relation to Humans: A traveller who pays her toll is curtsied to and let through unharmed, and the encounter ends there. A traveller who refuses is thrown into the briars or handed over to the lutins, cats and owls that keep her company.

The Pont d’Angot was a plank bridge over the Dive, in the country around Falaise, and it was narrow enough that two people could not cross it at once without one of them standing aside. That is the whole of the geography. It is also the whole of the problem, because something sat on it after dark and would not move, and the Norman peasant who wanted his supper had to come to terms.

Normandy’s fairies were mostly obliging. They danced their rings in the fields, borrowed the horses at night and plaited stirrups into the manes, mended a broken churn out of sheer good manners, and left luck behind them in the byre. The Dames Blanches were the other sort. Amélie Bosquet gathered them for *La Normandie romanesque et merveilleuse* in 1845, and Thomas Keightley carried them into English soon after with a flat one-line verdict: another kind of fée, of a less benevolent character. He was cautious enough about Bosquet’s collecting to say in a footnote that he hoped she had not let the Breton korrigans lend their traits to her Norman ladies. The worry is fair. It is also the only serious doubt anyone has raised about them.

They kept to bottlenecks. Ravines, fords, plank bridges, any place where the ground funnels a person into one line and there is no way to walk around. At Bayeux there was a winding sunken lane where the Rue Saint Quentin runs now, and a Dame Blanche called the Dame d’Aprigny held it. She did not block it by standing in the way. She blocked it by dancing, a tangled, doubling-back sort of dance that filled the width of the cut, and while she danced she put out a hand.

Take it and the thing was over in a moment. Two turns, a string of courtesies, and she was gone and the lane was empty and the walker went on to Bayeux with cold ears and a story. Draw the hand back and she had you off your feet and into the ditch, which on that road meant thorns, and briars, and a long scratched walk home. Nobody wrote down what her face looked like.

The lady of the Pont d’Angot wanted something different and more pointed. She sat on the planks and let nobody past who would not kneel to her first, and the ones who would not kneel she gave to her household: the lutins, and the cats, and the owls, and whatever else haunted that stretch of the Dive under her authority. They tormented the refuser cruelly. The record says that much and stops, which is worse than a description would have been.

White is nearly the entire portrait. She has no anatomy in the sources, no stature, no colouring beyond the one that names her, and the tellings never bother to say whether she is beautiful, because it is not the point. What the stories do describe with care is the space she occupies. A cut in the ground with high sides. A single plank over moving water. The dark bulk of thorn on either hand. She is a shape in a gap, and the gap is doing most of the work.

The name spread far past Normandy. In the Vosges and across France generally, dames blanches was simply one of the ordinary words for the fairies, sitting alongside bonnes dames and, in Léopold-François Sauvé’s collecting, dames vertes. At Martimpré the local people still spoke of them showing themselves at midnight on the bridge over the Vologne, which is the same instinct working in a different valley. Up in the Sarre country near Abreschviller the dames blanches once carried enormous stones about in their aprons and set them standing in the fields, and the standing stones are still there. Christianity is said to have driven them off. Every seventh year they come back, and at midnight they dance around the menhirs they raised, while one of their number goes down to the river with a bundle of white linen to wash.

That linen is worth noticing. The Vosges fairies are bridge-builders and water-keepers by nature, and the Pont des Fées turns up as a place name at Gérardmer, Uriménil, Val-d’Ajol, Bains-les-Bains, Raon-l’Étape and near Remiremont. The Gérardmer bridge has a beautiful fée behind it who is said to have stopped travellers, given them a philtre that emptied them of their own will, and set them to work on her masonry. The bridge is still standing over the Vologne. The story has kept the same three ingredients as the Norman one, a woman, a crossing, and a stranger who is not free to simply walk on.

Behind all of it lies something older and murkier. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, died in 1248 complaining about the *dominae nocturnae*, the night ladies who appeared in the likeness of girls or matrons in white women’s dress, who came into stables carrying wax lights so that the wax dripped on the horses’ collars and the manes were found neatly plaited in the morning, and whose queen he names as Domina Abundia. Householders left their wine casks open and their larders unbarred on the nights they expected her, on the theory that a well-fed visitor leaves prosperity behind. The *Roman de la Rose* has ordinary people convinced that a third of all children go riding with Dame Habonde three nights a week, their souls slipping out through cracks and cat-holes while the body stays in bed. J. A. MacCulloch, writing in 1911, traced the *Dame* of medieval folklore back to the *Dominae* of Gallo-Roman altar inscriptions and the guardian mothers, the Matres, and the same descent from the Gaulish *fatae* and the matronae is the standard reading of the Lorraine fairies today.

Her powers are narrow and absolute inside their borders. She can hold a crossing against anyone. She can compel a dance from a man who has no intention of dancing, and she has the lutins and the night animals of that place at her disposal. She vanishes when she is finished, without a departure. Outside the crossing she appears to have nothing at all. She does not follow, she does not hunt, she has no reach into houses or fields, and she cannot take what she wants by force, which is why she asks. Her entire hold on a person is that the person needs to get to the other side, and the moment he agrees to the dance or drops to one knee, the toll is paid and the power is spent. It costs a traveller two turns on a plank bridge and a little dignity. Most of them paid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Dames Blanches?

The Dames Blanches, or White Ladies, are fairy women of French folklore who take up a position at narrow crossings and demand a small courtesy before letting anyone through. They were recorded chiefly in Normandy and in Lorraine and the Vosges. Unlike most French fées, who bring luck and mend things, they are described as being of a less benevolent character.

Where do the Dames Blanches appear?

Dames Blanches appear at bottlenecks: ravines, fords, sunken lanes and narrow bridges, places where a traveller cannot go around. The best-known are the Dame d’Aprigny in a ravine on the site of the Rue Saint Quentin at Bayeux, and the lady of the Pont d’Angot, a plank bridge over the Dive near Falaise. In the Vosges they were said to show themselves at midnight on the bridge over the Vologne at Martimpré.

What happens if you refuse a Dame Blanche?

Refusal is punished immediately. The Dame d’Aprigny seized anyone who drew back from her dance and threw him into the ditches full of briars and thorns. The Dame Blanche of the Pont d’Angot handed refusers over to the lutins, cats and owls that served her, who tormented them.

How do you get past a Dame Blanche safely?

Give her what she asks for. A dance of a round or two, a hand across a plank, or going down on the knees was enough, and she would curtsy and vanish and leave the traveller unharmed. Her power does not extend past the crossing she occupies, so the encounter ends the moment the toll is paid.

What do the Dames Blanches look like?

The tradition names their colour and stops there. No source gives a Dame Blanche a face, a height or an age, only a pale figure filling a narrow space with a hand held out. In the Sarre country near Abreschviller they were described as carrying huge stones in their aprons, which is as close to a body as the record gets.