Charles Perrault

**Charles Perrault** (1628-1703) was a French writer, known for writting some of the most popular and influential tales of all time.

## Biography

Perrault was born in Paris in January 12th 1628 as the seventh child of Pierre Perrault and Paquette LeClerc. Because he had the luck to be born to a borgeouis family in the capital he could attend to good schools and study law to become a civil servant like his father and his eldest brother Jean were. Once he finished his studies he became his brother Pierre's secretary. Pierre was a chief tax's collector, and Charles's work with him helped him to be appointed in 1663 as the secretary of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, King Louis XIV's finance minister. It was here when Perrault started to write, doing most of the time works to honor the Royal Court. In 1668 he wrote *La Peinture* to honor Charles Le Brun, the king's first painter, and in 1670 he wrote *Courses de tetes et de bague*. In 1669 he advised the King to include in the gardens of Versailles thirty-nine fountains, each one representing one of Aesop's fables. Thanks to his work as a writer he became a member of the French Academy in 1671. The next year h got married to Marie Guichon, who was nineteen at the time while he was fourty four age old. The marriage didn't last very long because Guichon died in 1678. But tensions arouse with Colbert around 1676, and Colbert forced him to retirament in 1682. In 1683 Colbert died and Perrault lost his pension.

After losing his position Perrault centered around working for the French Academy, of which he was still a member. He attempted to write epic poetry showing his christian devotion, publishing in 1686 *Saint Paulin, évêque de Nôle*, but the ony thing he got was to become the target of ridicule by literary critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. After this failure he started to notice the tendency in French salons for authors, specially Aristocratic women, to write fairy tales, he decided to write some of them himself. His first fairy tale, *Griselisdis*, published in 1691 and written in verse, didn't have any magic element on it. His next two fairy tales, *The Ludicrous Wishes* and *Donkey Skin*, published respectively in 1693 and 1694, fixed that having magic as an important plot element. In 1697 he finally published under the name of his third son Pierre Damancour the collection *Histoires ou contes du temps passé*, that included eight tales written this time in prose, each one with a moral written at the end. Soon after publishing his collection he died in Paris in May 16th 1703 at the age of seventy-five.

## Works

The original edition of *Histoires ou contes du temps passé* published in 1697 had eight tales: *Sleeping Beauty in the Woods*, *Little Red Riding Hood*, *Blue Beard*, *Master Cat or Puss 'n Boots*, *The Fairies*, *Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper*, Ricky with the Truft and *Little Thumbling*. These tales have some common characteristics that tell them apart from the tales writen by other French saloon authors, like the possibility of commoners being the heroes, social climbing and the marriage between royalty and commoners being protrayed as something possitive, simple plots contrasting with the most convoluted plots his comtemporaries like to wrote, a sense of irony and tongue-in-cheeck tone in his prose, and a biggest influence of Giambattista Basile than of Gianfrancesco Straparola, although some tales can still be traced back to some of Straparola's, and Perrault's tales are less shocking to French aristocratic readers than Basile ever was.

*Sleeping Beauty in the Woods* is probably the closest of the tales to the trends at the time. The titular heroine is born royalty and the plot is launched by the fairy godmothers' intervention. The story is not completely Perrault's invention, and many academicist consider he took inspiration of two tales from Giambattista Basile's *Pentamerone*. The first story, titled *Sun, Moon and Talia*, tells the story of a princess called Talia who, like Perrault's, pricks her finger spinning and falls into a deep sleep from which is latter awakened. But unlike Basile's tale, that is full of elements that would be deemed outrageous by the Versailles court, Perrault bowdlerized many of the story's elements. For example, in the way the heroine is awakened. Instead of getting raped by the king who found her and being awakened when one of the babies she had while still asleep suck the flax that got stuck on fer finger like in Basile's, the princess gets awakened when the prince finds her, and has the two babies with the prince after they got married. Because the prince's no longer married when he woke the princess, he no longer commits adultery in Perrault's version, and the villain who tries to kill the heroine and her two children is no longer the king's first wife, but the princess' mother-in-law, who's an ogress who likes to eat human meat. The other tales that probably influenced Perraults was Basile's *The Young Slave*, in which the heroine is cursed at her baptism to die at a young age by an enraged fairy, like the heroine in Perrault's. The tale has been deemed as one of Perrault's best, with some critics praising his sense of irony used in the tale, while others critizing it for breaking the suspension of disbelief.

