Complete Fairy Tales

by Perrault, Charles; Betts, Christopher;

  Grimms: no. 15, Hänsel und Gretel (Crick, 58): The story falls into two parts, like Perrault’s. In the first, the parents attempt to get rid of their children in the forest, when Hansel plays the leading role; the second centres on the danger that they will be eaten. The main differences from Perrault’s tale are that the villain is a witch who has built an edible house into which she lures children, and that she is outwitted by Gretel, who (like Finette-Cendron) tricks her into entering the oven prepared for roasting the children. They return home with the help of a duck on whose back they ride across a wide stretch of water.

  APPENDIX B

  Early Versions of the last, part of

  Sleeping Beauty and of The Fairies

  The early variants are italicized.

  Sleeping Beauty

  FROM the moment when the Princess wakes up and talks to the Prince until the end of the tale, the first version published, in the Mercure galant of February 1696, differed significantly both from the text of the 1695 manuscript and that published in the 1697 volume of the Histoires ou Contes, as follows. The Moral was shorter, omitting the lines which give ‘a second lesson’. It has sometimes been affirmed that the passages found only in the Mercure galant were the work of Mlle Lhéritier. As with the variants to The Fairies, comparison with the final state of the text shows that Perrault was concerned always to simplify and shorten his stories.

  Be that as it may, they spent four hours talking to each other and still had not said the half of what they wanted. ‘Can it be, beautiful Princess,’ said the Prince, and his eyes as he gazed at her spoke volumes more than his words, ‘can it be that I was so favoured by destiny that I was born to serve you? Have those beautiful eyes been opened for me alone, while all the kings of the earth with all their power could not have achieved as much as my love?’

  ‘Yes, dear Prince,’ replied the Princess, ‘at the sight of you I could feel that we were made for one another. It was you whom I had seen, and talked with, and loved while I was asleep. The Fairy had filled my thoughts with the image of you. I clearly knew that he who was to release me from my enchantment would be as handsome as Love himself, and that he would love me more dearly than himself; and as soon as you appeared I recognized you without difficulty.’

  In the meantime, the whole palace had awakened with the Princess. Everyone was eager to carry on with his work, and since they were not in love, they were all dying of hunger; it was a long time since they had eaten. The lady in waiting, famished like the rest of them, grew impatient, and said loudly to the Princess that her meal was served. The Prince helped the Princess to her feet; she was fully dressed and her clothes were magnificent, but he took good care not to tell her that she was dressed like a grandmother in the old days, with a starched high collar; it did not make her any the less beautiful. They went into a hall lined with mirrors, where they had their supper, and were served by the officers of the Princess’s household. Violins and oboes played old pieces of music, which were excellent, even though they had not been played for almost a hundred years. After supper, without wasting time, the First Chaplain married them in the castle chapel, and the lady in waiting saw them to bed. They slept little, for the Princess had little need of it, and the Prince left her as soon as it was morning in order to go home to the town, since his father would be anxious about him.

  The Prince told him that he had got lost in the forest while out hunting, and that he had spent the night in a hovel belonging to a charcoal-burner, who had given him cheese and black bread to eat. The King, who was a good soul, believed what he said, but his mother was not convinced; and observing that he went hunting almost every day, and always had some reason to give as an excuse when he had slept away from home for two or three nights, she became certain that he was carrying on some love-affair. She said to him several times, in the hope of drawing him out, that one should enjoy oneself in life, but he never dared to entrust her with the secret; although he loved her, she made him afraid, because she came from a family of ogres, and the King had married her only because of her great wealth. It was even whispered at court that she had ogreish tendencies, and that when she saw small children going by she found it almost impossible to prevent herself from attacking them, which is why the Prince was reluctant to say anything.

