Charles Perrault

French writer

• Born: January 12, 1628
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 16, 1703
• Place of death: Paris, France

Perrault achieved lasting fame with his book Tales of Mother Goose, which created a new literary genre, the fairy tale. The work has remained timeless and has inspired music, opera, film, and the creation of other fairy tales and moral and ethical works not only for children but also for adults.

Early Life

Charles Perrault (peh-roh) was born a twin into a prominent and wealthy bourgeois family in Paris. His father was Pierre Perrault, a lawyer at the parlement of Paris. Charles’s twin brother, François, died at six months of age, but three brothers—Claude, Nicolas, and Pierre—all survived to adulthood and had successful careers.

As a child, Perrault was educated at the best schools, where he was always at the top of his class. In 1637, he enrolled at the College of Beauvais, a private secondary school in the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, near the Sorbonne. He excelled in all his classes but stopped attending school at the age of fifteen in 1643. He had quarreled with his teachers, especially in philosophy classes, and preferred to be self-taught. That year, he completed his first literary work, a satirical translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, Book VI.

In 1651, Perrault earned a law degree from the University of Orleans and was admitted to the Paris bar. In 1653, his first publication appeared. “Les Ruines de Troie: Ou, l’Origine du Burlesque” (walls of Troy, or, the origin of Burlesque) was a short poem cowritten with his brothers. When his brother Pierre became the tax receiver-general of Paris in 1654, Charles gave up his brief law career to become his brother’s clerk.

Life’s Work

For almost a decade, Perrault remained in the undemanding occupation of clerk and wrote verse in his leisure time. In 1659, Perrault wrote two allegorical poems: “Portrait d’Iris” (portrait of Iris) and “Portrait de la voix d’Iris” (portrait of the voice of Iris). By 1660, he had developed a literary reputation for his love poetry and light verse. He was also beginning a career as a public poet, glorifying the splendor of King Louis XIV’s reign. In 1660, he published “Ode sur le Mariage du roi” (ode on the marriage of the king), “Ode sur la paix,” (ode on peace), and “Dialogue de l’Amour et de l’Amitie” (dialogue of love and friendship). In 1661, Perrault published a poem on the birth of the first royal offspring: “Ode au Roi sur la Naissance de Monseigneur le Dauphin” and the allegorical “Le Miroir: Ou, la Metamorphose d’Oronte” (the mirror, or, the metamorphosis of Orante).

In 1663, Perrault was appointed secretary to Jean-Baptiste Colbert , France’s powerful minister of finance. Perrault also became secretary-for-life of Colbert’s Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. When assigned to the department of buildings in 1664, Perrault selected his brother Claude (1613-1688) as an architect for the Louvre. He also persuaded Colbert to establish a fund that would provide pensions to writers and scholars in Europe. In 1671, Perrault was admitted to the French Academy. In 1672, he was elected its chancellor, and he was elected its director in 1681.

On May 1, 1672, the forty-four-year-old Perrault married nineteen-year-old Marie Guichon, and they had a daughter and three sons. In October, 1678, Marie died prematurely, leaving four young children for Perrault to raise. With the death of Colbert in 1683, he left government service and devoted himself to literature.

Perrault’s reading of the poem “Le Siècle de Louis le Grand” (the century of Louis the Great) before the Academy in 1687 marked the start of the famous literary controversy querelle des anciens et des modernes, or quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. His poem, which compared ancient writers unfavorably with the modern authors from the century of Louis XIV, infuriated the poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and other supporters of the literature of antiquity. As part of the long, heated debate that raged in both France and England, Perrault wrote Parallele des anciens et des modernes (parallel between ancients and moderns) from 1688 to 1692.

Perrault published “Peau d’Ane” (donkey skin), his first fairy tale (in verse) in 1694, and “La Belle au bois dormant” (1696; sleeping beauty) first appeared in print in the periodical, Le Mercure galant. One year later, Perrault published his most famous and successful literary work, the Histoires: Ou, Contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (1697), commonly known in French as Contes des fées or Contes de ma mère l’oye (1697; Histories: Or Tales of Past Times, 1729). It is best known in English as Tales of Mother Goose . The book was published under the name of his son Pierre, but it was generally known that Perrault was the author of this instantly popular collection of stories. In Tales of Mother Goose, Perrault adapted eight traditional oral folktales into the first major fairy tale collection, which included “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Blue Beard,” “Puss in Boots,” “The Fairies,” “Cinderella,” “Riquet with the Tuft,” and “Tom Thumb,” sometimes called “Hop o’ My Thumb.”

During 1699, Perrault worked on his Memoires de ma vie (Memoirs of My Life , 1989), which was published posthumously in 1755. His son, Pierre, died at the age of twenty-two in 1700. On May 16, 1703, Charles Perrault died at home in Paris.

Significance

Charles Perrault achieved tremendous, lasting fame with his Tales of Mother Goose, which established a new literary genre, the fairy tale. Based on oral folk tradition, his fairy tales became timeless classics that have been popular with children as well as adult audiences.

The book also included the first appearance of the name “Mother Goose” in writing. The frontispiece featured an elderly woman spinning and telling stories to children by firelight. With the first English translation in 1729, “Mother Goose” became a popular term in English. After John Newbery’s publication of fifty-two rhymes in Mother Goose’s Melody in London in 1765, the name became associated with nursery rhymes rather than fairy tales.

Perrault’s fairy tales remain in print, and they have influenced the arts and media, inspiring works in opera and music: Béla Bártok’s one-act opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918); Jules Massenet’s opera, Cendrillon (Cinderella); Jacques Offenbach’s operetta, Barbe bleu; Maurice Ravel’s set of five piano pieces titled Ma Mère l’Oye (1915); and Gioacchino Rossini’s opera, La cenerentola (1817; Cinderella). Walt Disney produced animated film versions of Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). Feature films or movies based on Perrault’s tales include The Glass Slipper (directed by Charles Walters, 1955), Donkey Skin (directed by Jacques Demy, 1970), and Le Petit Poucet (directed by Olivier Dahan, 2001).

Bibliography

Barchilon, Jacques, and Peter Flinders. Charles Perrault. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This standard source on Perrault includes an engraving of him, a chronology, analyses of his literary works and style, and a bibliography of both primary and secondary sources.

Lewis, Philip E. Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. The author relates Perrault’s career as a public intellectual and promoter of the arts with his later-celebrated role as a fiction writer. Appendix, detailed notes, and bibliography.

Perrault, Charles. Charles Perrault: Memoirs of My Life. Edited and translated by Jeanne Morgan Zaruchhi. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. This significant source is Perrault’s own record of events in his life. Includes a chronology of his life and principal works, illustrations, and a bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Other Favorite Tales. Translated by A. E. Johnson. New York: Abrams, 2000. A modern translation of Perrault’s original eight fairy tales, with color illustrations by a different artist for each story. Bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Translated by Neil Philip and Nicoletta Simborowski. New York: Clarion Books, 1993. The complete, unabridged collection of all eleven classic tales, including the three in verse. Includes Perrault’s biography and notes on the origin and history of each story.

Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Tatar, a prominent folklore scholar, examines twenty-six fairy tales from historical, cultural, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. The section on Perrault includes a portrait of him from 1670. Extensive bibliography and beautifully illustrated.