*Little Red Riding Hood* is an unusal story for the time, telling the encounter of a commoner girl with a talkinga animal with a really simple plot. The story is considered a cautionary tale for young ladies, represented in the story by the titular character, to misstrust charming men, represented in the story by the wolf, as Perrault's moral says. Another cautionary tale is *Blue Beard*, a story about a woman who discovers her husband's horrible secret when she enters the chamber he forbid her to, although unlike in *Little Red Riding Hood* the heroine is not killed at the end. Like *Little Red Riding Hood* the tale of *Master Cat or Puss 'n Boots* could be considered actually subversive for its time, telling the story about a miller's youngest son who ends up marrying the king's only daughter with the help of the titular talking cat, without having any plot twist at the end to reveal that the miller's son was actually a prince all along. Like *Sleeping Beauty* this story can be tracked to two previous Italian fairy tales with the same plot, Gianfrancesco Straparola's *Costantino Fortunato* and Basile's *Cagliuso*, although Perrault's ends up in a happier note than Basile's story, that concludes with the cat learning her master's ungratefulness. *The Fairies* is another story of a commoner, this time a girl, marrying a royalty member thanks to magic intervantation, in this case a disguised fairy who rewards her kindness. When the heroine's sister tries to get the same results but only showing rudeness, the fairy punishes her.

But the most famous Perrault's tale about a commoner girl who marries a prince with a fairy's help is undoubtely *Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper*. Another story who has a previous version written by Basile, Perrault made his version again less violent to fit better the Court's tastes, deleting passages like the heroine killing her first stepmother so her governess can marry her father. Like *Sleeping Beauty* the story has been praised as one of Perrault's best because of his prose and iconic imaginery, like the glass slipper that only fits the heroine's small feet, or the pumpkin turned into a carriage and the mice into horses but that reverse to their original forms when the clock strucks midnight. After one of the most populars we have probably the less known of all, *Ricket with the Truft*, a story that consist mostly of the dialogue between an ugly but clever prince and a beautiful but dumb princess. The last story, *Little Thumbling*, keeps the motif in Perrault's stories of commoner heroes, that because of their achievements they earn privilied positions in the Royal Court. In this case we got the youngest of a woodcutter's seven sons who after stealing a maneating Ogre's magic seven-leagues boots becomes the King's messenger, saving his whole family from poverty. We can see a little of this tale in Perrault's, who was himself a seventh son.

In 1781 a revised edition was published in France, that included three tales that Perrault published before the collection. The three tales were originally written in verse, but this edition included versions in prose. The first story, *Griselidis*, was published in 1691 and barely have any magical element on it, 'till the point many call it a novella instead of a fairy tale. It tells the story of a misogynistic princess who refusses to marry because he deems all women untrustworthy. But he ends up falling in love with a shepherdess, the titular Griselidis, and marrying her. The prince, wanting to know how loyal his wife really is, puts her through a lot of situations to tests her limits, even marrying other women. Although the story is intended to refect an ideal woman, many have critized it as Perrault's worst story, glorifying an abusive relationship. Less hated is his second tale in verse, *The Ludicrous Wishes*, about a woodcutter and his wife who are granted by the Roman god Jupiter three wishes, that get wasted because of the couple's carelesness and bickering. But of the three the most well-known is *Donkey Skin*, the story of the princess who run away from her kingdom at her Fairy Godmother's aid to prevent her marriage to her own father. Like many of the tales that will latter become part of *Histoires ou contes du temps passé* this tale can also be traced to Straparola's and Basile's works, both of them having written stories about princesses who run away to prevent an incesteous marriage. Despite that, Perraut added many elements that weren't in Straparola's and Basile's, like the Fairy Godmother that helps the princess, the donkey that defecates golden coins whose hide will serve as the princess' disguise, the ring hidden in the food that will help the prince find the princess and the three wonderful dresses the princess asks her father before escaping.