  He continued for two years to see his beloved princess secretly, his love increasing all the time. This atmosphere of mystery preserved for him the romance of first love, and marriage with all its delights did not diminish the vivacity of his passion. But when the King his father died, and he was in command, he made his marriage public, and went in a grand procession to fetch his Queen from her castle. A magnificent reception was held for her in the capital, where she made her entrance into the town.

  Some time later, the new King went to war against his neighbour the Emperor Cantalabutto. He left the government of the kingdom in the hands of the Queen his mother, and asked her to take special care of the young Queen, whom he loved more than ever since she had given him two fine children, a girl who was called Dawn and a boy called Day, because of their great beauty. The King was to be away at the war for the whole summer, and as soon as he had left, the Queen Mother sent her daughter-in-law and the children to a summer residence she had in the forest, so as to satisfy her horrible desires more easily. She went there herself a few days later, and said one evening to her steward: ‘Tomorrow evening for supper, Master Simon, I want to eat little Dawn.’

  [The 1696 text then continues as in the 1697 volume, except that the steward continues to be called Master Simon and there is no reference to onion and mustard sauce (‘la Sauce-Robert’), but the final scene includes a speech from the young queen, omitted in 1697.]

  There they were, with the executioners getting ready to throw them into the cauldron, when the young Queen asked to be allowed at least to lament her fate, and the ogress, wicked though she was, agreed. ‘Alas and alack!’ cried the poor Princess, ‘must I die so young? I know that I have been in the world for some time, but for a hundred years I was asleep, and surely that ought to count? What will you say, what will you do, poor Prince, when you return, and your poor little Day, who is so lovable, and little Dawn, who is so pretty, will not be there to kiss you, and I will not be there either? If I weep, it is your tears that I shed, alas! and over your own fate. Perhaps you will avenge us; and you who obey the orders of an ogress, you wretches, your King will roast you to death over a slow fire.’ The ogress, hearing that this speech had gone beyond the limits of a lament, cried out in a transport of fury: ‘Executioners, carry out my orders, and throw this chatterbox into the cauldron.’ At once they approached the Queen and took hold of her robes, but at that moment the King, who was not expected so soon, rode into the courtyard.

  The Fairies

  The dedication manuscript of 1695 contained many passages which were revised for the 1697 publication. Some are the result of a change Perrault made at the beginning; in the manuscript the tale begins with a widower and his second wife, each with a daughter, not with a widow and two daughters. The Opies (Classic Fairy Tales, 100 n.) suggest that Perrault made the revision in order that the situation should be different from that at the beginning of Cinderella. Other changes were apparently due to the desire to remove anything deemed unnecessary. The manuscript also lacks the second Moral found in the 1697 text.

  Once upon a time there was a gentleman, the widower of a very sweet-tempered and considerate woman, and having had with her a daughter just like her mother, he married for the second time a very haughty and unpleasant woman, whose daughter was of the same disposition as herself, and as ill-favoured and sulky as the other was pretty and polite. However, this woman only loved her own daughter and mortally hated her husband’s; she made her eat in the kitchen and do all the worst and nastiest household work, while the bad-tempered sister had nothing to do all morning except attend to her appearance and, in the afternoon, entertain her visitors and make visits herself. Her poor sister went twice a day to fetch w
ater from a spring which was a good half-a-league distant from the house.

  [Apart from minor revisions, the text remained unchanged until the fairy reappears.]

  She was the fairy who had appeared to her sister, but she had made herself look and dress like a princess, so as to see how far this daughter’s bad manners would go. The girl, not thinking that the lady was a fairy, said to her in a grumbling tone: ‘Do you think I’ve come here just to give you a drink? I’m supposed to have brought a silver jug on purpose, am I, for Madam to drink from? As far as I’m concerned you can drink straight out of the stream, if you want.’

  ‘You are not very polite, young lady,’ said the fairy.

  I am what I am,’ retorted the bad-mannered girl, ‘and it’s not your business to tell me off.’

