The dedication, signed P. Darmancour, is addressed to Mademoiselle, and contains very agreeable flattery of the sister of the future Regent[18]. These motives would, indeed, account for Perrault's use of his boy's name. But it had occurred to me, before discovering the similar opinion of M. Paul Lacroix, that P. Darmancour really was the author of the Contes, or at least a collaborateur[19]. The naïveté, and popular traditional manner of their telling, recognised by all critics, and the cause of their popularity, was probably given by the little lad who, as Mlle. L'Heritier said, a year before the tales were published, 'a mis depuis peu les Contes sur le papier avec tant d'agrément.' The child, according to this theory, wrote out, by way of exercise, the stories as he heard them, not from brodeuses in Society, but from his Nurse, or from old women on his father's estates. The evidence of Madame de Sévigné and of Mlle. L'Heritier, as well as the testimony of the contes which ladies of rank instantly took to printing, shews how the stories were told in Society. Allegorical and other names were given to the characters, usually nameless in Märchen. Historical circumstances were introduced, and references to actual events in the past. Esprit raged assiduously through the narratives. Moreover the traditional tales were so confounded that Madame d'Aulnoy, in Finette Cendron, actually mixes Cinderella with Hop o' My Thumb[20].
Contrast with these refinements, these superfluities, and incoherences, the brevity, directness, and simplicity of Histoires et Contes du Tems passé. They have the touch of an intelligent child, writing down what he has heard told in plain language by plain people. They exactly correspond, in this respect, to the Hindoo folk tales collected from the lips of Ayahs by Miss Maive Stokes, who was a child when her collection was published.
But, if the little boy thus furnished the sketch, it is indubitable that the elderly Academician and beau esprit touched it up, here toning down an incident too amazing for French sobriety and logic, there adding a detail of contemporary court manners, or a hit at some foible or vanity of men. 'Livre unique entre tous les livres,' cries M. Paul de St. Victor, 'mêlé de la sagesse du vieillard et de la candeur de l'enfant!' This delightful blending of age and youth (which here can 'live together') is probably due to the collaboration we describe.
Were it a pious thing to dissect Perrault's Contes, as Professors of all nations mangle the sacred body of Homer, we might actually publish a text in which the work of the original Darmancour and of the paternal Diaskeuast should be printed in different characters. Without carrying mere guess-work to this absurd extent, cannot one detect the older hand in places like this,—the Ogre's wife finds that her husband has killed his own children by misadventure: 'Elle commenca par s'évanouir (car c'est le premier expédient que trouvent presque toutes les femmes en pareilles rencontres)'? One can almost see the Academician writing in that sentence on the margin of the boy's copy. Again, at the end of Le Petit Poucet, we read that he made a fortune by carrying letters from ladies to their lovers, 'ce fut là son plus large gain. Il se trouvoit quelques femmes qui le chargeoient de lettres pour leurs maris, mais elles le payoient si mal, et cela alloit à si peu de chose, qu'il ne daignoit mettre en ligne de conte ce qu'il gagnoit de ce côté-là.' That is the Academician's jibe, and it is he who makes Petit Poucet buy Offices 'de la nouvelle création pour sa famille.' 'You never did that of your own wit,' as the Giant says to the Laddie in the Scotch story, Nicht, Nought, Nothing. But 'Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?' 'Je ne vois rien que le Soleil qui poudroye et l'herbe qui verdoye!' or 'Tire la chevillette, le bobinette cherra,' or 'Elle alla donc bien loin, bien loin, encore plus loin'; there the child is listening to the old and broken voice of tradition, mumbling her ancient burden while the cradle rocks, and the spinning-wheel turns and hums.