## Cultural Impact and Legacy

Although maybe not the most popular fairy tale writer at the time, Perrault quickly became the most influential after his death. In 1729 Robert Samber translated the tales to English. In 1781 a new edition of *Histoires ou contes du temps passé* was published. This one included the three tales Perrault wrote in verse, although rewritten in prose and with new passages added to them. For example in *Donkey Skin* the incesteous king is enabled by a manipulating druid that wasn't present in the original story, the princess' fairy godmother is referred to as the Lilac Fairy and the princess goes to visit her in a carriage pulled by a ram. In the second half of the 19th Century new interest in the tales arouse thanks to the families that wanted to have fairy tale books to read aloud to thir children, and in 1861 a new edition illustrated by French artist Gustave Doré was published. Doré's illustrations quickly became an essential part to the collection as much as the tales. This interest also raised outside France. English playwright James Robinson Planché published *Four and Twenty Fairy Tales Slected from Those of Perrault and Other Popular Writers*, a collection of fairy tales by several French authors, including Perrault. Planché translated seven of Perrault's tales in prose, as well as included a summary of *Donkey Skin* in the appendix. In 1869 Dinah Craik published *The Fairy Book*, one of the first collections in the English language that included several tales from different authors and collectors intended to a children's audience, including six of Perrault's tales in prose. Andrew Lang included all of Perrault's tales in prose except for *Riquet with the Truft* in *The Blue Fairy Book*, published in 1889, and latter included in *The Grey Fairy Book* published in 1900 a bowdlerized version of *Donkey Skin* to fit Victorian sensibilities, in which the princess runs away to prevent her union to her stepfather instead of her biological father.

Perrault's tales also left their mark in the oral tradition, both inside and outside France. A good example of it is Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's collection *Children and Household's Tales*. Its first edition's first volume was published in 1812, and despite the Grimms intended their collection to be a collection of German tales, it included oral retellings of almost every Perrault's fairy tale. Most of them came from members of the Hassenpflug family, that were descendants of French huguenots. One of the few exceptions was *All-Kinds-of-Fur*, a variant of *Donkey Skin* whose source according to the Grimms was Henriette Dorothea Wild that keeps most of the elements Perrault introduced, like the three dresses, although the character of the Fairy Godmother is omitted, the princess goes to three balls instead of spending her free days looked in her room looking herself in the mirror, and the prince is turned into a king who doesn't need to make every single maiden in the kingdom try the ring to know its owner. Another exception was their version of *Cinderella*, that has an anonymous female patient from the Elisabeth-Hospital in Marburg credited as its source, and just like in *All-Kinds-of-Fur* the character of the Fairy Godmother is omitted, with Cinderella getting her dresses to go to the balls from a hazel tree she planted on her mother's grave. In the next editions most of those variants where kept, with the exceptions of *Bluebeard* and *Puss in Boots*, two tales that the Grimms deemed to similar to their French homologs, while the ones they kept they considered them different enough from their counterparts, as it was the case of *Little Red Cap*, told by Jeanette Hassenpflug and that ended with a happier note than Perralt's, with the heroine and her grandmother surviving at the end; or *Little Briar Rose*, a version of *Sleeping Beauty* told by Marie Hassenpflug that ends when the princess is awoken by the prince, omitting all the part concerning the cannibalistic mother-in-law. In the case of *Cinderella* the tale was kept, but they omitted many details that were similar to Perrault's version, like Cinderella having to return from the ball at midnight. Despite the fact the Grimms deleted their version of *Bluebeard* they kept *Fitcher's Feathered Bird*, another tale about murder bridegrooms and forbidden chambers with a much more cunning and resourcesful heroine that Perrault's. The theme of the forbidden chamber also appears in another tale, *Mary's Child*. Although the Grimms never published a version of *Little Thumbling*, their tale *Hänsel and Gretel* has a similar premise, with two sibling being abandoned in the woods because of their family's poverty, and the first time finding the way back home thanks to a trail of shining stones they left. Unfortunately they got lost the second time because the trail of breadcrumbs they left is eaten by the birds, just like in Perrault's, and they ended up defeating a maneating entity, this time a witch instead of an ogre, before returning home. In another tale, titled *Sweetheart Roland*, the villain is tricked to murder their own daughter while she sleeps thinking they're killing the heroine in a similar fashion to how the Ogre is in *Little Thumbling*. Meanwhile the theme of the kind stepdaughter being rewarded with magical gifts and the unkind stepsister being punished with curses, that already appeared in Perrault's *The Fairies*, also appeared in several tales by the brothers Grimm like *Old Mother Frost* and *The Three Little Men in the Woods*. The last one actually became closer to Perrault's tale in later editions after alterations, with the stepdaughter being gifted with gold falling from her mouth everytime she speaks, and the stepsister cursed with toads jumping from her mouth everytime she talks.