  ‘Very well, Miss,’ the fairy replied, without getting angry, ‘since you are so uncivil, the gift that I give you is this (since all should be treated as they deserve): at every word you say, a snake, a frog or a toad will come out of your mouth.’

  As soon as her mother saw her coming back from the stream, she ran to meet her, to see if she had been as fortunate as her sister, and cried out: ‘Well, daughter?’

  ‘Well, mother,’ the badly-behaved girl replied, spitting out two vipers and two toads, ‘there wasn’t much point in sending me all that way.’ And out came more toads and more snakes.

  ‘Oh Heavens!’ exclaimed the mother, ‘what’s happened? This is all because of her sister; I’ll see she pays for it.’ And she rushed off at once to give her a beating. The poor child ran away and escaped into the forest nearby.

  There, as she sat weeping at the foot of a tree, the King’s son, who had missed his way while hunting, saw her, and finding her very beautiful he asked her why she was in tears and appeared to be in such distress.

  ‘Alas! sir,’ she said, for she did not know that he was the King’s son, ‘I am a poor wretched girl whose mother has sent her away from home.’ The King’s son, seeing five or six pearls and as many diamonds coming from her mouth, asked her to say how such an unheard-of miracle had come about. She told him the whole story. The King’s son, who fell in love with her and thought that her gift was worth more than any other fortune imaginable, took her to the palace of the King his father, where he married her a few days later.

  As for her rude sister, she became so much hated, and was regarded with such horror because of the nasty creatures which came out of her mouth whenever she spoke, that her own mother could bear her no longer and sent her away in disgrace. For a long time the wretched girl wandered from place to place without finding anyone to take her in, and it is said that she went off to die miserably at the edge of a little wood.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  References below to Collinet and Rouger are to the page-numbers in their editions as given in the Bibliography.

  TALES IN VERSE

  Preface

  separately: this Preface was for the 1695 edition of the verse tales, the first to contain all three, which came out before the prose tales were published.

  with reason alone: Perrault is still on the defensive against Boileau, his enemy in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (see Introduction, p. xi); hence the argument based on examples from antiquity.

  Milesian Tales: or Milesian Fables, a genre of narrative named after Aristides of Miletus (c.100 BC), from a city in Asia Minor, who first compiled a collection of such tales. They had a reputation for eroticism.

  Widow of Ephesus: this famous story, found in the Satyricon of Petronius (first century AD), is the best-known example of a Milesian tale. It had been translated in 1682 by La Fontaine, among others, but in 1695 was topical because it had appeared in 1693 among his last pieces in the twelfth book of the Fables. The widow, who initially wishes to sacrifice herself to the memory of her dead husband, changes her mind, which gives rise to Perrault’s criticism of the tale’s morality. She has vowed to die of starvation, with her maid, at her husband’s tomb. Nearby, a soldier is guarding the corpse of a hanged robber, in case his family take it away. The widow and the soldier get into conversation. One thing leads to another, and the soldier, returning to his duties, finds that the corpse has been removed; to save him from the death penalty in his turn, it is replaced by the body of the dead husband.

  Lucian and Apuleius: the long and much-loved story of Psyche is found in The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses of Apuleius (b. C. AD123), but not in The Ass of Lucian (C. AD120—after 180), although this work is considered to be an example of Milesian fable; a surviving shorter version was attributed to him. Psyche, the youngest of three sisters, is so extraordinarily beautiful that she comes to be worshipped instead of Venus. The goddess in anger sends her son Cupid to make the girl fall in love with some peasant, but Cupid falls in love with her himself. He makes secret and complex arrangements to spirit her away, and visits her only by night, warning her not to try to find out who he is, but her sisters give her a lamp and a knife (they are jealous and want her to kill her lover); she sees him, asleep, but a drop of oil falls on him from the lamp. She is banished from his presence. After a long search for him and much suffering she is eventually reunited with him through the intercession of Jupiter.

  fable of the ploughman: it is among the fables by Gabriele Faerno translated by Perrault in 1699 (The Peasant and Jupiter; V. xiii) and the subject had been treated by La Fontaine (Fables, VI. iv). Collinet (298) notes that the fable does not date from antiquity, as Perrault seems to suggest.

