The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault 1

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault 1

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

 

 

CONTENTS.

 

INTRODUCTION 9

 

LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD 21

 

THE FAIRY 27

 

BLUE BEARD 35

 

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOOD 47

 

THE MASTER CAT; OR, PUSS IN BOOTS 67

 

CINDERILLA; OR, THE LITTLE GLASS SLIPPER 77

 

RIQUET WITH THE TUFT 93

 

LITTLE THUMB 109

 

THE RIDICULOUS WISHES 127

 

DONKEY-SKIN 137

 

 

 

 

 

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 

 

PAGE

 

CINDERILLA AND HER PRINCE _Frontispiece_

 

"HE ASKED HER WHITHER SHE WAS GOING" _facing_ 24

 

"'WHAT IS THIS I SEE?' SAID HER MOTHER" 28

 

"'AM I COME HITHER TO SERVE YOU WITH WATER, PRAY?'" _facing_ 30

 

"'WHAT, IS NOT THE KEY OF MY CLOSET AMONG THE REST?'" 36

 

"THIS MAN HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO HAVE A BLUE BEARD" _facing_ 38

 

"AT THIS VERY INSTANT THE YOUNG FAIRY CAME OUT FROM

BEHIND THE HANGINGS" 48

 

THE PRINCE ENQUIRES OF THE AGED COUNTRYMAN _facing_ 54

 

"HE SAW, UPON A BED, THE FINEST SIGHT WAS EVER

BEHELD" _facing_ 56

 

"'I WILL HAVE IT SO,' REPLIED THE QUEEN, 'AND WILL

EAT HER WITH SAUCE ROBERT'" 59

 

"THE MARQUIS GAVE HIS HAND TO THE PRINCESS, AND

FOLLOWED THE KING, WHO WENT UP FIRST" _facing_ 74

 

"AWAY SHE DROVE, SCARCE ABLE TO CONTAIN HERSELF FOR JOY" 78

 

"ANY ONE BUT CINDERILLA WOULD HAVE DRESSED THEIR

HEADS AWRY" _facing_ 80

 

"SHE LEFT BEHIND ONE OF HER GLASS SLIPPERS, WHICH THE

PRINCE TOOK UP MOST CAREFULLY" 87

 

"THE PRINCE BELIEVED HE HAD GIVEN HER MORE WITH THAN

HE HAD RESERVED FOR HIMSELF" 99

 

"RIQUET WITH THE TUFT APPEARED TO HER THE FINEST

PRINCE UPON EARTH" _facing_ 104

 

"LITTLE THUMB WAS AS GOOD AS HIS WORD, AND RETURNED

THAT SAME NIGHT WITH THE NEWS" 110

 

"HE BROUGHT THEM HOME BY THE VERY SAME WAY THEY CAME" _facing_ 112

 

"JUPITER APPEARED BEFORE HIM WIELDING HIS MIGHTY

THUNDERBOLTS" 128

 

"A LONG BLACK PUDDING CAME WINDING AND WRIGGLING

TOWARDS HER" _facing_ 130

 

"TRUTH TO TELL, THIS NEW ORNAMENT DID NOT SET OFF HER

BEAUTY" 133

 

"ANOTHER GOWN THE COLOUR OF THE MOON" 138

 

"HE THOUGHT THE PRINCESS WAS HIS QUEEN" 143

 

"CURIOSITY MADE HIM PUT HIS EYE TO THE KEYHOLE" _facing_ 150

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

"Avec ardeur il aima les beaux arts."