French folklorists collected many oral retellings of Perrault's stories. Paul Sébillot published in 1881 Littérature orale de la Haute-Bretagne, in which he included several oral retellings of Perrault's tales, like *Redbeard*, a retelling of *Bluebeard* in which the wife doesn't even need to open any chamber so her husband would want to kill her. Peau d'Ânette is a story that combines the story of *Donkey Skin* with the *The Three Spinning Women*. *The Dirty Shepherdess* substitutes the daughter running away from home to prevent an incestuous marriage to a daughter being expelled from home by her father for saying she loved him like salt, but the rest of tale develops similar to *Donkey Skin*. *The Gilded Fox* is a curious Breton variant of *Puss in Boots*, in which the protagonist is helped by a talking fox instead of a cat, and instead of a shapeshifting ogre the fox tricks a group of monks. Henri Carnoy included in his collection *Littérature orale de la Picardie*, first published in 1883, a charming version of *Little Thumbling* titled *Courtillon-Courtillette* in which the siblings are helped by the titular magic talking dog. Jean-François Bladé also included several oral retellings of Perrault's classics like *Bluebeard* on his collection *Folktales from Gascony* published in 1886. François-Marie Luzel published in 1887 the collection *Contes populaires de Basse-Bretagne* that included some interesting versions. Among them we must mention *The Girl Who Was Born with a Snake Around Her Neck*, a version of *Blue Beard* where the heroine's sister has been turned into a snake and gives an explanation to why Bluebeard kills his wives; and *The King of Spain's Daughter*, a version of *Donkey Skin* in which instead of the ring test the prince has a plan to learn his suitors' darkest secrets, included the heroine. The tale *The Princess Turned Into a Mouse* is not a version of *Sleeping Beauty* but it also starts with a witch cursing a princess because she wasn't invited to her baptism. Léopold Dardy included in his collection *Popular Anthology from l'Albert*, published in 1891, a version of *Sleeping Beauty* in which the princess is cursed by the fairy godmother of an ugly suitor she rejected. Achille Millien was a prolific collector, but whose most of his collected material wasn't published until he already passed away. Henri Pourrat published the thirteen-volume collection *Le Trésor des contes* from 1948 to 1961, which included many variants of Perrault's fairy tales. *Mary-in-the-Ashes* is a variant of *Cinderella* where the stepmother is also a witch who uses her powers to shrink the glass slipper when her daughters try it. *Red Riding Hood* is a variant of *Little Red Riding Hood* with a happier ending than Perrault's, with Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being saved by a lumberjack at the end. Geneviève Massignon was one of the most prolific French collectors of the 20th Century, and her collections included plenty of variants of Perrault's tales.

Variants of Perrault's tales pretty close to their plots are also pretty commonplace in Belgium and the Netherlands. For example variants of *The Ridicilous Wishes* have been recorded in Wallonia by Jules Lemoine and August Gittée and in Friesland by Waling Dykstra. In the Walloon variant collected by Lemoine and Gittée instead of a sausage stuck on her nose the wife gets a cauldron stuck on her back, while in the Frisian one collected by Dykstra is not the wife by the couple's child who gets stuck a basket of marbles on his nose. Among the many tales Gerrit Jacob Boekenoogen collected we can find *The Seven Monkeys*, a tale whose pretty resembling of Perrault's *The Fairies*, with the exception that after being expelled from home Bertha, the stepdaughter, has an encounter with the titular monkeys, who bless her with marrying a prince in the future to thank her for cleaning up their house. Antoon Jozef Witteryck collected variants of almost every well-known Perrault's tale, with his variant of *Cinderella*, *Dirtybrush*, that closely resembles Perrault's except for details like the fairy godmother turning an orange into a carriage instead of a pumpkin.