  Love: the literal translation of the word Perrault chose, l’Amour, but in La Fontaine’s translation (1669), to which he must be referring, the name is Cupid; sometimes ‘Eros’ is used.

  fall into the most dreadful misfortune: the content of this and the next paragraph must refer to the prose tales, particularly The Fairies, although as noted above this Preface was first published with the verse tales only. The Fairies was not yet published, but had appeared in the presentation manuscript of 1695, the year in which the Preface appeared. Despite what Perrault says here, parents and children are usually at odds in his tales. Nothing in them corresponds to what he says here about children obeying their parents, unless he meant that part of The Fairies in which the kind daughter is obedient to her mother. Rouger (291) suggests that he was thinking of stories known to everyone from oral tradition.

  to add humour: Perrault is certainly alluding to La Fontaine’s Preface (1665), or to similar pieces in which he defends his Contes, which were attacked for licentiousness. Collinet (299) comments that the pious atmosphere at Court in 1695 was very different from that of the sensuous and romantic 1660s.

  a young lady of much intelligence: ‘Mademoiselle Lhéritier’ (Perrault’s note). See the Introduction, p. xiv.

  Griselda

  History of Griselda: ‘History’ seems the best equivalent to Perrault’s subtitle ‘Nouvelle’, which he uses to refer to the poem, and which then suggested not a novel, but a short story presented as truth rather than legend, as in the Decameron.

  To Mademoiselle …: the identity of the dedicatee is not known. The dots after Mademoiselle, meaning that she was a real person whose name was to be concealed, differentiate her from the King’s niece, known simply as ‘Mademoiselle’, to whom the prose tales were dedicated.

  under Alpine heights: this refers to the principality which was supposedly the setting of the story, around the town of Saluzzo in northern Italy. Boccaccio called his character the Marquis of Saluzzo, and Perrault’s first version, in 1691, was entitled ‘La Marquise de Salusses ou La Patience de Griselidis’. According to a contemporary, Perrault had tried vainly to identify the marquis in question (Collinet, 276).

  coiffures descended: Rouget (292) notes that this is a satirical version of what happened at the French Court in 1691, as attested by one of Madame de Sévigné’s letters.

  Letter to M….

  To M….: this ‘letter’ was quite possibly not intended to be sent, but merely to be a cover for Perrault’s defence
against criticisms; it was published with the poem in the Academy’s 1691 record of its proceedings.

  blue covers: refers to the chapbooks of the popular versions, known as the ‘bibliothèque bleue’ and published mainly by Oudot in Troyes, which had cheap paper covers.

  read in the Academy: the poem was first read in public by the Abbé de Lavau at a sitting of the French Academy in August 1691.

  be published: the definitive text ends here, but the text published in 1691 contained a further paragraph, explaining why in this first version the name was Griselda: ‘You may be surprised that I give the Marchioness of Salusses the name of Griselda, rather than Griselidis, the name familiar to everyone, and so well known that “the patience of Griselidis” has become proverbial. I ought to tell you that in doing so I have followed Boccaccio, the original author of the history, who calls her Griselda; that the name Griselidis seems to me to have become somewhat soiled in the hands of the people, and besides that “Griselda” is easier to use in verse. I remain, Sir, etc.’ The French ‘Griselidis’ was the name used in the chapbook stories about her, and by Perrault in the definitive text (from 1694).

  Three Silly Wishes

  title: tales of this type are traditionally entitled in French Les Souhaits (‘The Wishes’). Perrault chose ‘Les Souhaits ridicules’.

  Mademoiselle de la C.: she has not been identified. From what Perrault says of her it seems that she was good at telling stories, but the initial does not fit the name of any known author.