Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a French poet and writer, and one of the best-loved personalities of 17th century France. He is remembered today for his collection of fairytales published in 1697 under the title Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé.

We know about his life mainly through his memoirs, which he wrote for his grandchildren, but which were not published till sixty-six years after his death. Though he wrote at length about his public life, Perrault was reticent about his personal life , and we know very little about his wife and children. [Editor’s note: The picture of Charles Perrault here is by the French lithographer Francois Seraphin Delpech (1778-1825), known for his lithographic portraits of important personalities of the Revolution and First Empire]

Perrault was born in Paris in 1628, the fifth son of Pierre Perrault, a wealthy lawyer. At the age of nine, he was sent to a day school, the Collège de Beauvais. Though always top of his class, Perrault’s school career came to a premature end when he quarrelled with his teacher, questioning him on a point of philosophy. The young Perrault bid his teacher a formal farewell and walked out of school, never to return. He was not alone in his protest. One of his friends, a boy called Beaurain, supported him and walked out of school with him.  For the next three or four years, the two boys studied together, educating themselves.

In 1651, he acquired a degree from the University of Orléans. He considered many careers, including medicine, theology and law, each of which he abandoned. He then took a job in the office of his brother Pierre, who was then Chief Commissioner of Taxes. Here, Perrault had little to do except enjoy his brother’s extensive library. In order to occupy himself, he returned to writing poetry, an activity he had been very fond of as a boy. His poems, which he published anonymously, became instantly popular, so much so that  Quinault, an established poet, passed some of them off as his own. When Perrault heard this, he felt it necessary to disclose his authorship; but when he heard that Quinault had used his poems to impress a young lady, he forgave the fraud.

Perrault now turned his attention to architecture. In 1657 he designed a house for his brother and supervised its construction. Minister Colbert, who was France’s Superintendent of Buildings, was so impressed by Perrault’s work that he employed him in the superintendence of the royal buildings, and put him in charge of Versailles, which was then in the process of construction. Perrault threw himself enthusiastically into his work, but also kept up his interests: he wrote odes in honour of the King,  planned designs for Gobelin tapestries and decorative paintings, and even found time to encourage musicians and support the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully when he fell out of favour with the King, Louis XIV. He also worked with his brother Claude to found the Academy of Science.

Perrault’s boyhood habit of independent thinking was still with him, and a few years later he became embroiled in one of the most famous literary quarrels of the era. In one of his poems, Perrault praised the writers of his own age, but disparaged  the authors of the ancient classics. This led to a huge furore, with writers and literary personages hurrying to attack Perrault, who defended himself with customary good humour. He published his defence in four volumes, Le Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, which were published in 1688-1696. He took far greater pride in this dry and boring work which has now been forgotten, than he did in the sparkling tales which have made him immortal.

After twenty years of working under Colbert, in 1683, Perrault retired: his brother, Pierre, had fallen out of favour with the Minister, and Colbert’s own position with the King had become shaky. What’s more, Perrault had met and married his wife, a match of which Colbert disapproved; needless to say, Perrault was not one to be influenced in his choice of life partner by Colbert. Perrault was now fifty-five years of age.

Perrault’s retirement from public service marks the start of his period of greatest literary activity. He wrote and published several poems and other literary works, most of which are now forgotten. Between 1691 and 1697 he composed his immortal Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Stories or Tales from Time Past) and the Contes en Vers (Tales in Verse), the fairytales for which he is best known.

It is surprising for us that Perrault was rather embarrassed by his  Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (better known as Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, or Mother Goose’s Tales, from the rough print which was inserted as a frontispiece to the first collected edition in 1697). He refused to publish them in his name; they were published as having been written by one P. Darmancour, the name of Perrault’s young son. In order to keep his secret, Perrault went so far as to abandon his usual publisher, Coignard, and publish them with another, Barbin.  

The book contained eight tales: La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood), Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding-Hood) La Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botté (The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots), Les Fées (The Fairy), Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre (Cinderilla, or The Little Glass Slipper), Riquet à la Houppe (Riquet with the Tuft),  and Le Petit Poucet (Little Thumb). The stories had previously appeared , anonymously, in the magazine called the Recueil, which was published from The Hague.

Perrault did not mind owning up to his three verse stories, Griselidis (Griselda), Les Souhaits Ridicules (The Ridiculous Wishes), and Peau d’Asne (Donkey-skin). The first appeared, anonymously, in 1691; but was later reprinted with Les Souhaits Ridicules and Peau d’Asne in 1695. These three stories were given by Perrault to his usual publisher, Coignard and appeared under his own name.  

Perrualt based his stories on folktales (perhaps the ones his young son heard from his nursemaid and brought to him?) and turned them into the sparkling, polished gems we have today. Griselidis, though, was not based on a folktale directly, but was borrowed by Perrault from Boccaccio. Each tale is accompanied by a moral at the end, a moral that often appears quaint and amusing to our ‘modern’ way of thinking.

Les Contes du Temps Passé was an instant hit, spawning a dozens of imitators, so that writing fairy tales became quite the rage in France. The stories soon crossed the Channel to England, and a translation by Robert Samber was advertised in 1729.