He served all the arts and practised most of them. Painters, writers, sculptors, musicians and scientists were among his friends and acquaintances. As a good civil servant he was no politician, and he never showed any leanings towards a career in the army, then regarded as the greatest of all professions. These two deficiencies, if they can be regarded as such, simply endear him to us all the more. Everyone likes a man who deserves to enjoy life and who does, in fact, enjoy it. Perrault was such a man, and more. He brought enjoyment to countless people during his lifetime, and his stories will continue to bring pleasure to multitudes in the future.

It is amazing to think that Perrault was rather ashamed of his Tales of Mother Goose and had them published under the name of his young son, Pierre Darmancour. To maintain his anonymity, Perrault abandoned his usual publisher, Coignard, and the first collected edition of the stories was published in 1697 by Barbin. They had previously appeared anonymously in the little magazine Recueil, published in The Hague. ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ was the first, followed in quick succession by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The Fairy’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Riquet with the Tuft’ and ‘Tom Thumb’.

Perrault was not so reluctant to admit the authorship of his three verse stories, ‘Griselidis’ (not included in this book), ‘The Ridiculous Wishes’ and ‘Donkey Skin’. Although the first of these had appeared anonymously in 1691, when it was reprinted in 1695, together with ‘The Ridiculous Wishes’ and ‘Donkey Skin’, it was given to the publisher Coignard and described as being by ‘Mr Perrault, of the French Academy’, a style of attribution made popular by La Fontaine.

It would be unfair to assume that Perrault’s son had nothing to do with the composition of the stories that were attributed to him. Paul de St Victor and Andrew Lang are among those who saw in the collection a marvellous collaboration of crabbed age and youth. The young boy probably heard the stories from his nurse and brought them to his father, who would have tweaked them and written them down. In his fine 1886 edition of the tales Paul Lacroix goes as far as to attribute their entire authorship to Perrault’s son. However, he deferred to universal usage when he called his volume Les Contes en Prose de Charles Perrault.

The stories were an overnight success. They had many imitators, but none of them has ever rivalled, much less surpassed the inimitable originals. They had soon made their way across the English Channel and a translation ‘by Mr Samber, printed for J. Pote’ was advertised in the Monthly Chronicle in 1729. Mr Samber was probably Robert Samber of New Inn, London, who translated other tales from the French for the bookseller Edmund Curll at about this time. No copy of the first edition of his translation has survived, but its wide popularity is shown by the fact that a seventh edition was published in 1795 for the bookseller J. Rivington of New York.

Harry Clarke’s illustrations speak for themselves and for Perrault. An illustrator has seldom entered so completely into the spirit of his text. The grace, delicacy, urbanity, tenderness and humour that went into the writing of Perrault’s stories also imbue the wonderful drawings, which would certainly have given pleasure to Perrault himself.

Acknowledgements

Song of the Mad Prince
Illustration by Harry Clarke from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
He Saw, Upon A Bed, The Finest Sight Was Ever Beheld

 

Copyright © National Gallery of Ireland

Portrait of Charles Perrault

Wikipedia Commons

 

Portrait of Charles Perrault (1628-1703)

Contrôleur général des Bâtiments du roi, membre de l’Académie française

Paris, palais de l’Institut

© RMN / Droits réservés

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Copyright © 2012 Teapot Press Ltd

 

 

 

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First published by Gill & Macmillan 2012

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