The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Read more from Charles Perrault
Puss in Boots: Level 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFairy Tales of Charles Perrault: [Complete & Illustrated] Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of Blue-Beard - Illustrated by Joseph E. Southall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cinderella Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsContes de Perrault - Illustrations de Margaret Tarrant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Virgin And The Werewolf: The Legend Of Red Riding Hood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sleeping Beauty: Level 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCinderella Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFairy Tales of Charles Perrault - Illustrated by Harry Clarke Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDiamonds and Toads: Level 3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClassic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault: Illustrated by Harry Clarke Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Snow White And Other Classic Princess Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cinderella and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Related ebooks
The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales from the Old French - Illustrated by Edmund Dulac Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nutcracker and the Mouse-King Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Snow Queen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A Little Princess: Illustrated Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Comedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Miller's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Snow Queen - The Golden Age of Illustration Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pink Fairy Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Classic Fairy tale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMedea and Other Plays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little White Bird - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little Mermaid and Other Fairy Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Marvelous Land of Oz: Original Oz Stories 1904 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beauty and the Beast – All Four Versions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Nutcracker and the Golden Pot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Peter and Wendy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Scottish Fairy Tales: Unabridged In Easy-To-Read Type Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beauty and the Beast Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Secret Garden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Marvelous Land of Oz Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories from the Pentamerone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOzma of Oz Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Madame de Villeneuve's Original Beauty and the Beast - Illustrated by Edward Corbould and Brothers Dalziel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Midsummer Night's Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Classics For You
The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master and Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Titus Groan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
10 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a brilliant book, with amazing but terrifying engravings by Dore. This edition of Perrault's fairy tales also include morals which read like rhyming verse, my favourite was the LRRH moral. This book is well worth the money if you are interested in fairy tales and the associated illustrations.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5i didn't realize that perrault had written so few stories. anderson and grimm have huge volumes. it's interesting to see the differences in stories. an interesting history by betts. i chose this book because it was illustrated by dore. we saw his great summer exhibition at the nag this past summer.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Charles Perrault, a minor government official in 17th century France, is best remembered today for the collection of fairy tales he published in 1697, just six years before his death. Perrault, however, was not the author of any of the tales collected in his book. Rather, he rewrote various folk tales, tales of unknown origin snatched from the oral tradition of his time, and published those stories in the versions that most closely resemble the ones children grow up on today.This new Christopher Betts translation of Perrault’s work presents a few of the stories in simple verse, the rest in prose, and it includes an all-star list of fairy tales. Among the stories in “The Complete Fairy Tales” are: “Little Red Riding-Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Cinderella,” and a story very similar to that of ”Hansel and Gretel.” But make no mistake about it – these are not the fairy tales you heard from your mother and they are, most definitely, not the ones made famous by Mr. Disney. Nevertheless, Perrault did intend that his stories be read to small children by their parents. For that reason, his versions of the folk tales are shorter than the stories with which adults of the period would have been more familiar, they encompass a limited number of characters and motivations, and much of the most obvious sexual content has been removed or, at the least, disguised. In addition, within his stories, Perrault emphasizes lessons and warnings about the process of growing up and he attaches at least one moral to the end of each tale. The attached morals, however, do seem to be aimed more at the parent/reader than at the listening children.Adult readers will be intrigued by the editing process to which Perrault subjected his chosen tales and probably a little shocked by some of the details he excluded. Perrault clearly felt it necessary to clean up the old folk tales before publishing them as children’s entertainment. Who might have imagined, for instance, that Snow White would be raped by her prince and would give birth to twins before she was awakened? Or that Little Red Riding-Hood would be forced by the wolf to eat part of her dismembered grandmother? Or that incest would play a prominent role in some of the tales?“The Complete Fairy Tales” includes twenty-six remarkable illustrations by 19th century French literary illustrator Gustave Doré (including the book’s cover and the “Cinderella” illustration shown here) and it is amply footnoted. Most intriguing, though, is the book’s presentation of alternate versions of several of today’s most beloved fairy tales, versions that make it obvious why Perrault felt obliged to edit the tales to fit his intended audience. Readers preferring their history in unexpurgated form will much appreciate “The Complete Fairy Tales” as translated by Christopher Betts.Rated at: 5.0
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I actually read these while I was in France, but I reread a couple of them this week while my online group was discussing them. The online discussion reminded me how dark these stories were, full of violence and terror and unpredictability. The things we face in life, in other words. The things we seek out in books.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not the most enchanting edition (Clarion, 1993) of these tales I would have thought, but it gets the job done.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This contains not only the regular tales, but also three summaries of poems, one of which (Donkey's Skin) was the basis of a recent fantasy. Of the original stories, my personal favorite is Puss in Boots. Some of the others e.g. Hop o;my thumb, are rather grisly.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The stories are beautiful enough, but the Dore illustrations are breathtaking...
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The complete fairy tales of Charles PerraultLiked hearing of the stories and also about the author who wrote these in the 1670's. Some of them are quite scary and gruesome and they all come with a moral or two at the end.Had never heard of Bluebeard and Hop of My Thumb and Donkeyskin.About the author and translations done are included at the end.I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
Book preview
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault - Charles Perrault
PERRAULT
ILLUSTRATED BY
HARRY CLARKE WITH
AN INTRODUCTION BY
THOMAS BODKIN
INTRODUCTION
Avec ardeur il aima les beaux arts.
Griselidis
harles Perrault must have been as charming a fellow as a man could meet. He was one of the best-liked personages of his own great age, and he has remained ever since a prime favourite of mankind. We are fortunate in knowing a great deal about his varied life, deriving our knowledge mainly from D'Alembert's history of the French Academy and from his own memoirs, which were written for his grandchildren, but not published till sixty-six years after his death. We should, I think, be more fortunate still if the memoirs had not ceased in mid-career, or if their author had permitted himself to write of his family affairs without reserve or restraint, in the approved manner of modern autobiography. We should like, for example, to know much more than we do about the wife and the two sons to whom he was so devoted.
Perrault was born in Paris in 1628, the fifth son of Pierre Perrault, a prosperous parliamentary lawyer; and, at the age of nine, was sent to a day-school—the Collège de Beauvais. His father helped him with his lessons at home, as he himself, later on, was accustomed to help his own children. He can never have been a model schoolboy, though he was always first in his class, and he ended his school career prematurely by quarrelling with his master and bidding him a formal farewell.
The cause of this quarrel throws a bright light on Perraults subsequent career. He refused to accept his teacher's philosophical tenets on the mere ground of their traditional authority. He claimed that novelty was in itself a merit, and on this they parted. He did not go alone. One of his friends, a boy called Beaurain, espoused his cause, and for the next three or four years the two read together, haphazard, in the Luxembourg Gardens. This plan of study had almost certainly a bad effect on Beaurain, for we hear no more of him. It certainly prevented Perrault from being a thorough scholar, though it made him a man of taste, a sincere independent, and an undaunted amateur.
In 1651 he took his degree at the University of Orléans, where degrees were given with scandalous readiness, payment of fees being the only essential preliminary. In the mean-time he had walked the hospitals with some vague notion of following his brother Claude into the profession of medicine, and had played a small part as a theological controversialist in the quarrel then raging, about the nature of grace, between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Having abandoned medicine and theology he got called to the Bar, practised for a while with distinct success, and coquetted with a notion of codifying the laws of the realm. The Bar proved too arid a profession to engage for long his attention; so he next sought and found a place in the office of another brother, Pierre, who was Chief Commissioner of Taxes in Paris. Here Perrault had little to do save to read at large in the excellent library which his brother had formed.
