Complete Fairy Tales Read online

  The Complete Fairy Tales

  Reading the tales to the family

  CHARLES PERRAULT

  The Complete

  Fairy Tales

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  CHTISTOPHER BETTS

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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  © Christopher Betts 2009

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  First published 2009

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Perrault, Charles, 1628–1703.

  [Contes des fées. English]

  The Complete Fairy Tales / Charles Perrault;

  translated with an introduction and notes by Christopher Betts.

  p. cm. — (Oxford World’s Classics hardbacks)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978–0–19–923683–1

  1. Fairy tales—France. 2. Children’s stories, French—Translations into English.

  I. Betts, C. J. II. Title.

  PQ1877.A27 2009

  843′.4—dc22

  2009009571

  Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

  ISBN 978–0–19–923683–1

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Note on the Text and Translation

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Charles Perrault

  THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES

  TALES IN VERSE

  Preface

  The History of Griselda

  Letter to M...., on sending him The History of Griselda

  Three Silly Wishes

  Donkey-Skin

  STORIES OR TALES OF BYGONE TIMES, WITH THEIR MORALS

  To Mademoiselle

  The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

  Little Red Riding-Hood

  Bluebeard

  Puss in Boots

  The Fairies

  Cinderella

  Ricky the Tuft

  Hop o’ my Thumb

  Appendix A: Selected Tales related to Perrault’s Contes

  Appendix B: Early Versions of the last part of Sleeping Beauty and of The Fairies

  Explanatory Notes

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Reading the tales to the family

  The courtiers attempt to rouse their king

  An expert casuist defends the match

  The Princess laments her sad situation

  Kings and queens from distant lands arrive for the wedding celebrations

  The Princess finds an old woman spinning alone

  The Prince passes gentlemen and ladies, all asleep

  The Prince sees the beautiful Princess

  Little Red Riding-Hood meets Master Wolf

  The Wolf flings himself on the old lady, and eats her all up

  Little Red Riding-Hood is surprised to see what her grandmother looks like

  Bluebeard forbids his wife to unlock the private room

  Friends and neighbours envy the new bride’s riches

  The two brothers set upon Bluebeard

  Master Cat cries for help to save the Marquis of Carabas from drowning

  Master Cat orders the labourers to acknowledge the Marquis of Carabas to the King

  The Ogre receives Master Cat politely

  A poor woman asks for something to drink

  Cinderella’s godmother scoops out the pumpkin

  Cinderella is admired at the ball

  The slipper fits Cinderella’s foot perfectly

  A troop of twenty or thirty cooks passes the Princess

  Hop o’ my Thumb leaves a trail of pebbles

  The Ogre demands to know if his supper is ready

  The Ogre pulls the boys out from under the bed

  The Ogre cuts his daughters’ throats

  INTRODUCTION

  GIVEN the title of this volume, the reader will no doubt take for granted that the stories it contains were created by a specific person, by the name of Charles Perrault, writing at a specific time and place—the end of the seventeenth century in Paris. Authorship and historical origins seem guaranteed. But if you look at a collection of stories centred, not on Perrault, but on the tale, say, of Red Riding-Hood, 1 these assumptions may seem shaky. You will find that his Le Petit Chaperon Rouge is there regarded as an item of folk literature, one among a huge array of versions of ‘the same’ tale, collected from many different times and places, without known origins and in most cases without an author. So Perrault did not create the story, he merely gave us one more version, albeit an important one. And seen in another perspective, that of adults recalling their childhood, this volume contains tales that many of us have known and loved for decades, concerning ourselves with meaning sufficiently in order to enjoy the narrative, as the child does, and no more; but if you look again at what you may remember as pleasurable entertainment, you will find that the content of the tales is problematic, to put it mildly. They are full of savagery, deceit, and sexual implications which are more or less evident—very much so in the most notorious verse tale, Donkey-Skin. It is understandable that readers ask what such stories signify, both for child and adult.

  Assuming for the moment that Perrault was indeed responsible for the tales (and leaving till later the long-standing question whether his son Pierre wrote at least some of them), it should also be said that his position as an author is anomalous. He wrote much, on many subjects, but only a few ‘fairy-tales’, the usual though rather misleading term. 2 They have been translated and published all over the world, and in consequence are almost certainly better known than any other French work. Yet in literary history they are largely neglected, and most people who know the tales would not recognize his name. The film that is clearly an amplified version of Perrault’s tale is commonly called Walt Disney’s Cinderella.

