Charles Perrault (1628–1703) was a French author who one can say was the founding Father of the fairy tale, and whose best known tales include:
Little Red Riding Hood
Sleeping Beauty
Puss-in-Boots
Cinderella
Bluebeard
Hop o' My Thumb
Diamonds and Toads
Ricky of the Tuft
Perrault's most famous stories are still in print today and have been made into operas, plays, films and animated motion pictures.
Perrault's tales were mostly adapted from earlier folk tales from stylish literary salons in the 1690s, as a recreation from the more strenuous energy expended in the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns or the struggles of Jansenism.
For amusement, one would take some simple traditional tale, such as an old peasant woman might tell in the kitchens, and recast it, "moralized" and translated into a succinct and witty tale that was purged of all coarseness, for the kind of audience that was also still reading the high-flown sentiments of The Princess of Cleves, and could appreciate the structure of a perfect, well-turned sermon, if not too long.
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Mythologist Jack Zipes has emphasized that these tales served the interests of the educated ruling classes. There was also a slightly subversive bite to the game as Perrault played it, a slight sense of an underlying, dry criticism of the same aristocratic approach. Instead of wily peasants, as in "Jack and the Beanstalk" (not a Perrault tale), there are princesses, even if the subtext of Perrault's "Puss-in-Boots" is that the right clothes and a fine castle can make a "Marquis of Carabas" out of a miller's son.
Some of the droll fun of Perrault is in the mock-heroic contrast between the folktale context and fashionable life. In "Sleeping Beauty," once the Princess has fallen asleep, the good fairy arrives to set things to rights: She was to be seen in an hour's time, arriving in a fiery chariot drawn by dragons. The King went to hand her down from the chariot...
In etiquette, the importance of a visitor was assessed by the distance the host proceeded from his private apartments to receive her. To hand her out of her carriage was a signal courtesy. But in the 1690s in French a "coach" (coche) had become a lumbering public conveyance, and those who knew better followed the example of the Précieuses, and always called a private carriage a "chariot". The contrast between the fiery dragon-drawn goddess-like arrival and the courtly yet familiar gesture of handing her down, caused a ripple of entertainment to pass through Perrault's assembled listeners, too refined to laugh out loud. Sometimes the skeptical undertone can be quite wicked.
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