For want of further occupation he returned to the writing of verse, one of the chief pleasures of his boyhood. His first sustained literary effort had been a parody of the sixth book of the Æneid
; which, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, was never published and has not survived. Beaurain and his brother Nicholas, a doctor of the Sorbonne, assisted him in this perpetration, and Claude made the pen-and-ink sketches with which it was illustrated. In the few years that had elapsed since the writing of this burlesque Perrault had acquired more sense and taste, and his new poems—in particular the Portrait d'Iris
and the Dialogue entre l'Amour et l'Amitié
—were found charming by his contemporaries. They were issued anonymously, and Quinault, himself a poet of established reputation, used some of them to forward his suit with a young lady, allowing her to think that they were his own. Perrault, when told of Quinault's pretensions, deemed it necessary to disclose his authorship; but, on hearing of the use to which his work had been put, he gallantly remained in the background, forgave the fraud, and made a friend of the culprit.
Architecture next engaged his attention, and in 1657 he designed a house at Viry for his brother and supervised its construction. Colbert approved so much of this performance that he employed him in the superintendence of the royal buildings and put him in special charge of Versailles, which was then in process of erection. Perrault flung himself with ardour into this work, though not to the exclusion of his other activities. He wrote odes in honour of the King; he planned designs for Gobelin tapestries and decorative paintings; he became a member of the select little Academy of Medals and Inscriptions which Colbert brought into being to devise suitable legends for the royal palaces and monuments; he encouraged musicians and fought the cause of Lulli; he joined with Claude in a successful effort to found the Academy of Science.
Claude Perrault had something of his brother's versatility and shared his love for architecture, and the two now became deeply interested in the various schemes which were mooted for the completion of the Louvre. Bernini was summoned by the King from Rome, and entrusted with the task; but the brothers Perrault intervened. Charles conceived the idea of the great east front and communicated it to Claude, who drew the plans and was commissioned to carry them out. The work was finished in 1671, and is still popularly known as Perrault's Colonnade.
In the same year Charles was elected to the Academy without any personal canvas on his part for the honour. His inaugural address was heard with such approval that he ventured to suggest that the inauguration of future members should be a public function. The suggestion was adopted, and these addresses became the most famous feature of the Academy's proceedings and are so to the present day. This was not his only service to the Academy, for he carried a motion to the effect that future elections should be by ballot; and invented and provided, at his own expense, a ballot-box which, though he does not describe it, was probably the model of those in use in all modern clubs and societies.
The novelty of his views did not always commend them to his brother 'Immortals.' Those expressed in his poem Le Siècle de Louis XIV,
which he read as an Academician of sixteen years' standing, initiated one of the most famous and lasting literary quarrels of the era. Perrault, in praising the writers of his own age, ventured to disparage some of the great authors of the ancient classics. Boileau lashed himself into a fury of opposition and hurled strident insults against the heretic. Racine, more adroit, pretended to think that the poem was a piece of ingenious irony. Most men of letters hastened to participate in the battle. No doubt Perrault's position was untenable, but he conducted his defence with perfect temper and much wit; and Boileau made himself not a little absurd by his violence and his obvious longing to display the extent of his learning. Perrault's case is finally stated in his four volumes, Le Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes,
which were published in 1688-1696. He evidently took vastly more pride in this dull and now almost forgotten work than in the matchless stories which have made him famous for ever.
After twenty years in the service of Colbert, the sun of Perrault's fortunes passed its zenith. His brother, the Commissioner of Taxes, had a dispute with the Minister and was disgraced. Then Perrault got married to a young lady of whom we know nothing except that her marriage was the subject of some opposition from his powerful employer. In a matter of the sort Perrault, though a courtier, could be relied on to consider no wishes save those of his future wife and himself. Colbert's own influence with the King became shaky, and this affected his temper. So Perrault, then just fifty-five, slid quietly from his service in the year 1683.
Before he went, he succeeded in frustrating a project for closing the Tuileries Gardens against the people of Paris and their children. Colbert proposed to reserve them to the royal use, but Perrault persuaded him to come