“These,” explains Madame la Comtesse, “are her own words, which it has been thought best to keep unchanged”. Elsewhere she is less concerned for her originals. Her “Finette Cendron” (the English “Finetta”) is an odd mixture of Perrault’s “Cinderella” and “Little Thumb”, in which both stories are spoilt.
Gold and silver are the meanest ornaments in these fairy novels; they have much of the glitter of a transformation scene. When the colours fade, there is only a confused memory of the setting; but fairies and talking animals remain. Children are not likely to forget “The White Cat”, “The Hind in the Wood”, or that lurker in dark corners of the nursery, “The Yellow Dwarf”.
As the century advanced, grown-up persons from time to time ventured into the unknown regions of romance; and it is odd to find that the more thrilling their discoveries in poetry and fiction, the more determined they were to hide them from children, or to cloak them with moral applications.
The rhymed “Moralités” which Perrault added to his tales were a tactful concession to public opinion. No moralist ever succeeded in reforming Puss in Boots, though one, early in the nineteenth century, claimed him as the ancestor of a Moral Cat. It is clear, however, that Perrault, left to himself, would have trusted his readers to find their own morals; for in the dedication to his Contes he says: “they all contain a very obvious moral, and one that shows itself more or less according to the insight of the reader.”
The task of reconciling parents and children upon the vexed question of the supernatural was achieved by Madame le Prince de Beaumont, with her educational or moral fairy-tales.
Allegorical persons often appeared in the court adaptations with names and images drawn from classical authority. Mlle. L’Héritier had already foisted into the old folk-tale of “Diamonds and Toads” a fairy called “Eloquentia Nativa”; but Madame de Beaumont’s tales were simpler and more convincing. From the parental point of view she had undoubted advantages over her predecessors in the fairy-tale, for, in the words of an editor of the Cabinet des Fées, she “devoted herself entirely to the education of children”.
Born in 1711, six years after the death of Madame D’Aulnoy, she spent a great part of her life in London. Her Magasin des Enfans, published in 1757,[27] properly belongs to the type of moral miscellany introduced by Sarah Fielding’s Governess[28]; but the schoolroom setting could not spoil fairy-tales which, however obvious their moral purposes, had refreshing touches of humour. In her intercourse with English children, Madame de Beaumont had somehow acquired a belief in the educational value of nonsense.
Charles Lamb’s rhyme of “Prince Dorus” is simply an adaptation of Madame de Beaumont’s “Prince Désir”; her story of “The Three Wishes” found in so many chap-books, is a well-known “droll”, and there are playful touches in her most serious tales.
Yet a child might venture a protest on discovering that the little white rabbit in “Prince Chéri”, that leaps into the King’s arms as he rides hunting, is an educational fairy in disguise; and it is impossible not to sympathise with the prince who, in spite of a ring that pricks whenever he is naughty, becomes a scapegrace, and has to undergo a Circeian transformation ere he is reformed.
Like all successful gouvernantes, Madame de Beaumont can be severe. Her fairy in “Fatal et Fortune” deserves a place in Spartan folklore; this is how she answers the mother who pleads for a son doomed to misfortune: