son of wealthy parents. He was sent to a prestigious school and did well there, becoming, in his own words, ‘one of the best students in my class’. ‘I took so much pleasure in class debates,’ he later recalled in his memoirs, ‘that I enjoyed the days we went to school as much as the holidays.’ Around the age of fifteen, he left school to study independently for a few years — among other subjects, poetry — during which he also found the time to put together a burlesque translation of a portion of Virgil’s Aeneid.
But writing was not the career he — or, more to the point, his father — had in mind. Aged twenty-three, and after a fleeting attendance at the University of Orléans (‘They were not … strict … in granting degrees’), Perrault became a lawyer. It was a short-lived endeavour and he never settled into it, abandoning the profession in 1654 to become a government clerk under his brother Pierre. Finding his new job ‘not very demanding’, Perrault took to visiting libraries and reading poetry, and was inspired to write a poem, ‘Le Portrait d’Iris’, which was published to positive reviews in 1659.
Although he continued to write and publish poetry, he spent the late 1650s and early 1660s restoring and redesigning a large family estate, as a result of which he came to the attention of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s superintendent of buildings. Under Colbert’s patronage, Perrault rose to a position of significant influence in the royal court, even able to appoint his own brother Claude to design the east wing of the Louvre. He took to commemorating notable royal events in verse.
The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
By 1671, Perrault was esteemed enough in Parisian society to be elected to the prestigious Académie française, an elite authority established to maintain correct usage of the French language. In this role, he became deeply involved in an academic debate that began as a difference of artistic opinion and quickly developed into a fierce, decades-long war of words between France’s most eminent thinkers.
The subject of the debate sounds almost trivial now, but in the late seventeenth century it challenged the very foundations of the Académie française. It centred on a long-held view among academics that no contemporary writer could ever match the talent and excellence of his Classical Greek and Roman predecessors. Perrault was one of a few members who thought differently, and in 1674, after his less enlightened colleagues mounted a denunciation of opera — then a relatively new form of music — he published Critique de l’Opéra, a spirited defence that made unfavourable comparisons with ancient works.
The Académie quickly split into two factions, the Anciens (among them Nicolas Boileau, Jean Racine and Jean de la Fontaine) and the Modernes (led by Perrault), who took to publishing and counter-publishing tracts against the other’s thinking. Perrault’s Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great), published in 1687, was one of the key cases for the prosecution, establishing the Modernes’ arguably immodest viewpoint that they were living and writing in times of artistic excellence.
The debate continued into the early years of the eighteenth century but Perrault and his supporters ultimately won the day, setting the scene for France to lead the world in literary and artistic experimentation.
Fabulous Beasts
Perrault was briefly married in the 1670s, to Marie Guichon, a woman many decades his junior, and they had four children before she succumbed to an early death. During this period he was influential in advising Louis XIV on his plans for expansion at the Palace of Versailles; perhaps it was becoming a family man that compelled him to talk the king into adding thirty-nine elaborate fountains along the pathways of the Versailles labyrinth, each of them depicting one of Aesop’s fables. In a playful twist, the figures were designed to ‘converse’ with one another by shooting out alternating jets of water. It was an early indication of Perrault’s love of old folk tales and memorable characters, although he would not write his first collection until his own children were adults.
This last change in Perrault’s meandering career is once again attributable to the intervention of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, albeit in an indirect way. By the early 1680s Perrault seems to have fallen out of favour with his former patron, and he was gradually pushed aside to make way for Colbert’s son. Jobless, widowed, and with his children growing up fast, Perrault turned to writing. He was sixty-nine years old in 1697 when he published Histoires ou contes du temps passé or Les Contes de ma mère l’oye (Stories or Tales from Past Times or Tales of Mother Goose).
The tales were modernised, some of them significantly, from both well-known and more obscure European peasant tales as well as from ancient sources — a poke in the eye, it has been argued, to Perrault’s Ancien colleagues at the Académie française. The Ridiculous Wishes and Donkey-Skin were stories Perrault had been toying with for a number of years, although both are likely to have been based on folk tales and fables. A handful of the stories had previously appeared in print, notably the Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty of Giambattista Basile, published in Italy in the 1630s, but the additions and edits made by Perrault were substantial: he gave Cinderella her Fairy Godmother and glass slippers and spared Sleeping Beauty a sexual assault by the king she goes on to marry. He cut the ending in which Puss in Boots fakes his own death to see if he’ll get a golden coffin, and gave Little Red Riding Hood her red hood.
Curiously, Perrault published his collection under the name of his teenage son, Pierre Perrault Darmancour. Perhaps, aged almost seventy, and just six years before his death, Perrault was handing over the baton of literary modernism to the next generation.
Charles Perrault died in Paris in 1703. He could little have predicted the legacy of his late literary outpouring, or that many of his adaptations of fables and folk tales would become the definitive texts. Over a century later, when the Brothers Grimm mined European storytelling traditions for their own influential collection, Perrault’s contes were among the richest sources. If they made changes to his stories to better fit with their own time, one can only assume Perrault would have approved.
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOOD
Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who were grieved, more grieved than words can tell, because they had no children. They tried the waters of every country, made vows and pilgrimages, and did everything that could be done, but without result. At last, however, the queen found that her wishes were fulfilled, and in due course she gave birth to a daughter.
A grand christening was held, and all the fairies that could be found in the realm (they numbered seven in all) were invited to be godmothers to the little princess. This was done so that by means of the gifts which each in turn would bestow upon her (in accordance with the fairy custom of those days) the princess might be endowed with every imaginable perfection.
When the christening ceremony was over, all the company returned to the king’s palace, where a great banquet was held in honour of the fairies. Places were laid for them in magnificent style, and before each was placed a solid gold casket containing a spoon, fork, and knife of fine gold, set with diamonds and rubies. But just as all were sitting down to table an aged fairy was seen to enter, whom no one had thought to invite—the reason being that for more than fifty years she had never quitted the tower in which she lived, and people had supposed her to be dead or bewitched.
By the king’s orders a place was laid for her, but it was impossible to give her a golden casket like the others, for only seven had been made for the seven fairies. The old creature believed that she was intentionally slighted, and muttered threats between her teeth.
She was overheard by
