Farfadet

Also Known As: Provençal farfadet, fem. farfadeto; fadet and fradet in Poitou and the Vendée; Frère-Fadet and failfadet in the Poitevin glossaries; from fadet, a diminutive of the southern word for a fairy
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It works and meddles by night around livestock, hearths and quarries, keeps itself unseen, and in the Poitevin tellings can leave one of its own children in a cradle and take the human one away.
Role in Mythos: It is the house and rock lutin of western and southern France, holding the caves and stones that carry its name and doing after dark the work nobody saw done.
Relation to Humans: It fastens on a farm, a byre or a cave and works or interferes there unasked, and the country rule is that whatever it has done is left exactly as found. Crowd it, undo its work, or heat the seat it likes to sit on, and it turns to small revenges or goes.

A Vendée cowman in the middle of the nineteenth century would walk into his byre at dawn, look at the crust of dried bedding matted along the thighs of every animal in the stalls, and leave it precisely where it was. The farfadets had been in during the night, rubbing the cows down with the litter, and the rule in that country was firm: harm came to the man who undid the work of the night spirits. So the cows stayed filthy. Paul Sébillot, sweeping up French belief parish by parish, found that one nowhere but the Vendée, and it is nothing like the tidy little house-elf of the modern picture books.

The word itself arrives in French as a joke. In 1542 Rabelais stocked the imaginary library of Saint-Victor with absurd volumes, and one of them, in an early variant of that list, is L’histoire des farfadetz. He had borrowed the word from the south, where a farfadet is simply a lutin. Mistral’s great dictionary of the langue d’oc places it in Languedoc and Quercy and files it beside fadet, fouletoun, fantasti and dra, all of them names for the same nuisance. Underneath sits fadet, a diminutive of the southern word for a fairy, with a doubled first syllable that the etymologists are still arguing about: either a collision with the Italian farfarello, which began as the name of one of Dante’s devils, or a meaningless intensifier of the sort that also produced farfouiller.

What the southern farfadet actually does, Mistral records under one of its other names. It comes into the stable after dark, unhitches the horses from the manger, ties them together by the tail, walks them down to the drinking trough in the black of the night and curries them, and then invents further nuisances until morning. His summing-up is worth keeping whole: an imaginary being who, in the people’s idea of it, is mischievous rather than wicked. There is no saucer of cream anywhere in the entry.

Up in the limestone country along the Vienne, the same word carries something else entirely. Léon Pineau took his Poitou material down in the 1890s from the people who spoke it, and his fadets are not household spirits at all. At Biâre, a hamlet facing Moussac on the left bank of the river, there is a long rock called the roche aux Fadets, and it carries the name because the fadets there used to do a great deal of good. Every night they took the sharecroppers’ ewes out to the fields and never lost one, and there were no finer sheep anywhere in the country.

One night a hare got itself shut inside the flock and could not find its way out. The fadets were standing all around the sheep, and as the hare broke one way and then the other they called to one another across the dark: fadet, fadet, stop that little red lamb. They stopped it. They walked it into the pen with the ewes, and in the morning the farmers came down to look at their sheep and found a hare among them.

They took children too. The Biâre telling has one lifted from its own doorstep with a fadet child left in its place, and the parents, at their wits’ end, carrying the substitute up to the mouth of the rock and making it howl until the fadets brought the right one back and took theirs away. A second version, from a woman named Cécile Compaing, is colder. A fadette swaps her baby for a working woman’s while the woman is out, and the mother gets her own back by pinching the fadet child until it screams. Those little fadets, the teller says, are not pretty. They were black, very black. The fadette returns the stolen baby with a line that lands like a slap: wicked woman, you hurt mine, and I do no harm to yours.

Pineau added a note to that story which changes the shape of the whole subject. For the country people he was recording, fadets and fadettes were not spirits at all. They were men like themselves, an earlier people who had held the land before them and lived in the rocks. The teller of the Biâre story says as much in passing, that the fadets were a kind of savage but they were not wicked. Near Lussac-les-Châteaux there is a cave called the Grotte des Fadets which has given up worked flint and worked bone from long before anyone thought to put a name to it. The memory attaches to the stone. Pineau reckoned there was scarcely a cave or a rock in the whole Vienne valley without a fadet story hanging off it.

In the Vendée the creature comes indoors and changes again. The Poitevin glossaries file it as the Frère-Fadet and call it the Trilby of the Vendée, after the lovesick sprite in Charles Nodier’s tale: a charming and likeable little lutin that haunts by night the houses where pretty fair-haired women live, and that withdraws by day into great caverns where the farfadets pile up immense treasures. In the Vendéen scholar Benjamin Fillon’s legend of Germanette it earns its keep in the plainest way imaginable. The woman picks up her distaff again, and the Frère-Fadet rocks the baby, brings the pot to the boil and snuffs the lamp through the long evening. Elsewhere in the same tale somebody heats the Frère-Fadet’s trivet, which is not a kindness. Fillon also had the local story, comic and touching at once, of a farfadet in love with a pretty woman of the village of La Fosse in the commune of Mouilleron-en-Pareds, and there was a spring in the Vendée called the fountain of the Frères-Fadet where a lutin fell for a peasant girl who came there to draw water.