### Adaptations

As we already said *Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper* is the most known of Perrault's fairy tales. But not only that, Perrault's version is the most well-known variant of the folk tale type number 510A *Cinderella* in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index and the one that's use for inspiration in most modern adaptations and retellings. Already in 1749 an opera adaptation with music composed by Jean-Louis Laruette, and quickly more opera adaptations in the next century followed, the two most successful of them composed respectively by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and French composer Jules Massenet. Rossini's two-act opera *La Cenerentola* premiered in Rome in January 25th 1817 and is a humoristic retelling of Perrault's classic that reverse the genders of the stepmother and the Fairy Godmother, and has the prince's valet possing as him so the prince could find a girl who loves him for him and not because they want to marry into royalty. Massenet's four-act opera *Cendrillon* premiered in Paris in May 24th 1899 and follows closely Perrault's plot. In regards to ballet adaptations we should mention Johann Strauss II's posthumous ballet *Aschenbrödel*, that premiered in Berlin in May 2nd 1901, that retells the story in a modern clothing store; and Sergei Prokofiev's *Zolushka*, that premiered in Moscow in November 21st 1945. Perrault's *Cinderella* is also one of the stories that has been most times adapted to film, with its first adaptation released as early as 1899, directed by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès. After it we got among the live-action adaptations the French film *Cinderella or the Marvelous Slipper*, directed by Albert Capellani and released in 1907; the Soviet film *Cinderella* directed by Nadezhda Kosheverova and released in 1947; the American film *The Glass Slipper* directed by Charles Walters and released in 1955; and the British film *The Slipper and the Rose* directed by Bryan Forbes and released in 1976. Among its animated adaptations the most famous is Walt Disney's 1959 production, but we also mention the Soviet animated film released in 1979. The tale has been also adapted for TV multiple times, both live-action and animated. Many female authors have wrote novels and short stories retelling the story, like Tanith Lee's short story *When the Clock Strikes* first published in 1980, Gail Carson Levine's novel *Ella Enchanted* published in 1997, Margaret Peterson Haddix's novel *Just Ella* published in 1999, and Diane Stanley's novel *Bella at Midnight* published in 2006. A really popular way to retell the story was writing stories in which the rats that were turned into humans remained humans after midnight, or decided they prefer to live as humans, as we can see in the novels *The Coachman Rat* by British author David Henry Wilson, first published in 1985, and *I Was a Rat! or the Scarlet Slippers* by the also British author Philip Pullman, first published in 1999. Picture books adaptation became a popular way to keep the tale relevant for the youngest readers, some of them following the original text, while other reinterpreting or updating it. Among the examples that followed Perrault's story without altering it we find some remarkable ones illustrated by artists like Marcia Brown, that won the Caldecott Medal in 1955, Errol Le Cain, Hilary Knight and Roberto Innocenti.

*Sleeping Beauty in the Woods* might be the second most influential of Perrault's tales. The premise of a princess being cursed at her baptism by a jealous fairy quickly became a favorite for Victorian writers, as we can see in Scottish writer George MacDonald's tales *The Light Princess* first published in 1864 and *Little Daylight* first published in 1871 in the novel *At the Back of the North Wind*; and *Melisande* by English author Edith Nesbit, first published in 1901 in the book *Nine Unlikely Tales*. The tale has served as inspiration for many composers. French composer Michele Carafa use it as inspiration for his four-act opera of the same name that premiered in Paris in March 2nd 1825; and Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky use it as inspiration for his ballet *The Sleeping Beauty*, that premiered in Saint Petersburg in January 15th 1890. Despite that most modern interpretations tend to take more inspiration from Grimm's version that from Perrault's. A similar case is the one of *Little Red Riding Hood*, mostly because of Grimm's happier ending.

On the contrary we had the case of *Master Cat or Puss 'n Boots*, that still remains the most well known version in most countries, partially thanks to the Grimm's omitting their own version from their collection's definitive edition. Already in 1797 German writer Ludwig Tieck wrote a satyrical comedy based on the tale, although it didn't premiered untill 1844. The tales has also been the subject to several picture book adaptations by authors like Philip Pullman or Diana Wynne Jones, and artists like Fred Marcellino and Jerry Pinkney.