It is to this union of old age and childhood, then, of peasant memories, and memories of Versailles, to this kindly handling of venerable legends, that Perrault's Contes owe their perennial charm. The nursery tale is apt to lose itself in its wanderings, like the children in the haunted forest; Perrault supplies it with the clue that guides it home. A little grain of French common sense ballasts these light minions of the Moon, the elves; with a little toss of Court powder on the locks, pulveris exigui jactu, he tames the wild fée into the Fairy Godmother, a grande dame de par le monde, with an agate crutch-handle on her magic wand. 'His young Princesses, so gentle and so maidenly, have just left the convent of Saint Cyr. The King's sons have the proud courtesy of Dauphins of France: the Maids of Honour, the Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber, the red-nosed Swiss guards, sleep through the slumber of the Belle au Bois Dormant[21].'
They are all departed now, Dukes and Vicomtes and Princes, the Swiss Guards have gone, that made the best end of any, the hunting horn is still, and silent is the spinning wheel. The great golden coaches have turned into pumpkins again, the coachman has jumped down from his box, and hidden in his rat-hole, the Dragoon and the Hussar have clattered off for ever, the Duchesses dance no more in the minuet, nor the fairies on the haunted green. But in Perrault's enchanted book they are all with us, figures out of every age, the cannibal ogre that little Zulu and Ojibbeway children fear not unreasonably; the starving wood-cutter in the famines Racine deplored; the Princess, so like Mademoiselle; the Fairy Godmother you might mistake for Madame d'Epernon; the talking animals escaped from the fables of days when man and beast were all on one level with gods, and winds, and stars. In Perrault's fairy-land is room for all of them, and room for children too, who wander hither out of their own world of fancy, and half hope that the Sleeping Beauty dwells behind the hedge of yew, or think to find the dangerous distaff in some dismantled chamber.
The Histoires et Contes du Tems Passé must clearly have been successful, though scant trace of their success remains in the criticism of the time[22]. We may measure it by the fleet of other books of fairy tales which 'pursue the triumph and partake the gale.' The Contes de Fées of Mad. La Comtesse de M—— (Murat) were published by Barbin in 1698. How little the manner resembles Perrault's 'fairy-way of writing,' how much it deserves the censure of the Abbé de Villiers, may be learned from the opening sentence of Le Parfait Amour. 'Dans un de ces agréables pais qui sont dependans de l'Empire des Fées, regnoit la redoutable Danamo, elle estoit scavante dans son art, cruelle dans ses actions, et glorieuse de l'honneur d'estre descendue de la célèbre Calipso, dont les charmes eurent la gloire et le pouvoir en arrestant le fameux Ulisse, de triompher de la prudence des vainqueurs de Troye.'
The second story, Anguillette, is so far natural, that it contains a friendly Eel (as in the Mangaian legend of the Eel-lover of Ina); but this Eel is a fairy, condemned to wear the form of a fish, for certain days in each month. These narratives are almost unreadable, and scarcely keep a trace of the popular tradition. The tales of Madame d'Aulnoy, on the other hand, introduced the White Cat, the Yellow Dwarf, Finette Cendron, and Le Mouton to literature and the stage, where they survive in pantomime and féerie. Beauty and the Beast first appears, at the immoderate length of three hundred and sixty-two pages, in Les Contes Marins (La Haye, 1740) by Madame de Villeneuve.
Literary Fairy Tales flourished all through the eighteenth century in the endless Cabinet de Fées. As for Perrault's Tales, they were republished at the Hague, in 1742, with illustrations by Fokke. In 1745, they appeared, with Fokke's vignettes, and with an English translation. An English version, translated by Mr. Samber, printed for J. Pote, was advertised, Mr. Austin Dobson tells me, in the Monthly Chronicle, March 1729. There have been innumerable editions, often splendidly equipped and illustrated, down to the present date. This little book alone, of all Charles Perrault's labours, has won 'the land of matters unforgot.' Odysseus, Figaro, and Othello are not more certain to be immortal than Hop o' my Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard, the heroes whom Charles Nodier so pleasantly called 'the Ulysses, the Figaro, and the Othello of children.'
[4] Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen. No. 89.