Further east, in the Deux-Sèvres, the farfadets kept to the quarries and would not be crowded. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the women of the Sèvre valley used to gather of an evening to spin and knit in the hollows left by stone-getting, because the air inside stayed mild and spared them the trouble of a fire. The farfadets, who lived in those caverns, took the invasion badly. In the half-dark the spindles went missing, the thread came out snarled, and the light kept going out. They are all through that landscape. They dug the caves of the Boullardière at Terves. They gave their name to the Roche aux Fadets at Verruyes and to a Trou des Farfadets in the same département. Among the white quartz at Pyrome they keep heaps of gold under an enormous block that lifts itself at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve, and anyone who means to reach in has to have renounced his share of paradise first. The Vendée ones hoarded silver as well, in caverns nobody could get into. Up in the Beauce they stop being small altogether and become the whirlwinds that go through a standing crop and turn it over.

None of these collectors describes one. That is the striking thing about the record: it is thick with what farfadets do and empty of what they look like. The familiar picture, the wrinkled brown little man half a metre high in brown rags, the mountain farfadets with no fingers or toes and the lowland ones with no noses, is not in Sébillot, not in Pineau and not in the Poitevin glossaries. It comes out of the illustrated fairy books of the late twentieth century and the popular encyclopedias that quote them. The bowl of cream on the doorstep and the gift of new clothes that sends the helper away for good arrive by the same road, out of the wider European story of the house spirit. They are good motifs. They are simply not what the French collectors wrote down about this one.

Then there is the man who thought they were killing him. Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier, a gentleman of Carpentras, published three volumes at his own expense in 1821, printed on the rue Guénégaud where he also lodged, adorned with eight superb lithographs, eighteen francs in paper covers: Les Farfadets, ou Tous les démons ne sont pas de l’autre monde. He dedicated it to all the emperors, kings, princes and sovereigns of the four parts of the world, and told them he had been under attack for more than twenty-three years. He named the attackers in order of rank. First Moreau, sorcerer of Paris, representative of Beelzebub. Second, Pinel the elder, physician at the Salpêtrière, representative of Satan. Berbiguier had gone to consult him on 24 April 1816. His arsenal was larding needles, pins, sulphur, salt, tobacco, vinegar and ox hearts, and he kept thousands of captured farfadets shut up in bottles. He knew exactly what would be said of him, and said it first: you are reading the memoirs of a madman. His answer was that if he were mad, his enemies would not be tormented day and night by his pins. He also explained why he had added de Terre-Neuve du Thym to his name, and the reason he gives is not the one usually repeated. It was not that thyme drives farfadets off. It was so that nobody would confuse him with the other Berbiguiers who had gone to law against his uncle, and he meant to buy a small piece of ground where he would grow the herb for good.

Whatever the farfadet is in a given valley, its strength is always the same, and it is a strength of position. It is already inside: in the byre, in the fold, in the quarry the women wanted for an hour, in the cradle, in the hair of a man who cannot sleep. Nothing it does requires any power beyond being there unseen with the whole night to spend. The limits run along the same seam. It can be pulled back to the mouth of its own rock by the sound of its own child crying. It can be driven out of a house by heating the seat it likes to sit on. Its gold can be reached, at a price nobody in the story is willing to pay. And the surest way to lose one is the thing that Vendée cowman understood when he looked at his filthy cows and picked up nothing at all: undo its work, and it stops working.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a farfadet?

A farfadet is a lutin of French folklore, recorded in Provence and Languedoc in the south and in Poitou and the Vendée in the west. It works and meddles at night around stables, byres, hearths and quarries, and it is generally unseen. In the western Vendée form, called the Frère-Fadet, it rocks the baby, boils the pot and snuffs the lamp while the household spins.

What does a farfadet look like?

No nineteenth-century French collector describes one. The picture that circulates today, a wrinkled brown man half a metre high in brown rags, with mountain farfadets missing their fingers and toes and lowland ones missing their noses, comes from late twentieth-century illustrated fairy books and the popular encyclopedias that quote them, not from Sébillot, Pineau or the Poitevin glossaries. What the old tellings give instead is a voice calling across a flock in the dark and fadet children remembered as black, very black.

Where does the word farfadet come from?

Farfadet entered French from Provençal, where it means a lutin, and its first recorded French appearance is in 1542, in a variant of the joke library catalogue in Rabelais’s Pantagruel. It is built on fadet, a diminutive of the southern word for a fairy. The doubled first syllable is either a crossing with the Italian farfarello, originally the name of one of Dante’s devils, or an intensifying particle of unknown origin.

How do you get rid of a farfadet?

The French record is thinner on this than modern retellings suggest. In Benjamin Fillon’s Vendéen legend of Germanette somebody heats the Frère-Fadet’s trivet, and in the Poitou changeling tales the fadets are made to give a stolen child back by tormenting the fadet child left in its place. The gift of new clothes that sends a house spirit away belongs to the wider European tradition rather than to what the Poitevin and Vendéen collectors wrote down.

Who was Berbiguier de Terre-Neuve du Thym?

Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier was a gentleman of Carpentras who published three volumes in 1821, Les Farfadets, ou Tous les démons ne sont pas de l’autre monde, describing more than twenty-three years of persecution by invisible farfadets. He listed his tormentors by rank, placing Pinel the elder, physician at the Salpêtrière, second as the representative of Satan, and he fought them with pins, sulphur, salt, tobacco, vinegar and ox hearts. His book is the longest account of farfadets ever written and it preserves a far more vicious creature than the farmyard helper.