  These
stories raise plenty of problems, then, and an introduction can do no more than indicate some lines of approach. For the literary critic, the Contes are admired and studied because Perrault was a master of narrative; the quality of the writing is paramount. But as regards interpretation, the methods of pure literary criticism are insufficient. From psychoanalysis we need to take not only insights into child psychology, but also the post-Freudian interpretation of symbolism. Even more necessary are the data which come from folk-tale studies; comparisons between Perrault’s version of a tale and others are of fundamental interest. Some are mentioned here, but Appendix A gives further detail in the form of summaries of tales which throw light in one way or another on the versions handed down to us by Perrault.

  1. Perrault and His Works

  Perrault was born in 1628, into a family then undistinguished, but of many talents. He made an extremely successful career under the ‘absolute monarchy’ of Louis XIV, who in 1661, as a young man, took the reins of government into his own hands. Perrault was the right age to benefit from the King’s policy of choosing public servants from commoners rather than the aristocracy. First as an aide to Colbert, Louis’s first and greatest minister, a post that Perrault seems to have won by his writing skills, he became responsible for public buildings, and later a leading figure in administering the King’s cultural policies. Ousted from his position as ‘Contrôleur des bâtiments’ when Colbert died, by which time he had made his fortune, he devoted much energy to the new and still ineffectual Académie française, thus maintaining his influence in the world of official culture. From youth he had been a talented and industrious writer, especially in verse; in tandem with his administrative career, and in a manner which typifies the conjunction between literary and worldly success at the time, he wrote prolifically in praise, direct or indirect, of Louis XIV and his achievements, from the mottos on commemorative medals to panegyrics on military victories. These were not mere attempts to curry favour at court: such writings were an important element in a concerted effort to promote the prestige of the King, seen as personifying the nation. Perrault, then, was a most loyal servant of the crown, and earned rewards in wealth and status. The first Moral of Puss in Boots could have been written with himself in mind—he exemplifies the royalist meritocracy which was gradually acquiring power.

  By the age of 55 he was effectively in retirement from his career as a public servant, and applied himself to the affairs of the Académie and to writing, producing very varied works, among them several large-scale poems of Christian inspiration. His involvement in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, a long-running controversy about the relative merits of contemporary culture as opposed to that of classical antiquity, began when in 1687 he published a poem adroitly associating modernist sentiments with loyalty to the Christian King. The Siècle de Louis le Grand (‘The Century of Louis the Great’) asserted that under Louis the arts had reached heights previously unscaled, thus causing outrage among those who revered the legacy, especially in literature, of the Greek and Roman classics. Their champion was Boileau (1636–1711), the satirist and acknowledged authority on all things literary, who from then on became Perrault’s enemy and took every opportunity to mock his work. Perrault followed up the poem with three volumes of a Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, his best-known work apart from the Contes.

  These energetic activities are remote from the world of fairy-tale. Does his personal life explain why, in his sixties, he branched out so unexpectedly from the rewarding paths of public and semi-official poetry? With Perrault, as with virtually all except the grandest figures of the time, very little personal information survives. Apart from a short-lived twin, 3 he was the youngest of seven children, like his character Hop o’ my Thumb, except that Perrault’s siblings included two sisters. One brother, Claude, became an important architect. The family was close-knit, and the bonds between the siblings of whom anything is known remained strong. Charles soon showed himself to be a strong-minded character, abandoning school on his own initiative at the age of about 15: he walked out, according to his memoirs, 4having had a row with one of his teachers. Together with a friend, he saw to his own education thereafter, evidently to good effect. His father died in 1653, when Charles was 22; his mother four years later. He married late, in 1672, when he was well able to provide for a wife. She was Marie Guichon, aged only 19. Colbert thought that Perrault should have done better for himself, and offered to find him someone wealthier; this may suggest a love-match. 5 Three sons were born, in 1675, 1676, and 1678, and perhaps a daughter, about whom no details are known; 6 later in 1678, their mother died. Perrault did not remarry. He is known from the testimony of contemporaries to have taken much interest in the upbringing of his children, but it remains unclear whether he himself told them fairy-tales, which was commonly a woman’s occupation. However, a passage in the Preface to the Contes, in the course of defending the value of his book, mentions that ‘fathers and mothers’ deserve praise for giving young children early moral instruction by means of such stories.

