THE FATHER OF THE FAIRY TALE - CHARLES PERRAULT

That’s Charles Perrault, not CBS’ “On the Road” Charles Kuralt, though both were story-tellers. On first reading the names, you might rhyme them. Not even close!  Perrault’ is pronounced in the French way, and you know what that means: ‘pehr-OH’

So why should you know the name Charles Perrault? This man, born 390 years ago this month, wrote some of the fairy tales we love to this day. He is considered the Father of the Fairy Tale.

Grandfatherly-looking gentleman -
and that has to be a wig he's wearing.

During his fairly long life, Perrault was, by training, a lawyer, working in the government as one of the officials charged with royal buildings, among them, le Château de Versailles. Indeed, he wrote the guide to the labyrinth and its fountains. Promoting literature and the arts, he also wrote poems, treatises, and commemorative pieces. He was part of the ongoing and often violent debate called “Ancients and Moderns,” that argued the relative merits of ancient Greek and Roman literature versus those of the contemporary writers. During this Age of Reason, at the height of French literature, the times of Louis XIV, the late years of the Renaissance, Perrault wrote for the modernists.

Be that as it may, after an interesting life and having just lost his government post, at the age of 67 he published his collection of fairy tales named “Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals.” Of course you know “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” What child of the Disney era doesn’t? “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Blue Beard” are his creations too.

The infamous Bluebeard -
a cautionary tale, if there ever was one

Perrault’s collection was subtitled “Contes de ma mère l’Oye” in French, or in English, “Tales of Mother Goose.” This is cited as being the beginning of “Mother Goose” collections. When the tales were first translated into English, the editors added more stories and nursery rhymes. In the long printing history of “Mother Goose” recipe for the mix of these two has varied from publication to publication.

Fairy tales and fables, stories and poems, had certainly been around before Perraul’s time. They were usually meant as life lessons for children, and every parent had cautionary tales to pass on to the next generation. Perrault recognized the need to flesh out simple folk-tales, creating what then were fairly grim stories. For example, “Little Red Riding Hood” was meant to warn young ladies not to listen to strangers lest, like the heroine, they wind up as the wolf’s dinner. In the original version, that’s exactly what happened. “All the better to eat you with, my dear.” And no woodsman came to her rescue, as he does in more modern versions of the story. 

You know who these two are.

And speaking of grim, the brothers Grimm are often credited with writing tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but Perrault wrote them down over a century before. Getting the tales into print solidified them, so to speak, and preserved them for a population that was increasingly literate and less in the habit of telling folk tales as an evening’s entertainment.

Cinderella - and not your Disney version.
There are many more illustrated versions of the story.
This is by Gustav Doré.

 Today, in this age of almost universal literacy, we’ve books and electronic devices to provide the lessons. We usually read to our little ones, rather than pass down or make up stories, and consider as quaint the stories from Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, even Aesop. Quaint or not, lessons are universal – we just dress them in modern clothes.