So Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter, on the 6th of August, 1676.
The letter proves that fairy tales or contes had come to Court, and were in fashion, twenty years before Charles Perrault published his Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, our 'Mother Goose's Tales.' The apparition of the simple traditional stories at Versailles must have resembled the arrival of the Goose Girl, in her shabby raiment, at the King's Palace[4]. The stories came in their rustic weeds, they wandered out of the cabins of the charcoal burners, out of the farmers' cottages, and, after many adventures, reached that enchanted castle of Versailles. There the courtiers welcomed them gladly, recognised the truant girls and boys of the Fairy world as princes and princesses, and arrayed them in the splendour of Cinderella's sisters, 'mon habit de velours rouge, et ma garniture d'Angleterre; mon manteau à fleurs d'or et ma barrière de diamans qui n'est pas des plus indifférentes.' The legends of the country folk, which had been as simple and rude as Peau d'Ane in her scullion's disguise, shone forth like Peau d'Ane herself, when she wore her fairy garments, embroidered with the sun and moon in thread of gold and silver. We can see, from Madame de Sévigné's letter, that the Märchen had been decked out in Court dress, in train and feathers, as early as 1676. When the Princess of the Green Isle, and the Prince of Pleasures alighted from their flying ball of crystal, in Madame Coulanges' tale, every one cried, 'Cybele is descending among us!' Cybele is remote enough from the world of fairy, and the whole story, like the stories afterwards published by Madame d'Aulnoy, must have been a highly decorated and scarcely recognisable variant of some old tradition.
How did the fairy tales get presented at Court, and thence win their way, thanks to Perrault, into the classical literature of France? Probably they were welcomed partly in that spirit of sham simplicity, which moved Louis XIV and his nobles and ladies to appear in Ballets as shepherds and shepherdesses[5]. In later days the witty maidens of Saint Cyr became aweary of sermons on la simplicité. They used to say, by way of raillery, 'par simplicité je prends la meilleure place,' 'par simplicité A Paris. Par Robert Ballard. M.DC.LXIII.] je vais me louer,' 'par simplicité je veux ce qu'il y a de plus loin de moi sur une table.' This, as Madame de Maintenon remarked, was 'laughing at serious things,' at sweet simplicity, which first brought Fairy Tales to the Œil de Bœuf[6]. Mlle. L'Heritier in Bigarrures Ingénieuses (p. 237) expressly says, 'Les Romances modernes tâchent d'imiter la simplicité des Romances antiques.' It is curious that Madame de Maintenon did not find this simplicity simple enough for her pupils at St. Cyr. On the 4th of March, 1700, when the fashion for fairy tales was at its height, she wrote to the Comte d'Ayen on the subject of harmless literature for demoiselles, and asked him to procure something, 'mais non des contes de fées ou de Peau d'Ane, car je n'en veux point[7].'
Indeed it is very probable that weariness of the long novels and pompous plays of the age of Louis XIV made people find a real charm in the stories of Cendrillon, and La Belle au Bois Dormant. For some reason, however, the stories (as current in France) existed only by word of mouth, and in oral narrative, till near the end of the century. In 1691 Charles Perrault, now withdrawn from public life, and busy fighting the Battle of the Books with Boileau, published anonymously his earliest attempt at story telling, unless we reckon L'Esprit Fort, a tale of light and frivolous character. The new story was La Marquise de Salusses, ou la Patience de Griselidis, nouvelle[8]. Griselidis is not precisely a popular tale, as Perrault openly borrowed his matter from Boccaccio, and his manner (as far as in him lay) from La Fontaine. He has greatly softened the brutality of the narrative as Boccaccio tells it, and there is much beauty in his description of the young Prince lost in the forest, after one of those Royal hunts in Rambouillet or Marly whose echoes now scarce reach us, faint and fabulous as the horns of Roland or of Arthur[9]. Nay, there is a certain simple poetry and sentiment of Nature, in Griselidis, which comes strangely from a man of the Town and the Court. The place where the wandering Prince encounters first his shepherdess
'Clair de ruisseaux et sombre de verdure Saisissait les esprits d'une secrete horreur; La simple et naive nature S'y faisoit voir si belle et si pure, Que mille fois il benit son erreur.'
So the Prince rides on his way
'Rempli de douces reveries Qu'inspirent les grands bois, les eaux et les prairies.'
The sentiment is like Madame de Sévigné's love of her woods at Les Rochers, the woods where she says goodbye to the Autumn colours, and longs for the fairy feuille qui chante, and praises 'the crystal October days.' Of all this there is nothing in Boccaccio. Perrault, of course, does not repeat the brutalities of the Italian tyrant, in which Boccaccio takes a kind of pleasure, while Chaucer veils them in his kindly courtesy.
To Griselidis Perrault added an amusing little essay on the vanity of Criticism, and the varying verdicts of critics. In this Essay, Perrault apparently shews us the source from which he directly drew his matter, namely Boccaccio in the popular form of the chap-books called La Bibliothèque Bleue. 'If I had taken out everything that every critic found fault with,' he says, 'I had done better to leave the story in its blue paper cover, where it has been for so many years.' Thus Perrault borrowed from the Bibliothèque Bleue, not the Bibliothèque Bleue, as M. Maury fancied, from Perrault[10].
In 1694 Moetjens, the bookseller at The Hague, began to publish a little Miscellany, or Magazine, in the form of the small Elzevir collection, called Recueil de pièces curieuses et nouvelles, tant en prose qu'en vers. Perrault had already published Les Souhaits Ridicules, in a Society paper, Le Mercure Galant (Nov. 1693). He now reprinted this piece, with Griselidis and Peau d'Ane, in Moetjens' Recueil[11]. These versified tales caused some discussion, and were rather severely handled by anonymous writers in the Recueil. In 1694, Perrault put forth the three, with the introductions and essay, in a small volume. Probably each tale had appeared separately, but these treasures of the book-hunter are lost. Another edition came out, with a new preface, in 1695[12].