Because of their taboo topics, specially to young readers, *Blue Beard* and *Donkey Skin* have lost popularity recently, specially on English speaking countries, although they managed to keep it in France and to a less degree in neighboring countries like Spain and Italy. Despite tht recent decline, the two tales experienced several adpatations since they were published. *Bluebeard* has been the subject to several opera adaptations, with one of the firsts and the most succesful being Raoul Bluebeard, a three-act opera with music by Belgian composer André Grétry that premiered in March 2nd 1789 in Paris. Jacques Offenbach made a more light-hearted retelling of the story in his three-act operetta *Bluebeard*, that premiered in Paris in February 5th 1866. Another Belgian, palywright Maurice Maeterlinck, wrote a play titled *Ariane and Bluebeard*, that was latter adapted into an opera with music composed by Paul Dukas, that premiered in Paris in May 10th 1907. Hungarian poet Béla Balázs wrote the libretti for the one-act opera *Duke Bluebeard's Castle*, the only one his fellow countryman Béla Bartók ever composed, that premiered in Budapest in May 24th 1918. The tale have been also the subject of several literary reinterpretations. Already in 1843 William Makerpeace Thackeray wrote *Bluebeard's Ghost*, a sequel to Perrault's tale about Bluebeard's last wife dealing with her trauma after her busband was killed. Anatole France published in 1909 *The Seven Wives of Bluebeard*, a literary reinterpretaion with the premise that Bluebeard was a real historical figure called Bernard de Montragoux, and that Perrault altered the events to make him look bad because he chose to live in the country instead of Versailles. *The Bloody Chamber* by British author Angela Carter, a feminist retelling first published in 1979 in which the heroine is rescued not by her brothers but by her own mother. Japanese writer and director Shūji Terayama wrote the play *Bluebeard's Castle*, inspired by Perrault's tale. The short fiction story of the same name by North American author Donald Barthelme was a parody of the tale first published in 1987 in which Bluebeard marries a woman who doesn't any any interest to open the forbidden chamber whatsoever. Film adaptations have also been common, with one of the earliest being the silent film directed by Méliès released in 1901 with Méliès playing the titular character, that takes more inspiration from Offenbach's operetta than to Perrault's tale, resulting in a much more lighter story. Female director Catherine Breillat released in 2009 an adaptation in which, with the framing device of a girl telling the story to her younger sister, ezplore the psychological implications of the story giving them a feminist twist.

In the case of *Donkey Skin* French composer Raoul Laparra composed a four-act opera based on the tale that premiered in Laparra's hometown of Bordeaux in February 3rd 1899. The tale has been adapted multiple times to film in France, with one of the earliest examples being Capellani's silent film adaptation released in 1908. But the most remarkable one is undoubtely Jacques Demy's musical film adaptation released in 1970 with a score composed by Michel Legrand and starring Jean Marais as the incestuous king and Catherine Deneuve as his daughter. In regards to film adaptations outside France there has been also some noteworthy adaptations like the Soviet film *The Donkey's Hide*, released in 1982 and directed by Kosheverova. Literary reinterpretations directed to an adult audience have become pretty common, with Robin McKinnley's novel *Deerskin*, first published in 1993, being the most well-known among English-speaking readers. Other remarkable retellings writen in the English language are the short fiction story *The Tale of the Skin* by Irish author Emma Donoghue published in 1997, which ends with the princess leaving the ring in the prince's food not to be found, but so the prince will choke after not being able to recognize her when she's wearing the skin, before returning to her kingdom to live with the flower women who advised her to escape; and the short fiction story *The Color Master* by North American writer Aimee Bender, that retells the story of the point of view of the people who made the three wonderful dresses. In France there's also have been several picture books adaptations that brought the tales to new generations of readers, with artworks done by such artists as Anne Romby and Charlotte Gastaut.

*Little Thumbling* is a peculiar case with the tale being really popular on its native France, as well as neighboring European countries like Italy and Spain, as well as several Latin American countries, but the tale has never been as popular in English speaking areas. German composer composed an opera based on the tale, that premiered in 1980. In 2001 a French film adaptation was released, directed by Olivier Dahan and starring Catherine Deneuve as the queen. The score was composed by Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, Hayao Miyazaki's usual collaborator.