APPENDIX.
CHARLES PERRAULT.
Member of the Académie Française, and premier commis des batimens du Roi, was born, as he himself tells us in the Mémoires he left to his children, in Paris, on the 12th of January, 1628; and at eight and a half years of age was sent to the College of Beauvais, where he gave early proof of his literary abilities. He died in 1703. Although the author of many creditable compositions, both in prose and verse, he is indebted for his celebrity to that collection of Fairy tales which, under the title of Histoires, ou Contes du Tems passé, were first published in 1697, and speedily obtained a world-wide popularity as Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, known in England as Mother Goose's Fairy Tales.
They were published by Perrault, under the name of his son, Perrault D'Armancour, at that time a child only ten years old, whose name is appended to the dedication of the first edition to "Mademoiselle," i.e., Elizabeth Charlotte d'Orleans, sister of Philippe, Duke of Chartres, and, after the death of Louis XIV., Regent of France. Mademoiselle was born 13th September, 1676. The title, Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, has given rise to much controversy, and a great deal of paper, not to say learning, has been wasted in the attempt to discover the original source of the stories, and the reason of their being called those of "Ma Mère l'Oye." The former question I shall reserve for discussion in my notices of the tales themselves. The latter we will dispose of at once. Monsieur Colin de Plancy, in his valuable edition of the Œuvres Choisis de Charles Perrault, 8vo, Paris, 1826; and Baron Walkenaër in his Lettres sur les Contes des Fées attribués à Perrault, &c., Paris, 12mo, same date, have pretty well exhausted the subject. The three principal derivations that have been insisted upon, are:—
Firstly. That in an ancient fabliau, "a goose is represented telling stories to her goslings, worthy of them and of her."