  It was in any case only long afterwards that he began on the course which was to lead towards the prose tales. In 1691 came the first long tale in verse, which is about a wife: Griselidis. The subject was taken from one of the great works of European literature, Boccaccio’s Decameron, of about 1358, in which it is the last story, rather untypical of a work known for comic bawdiness. Its heroine is known in English as Patient Griselda; she is the mistreated wife whose acceptance of her fate finally wins over her cruel husband. Perrault’s next tale, also in verse, was a complete contrast: the short and comic Les Souhaits ridicules, ‘Three Silly Wishes’, published in 1693 in the Mercure galant, the Parisian literary and social periodical. This was followed by the third and last verse tale, Donkey-Skin, also containing a good deal of humour, but on a subject, again taken from folk-tale, which in itself is scarcely comic; the story’s opening concerns a widowed father who decides that his daughter must be his second wife. It was published in 1694, but like the two other tales it would certainly have been given private readings beforehand, in one or other of the literary salons; Griselidis had been read in a session of the French Academy in 1691.

  The salons were regular gatherings, in a drawing-room, of friends and acquaintances of the hostess. They were of enormous significance in the literary and social life of the ancien régime. Through the conversations which took place in them, including elaborate intellectual and literary pursuits and pastimes, both men and women could acquire prestige and influence. They seem to have been an important factor in Perrault’s move from verse narrative to the prose of the later Contes, since a new fashion for fairy-tale originated, it seems, with storytelling in the salons. In 1690 came a story published within a novel by Madame d’Aulnoy, 7 who herself ruled a notable salon. She must have caught something in the public mood, because from then on through most of the eighteenth century the fairy-tale genre, or at any rate tales of magic, including oriental tales in the Arabian Nights, flourished. The usual explanation is that the dazzling achievements of Louis XIV’s early reign were fading into decline, and that in a decade marked also by a series of national disasters (royal deaths, military defeat, spreading poverty, famine) escapist literature was popular.

  The majority of the tales published were by women writers, Mme d’Aulnoy foremost among them, and were often entirely invented. When based on traditional tales, they were almost always longer and more obviously literary than Perrault’s spare narratives. Some well-known examples were written by a younger relative of his on his mother’s side, Mlle Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier (1664–1734), 8 whose salon and writings were to make her in due course a much-respected figure. In Perrault’s Preface to his verse tales, he mentions that he sent her a copy—presumably before publication—of Donkey-Skin; she responded with her comments. Like him, and at more or less the same time, in 1695, she wrote a version of the tale known in English as ‘Diamonds and Toads’ (also as ‘The Kind and Unkind Sisters’); thi
s was in her Œuvres mêlées (‘Miscellanies’). The two of them must have discussed their stories but agreed to publish separately. Another case is a tale with the same title as one of Perrault’s, Riquet à la houppe, by Catherine Bernard, who published it as part of a novel, Inès de Cordoue, in 1696; it was probably not simple coincidence that both chose the same subject.

  The first of the prose tales appeared in 1695, in manuscript form, not written out by Perrault himself, but by a skilled calligrapher preparing a luxurious presentation volume for a great personage, ‘Mademoiselle’, that is, the King’s niece. She was then 19. The manuscript, entitled Contes de ma mère l’oie (‘Tales of Mother Goose’), contained five tales, those of Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding-Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, and The Fairies. They were introduced by a dedicatory epistle, and from it stems an enduring mystery in Perrault studies, for it is signed ‘P.P.’—the initials of Pierre, Charles Perrault’s youngest son, also known as Pierre Darmancour, then aged 16 or 17. Were the tales therefore by ‘a child’, as he is called in the dedication? This and other documentary evidence has often been taken to justify the attribution to Pierre, 9 but evidence from contemporaries in a position to know points the other way. The general points which seem significant are that Pierre gave no other indications of being a writer, and that his father had good reason to conceal his own authorship. It seems reasonable to assume, with the majority, that the attribution to Charles Perrault is correct, if only in the sense that he was responsible for the tales as we have them. It remains possible that Pierre contributed something in the form of an early draft or simply by discussion.

  In 1696 a version of Sleeping Beauty was published in the Mercure galant; it was revised for the complete prose tales. They were published early in 1697, anonymously, and over the imprint of Claude Barbin, the leading publisher of literary works: Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. Avec des moralités—’Stories or Tales of Bygone Times. With their Morals’. Three tales were added to those in the manuscript: Cinderella, Ricky the Tuft, and Hop o’ my Thumb. The only passages in verse were the ‘Moralités’, most of which were new in 1697.