 

_Griselidis_

 

 

_Charles Perrault must have been as charming a fellow as a man could

meet. He was one of the best-liked personages of his own great age,

and he has remained ever since a prime favourite of mankind. We are

fortunate in knowing a great deal about his varied life, deriving our

knowledge mainly from D'Alembert's history of the French Academy and

from his own memoirs, which were written for his grandchildren, but

not published till sixty-six years after his death. We should, I

think, be more fortunate still if the memoirs had not ceased in

mid-career, or if their author had permitted himself to write of his

family affairs without reserve or restraint, in the approved manner of

modern autobiography. We should like, for example, to know much more

than we do about the wife and the two sons to whom he was so devoted._

 

_Perrault was born in Paris in 1628, the fifth son of Pierre Perrault,

a prosperous parliamentary lawyer; and, at the age of nine, was sent

to a day-school--the Collège de Beauvais. His father helped him with

his lessons at home, as he himself, later on, was accustomed to help

his own children. He can never have been a model schoolboy, though he

was always first in his class, and he ended his school career

prematurely by quarrelling with his master and bidding him a formal

farewell._

 

_The cause of this quarrel throws a bright light on Perraults

subsequent career. He refused to accept his teacher's philosophical

tenets on the mere ground of their traditional authority. He claimed

that novelty was in itself a merit, and on this they parted. He did

not go alone. One of his friends, a boy called Beaurain, espoused his

cause, and for the next three or four years the two read together,

haphazard, in the Luxembourg Gardens. This plan of study had almost

certainly a bad effect on Beaurain, for we hear no more of him. It

certainly prevented Perrault from being a thorough scholar, though it

made him a man of taste, a sincere independent, and an undaunted

amateur._

 

_In 1651 he took his degree at the University of Orléans, where

degrees were given with scandalous readiness, payment of fees being

the only essential preliminary. In the mean-time he had walked the

hospitals with some vague notion of following his brother Claude into

the profession of medicine, and had played a small part as a

theological controversialist in the quarrel then raging, about the

nature of grace, between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Having

abandoned medicine and theology he got called to the Bar, practised

for a while with distinct success, and coquetted with a notion of

codifying the laws of the realm. The Bar proved too arid a profession

to engage for long his attention; so he next sought and found a place

in the office of another brother, Pierre, who was Chief Commissioner

of Taxes in Paris. Here Perrault had little to do save to read at

large in the excellent library which his brother had formed._

 

_For want of further occupation he returned to the writing of verse,

one of the chief pleasures of his boyhood. His first sustained

literary effort had been a parody of the sixth book of the "Æneid";

which, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, was never published and

has not survived. Beaurain and his brother Nicholas, a doctor of the

Sorbonne, assisted him in this perpetration, and Claude made the

pen-and-ink sketches with which it was illustrated. In the few years

that had elapsed since the writing of this burlesque Perrault had

acquired more sense and taste, and his new poems--in particular the

"Portrait d'Iris" and the "Dialogue entre l'Amour et l'Amitié"--were

found charming by his contemporaries. They were issued anonymously,

and Quinault, himself a poet of established reputation, used some of

them to forward his suit with a young lady, allowing her to think that

they were his own. Perrault, when told of Quinault's pretensions,

deemed it necessary to disclose his authorship; but, on hearing of the

use to which his work had been put, he gallantly remained in the

background, forgave the fraud, and made a friend of the culprit._

 

_Architecture next engaged his attention, and in 1657 he designed a

house at Viry for his brother and supervised its construction. Colbert

approved so much of this performance that he employed him in the

superintendence of the royal buildings and put him in special charge

of Versailles, which was then in process of erection. Perrault flung

himself with ardour into this work, though not to the exclusion of his

other activities. He wrote odes in honour of the King; he planned

designs for Gobelin tapestries and decorative paintings; he became a

member of the select little Academy of Medals and Inscriptions which

Colbert brought into being to devise suitable legends for the royal

palaces and monuments; he encouraged musicians and fought the cause of

Lulli; he joined with Claude in a successful effort to found the

Academy of Science._

 

_Claude Perrault had something of his brother's versatility and shared

his love for architecture, and the two now became deeply interested in

the various schemes which were mooted for the completion of the

Louvre. Bernini was summoned by the King from Rome, and entrusted with

the task; but the brothers Perrault intervened. Charles conceived the

idea of the great east front and communicated it to Claude, who drew

the plans and was commissioned to carry them out. The work was

finished in 1671, and is still popularly known as Perrault's Colonnade._