Partly work and partly play You must on St. Distaff's day.
That is, the day after Twelfth Day, and is evidently the relic of some pagan rite in honour, most probably, of Freya or Frega, the Venus of the Scandinavians. "Dame Bertha horned," is one of the characters in Les Evangiles des Conoilles (Quenouilles), the joint composition of Jean d'Arras and three other writers, in 1475. It was translated into English, and printed by Winkyn de Worde, with the title of The Gospelles of Distaffs.[51]
A writer who signs himself Philetymus, has acutely pointed out a more probable origin of the title of Contes de ma (or de le) Mère l'Oye, which it is clear, from passages in Boileau and Molière, was applied to a certain collection of old stories, long before Perrault published his Histoires du Temps Passé. This writer refers us to the customs of antiquity and the superstitions of the middle ages. He recals to us that the ancient Romans confided their dwellings to the care of their geese. He alludes to the two hundred thousand Crusaders who, in 1096, directed their march by the flight of a goose from Hungary to Jerusalem; to the guardian fairies of the Château de Piron in the Contentin, who, at the time of the invasion of the Normans, transformed themselves into wild geese; to the benevolent and protecting dwarfs of the Canton of Berne, who are said to have been all goose-footed; and above all, to Marguerite de Navarre, who, in her Heptameron, calls herself Oisille; and he concludes by saying, "C'est que la bonne dame Oisille, veuve de grand expérience y représente la Mère l'Oie; c'est que du conté le moins discret elle sait tirer toujours une conclusion favorable à la morale.... Contes de la Mère l'Oie c'est à dire contes de la vieille grand mère, jaseuse et criande comme l'Oie mais comme l'Oie, surtout gardienne vigilante de la maison.... J'allais dire de la Vertu."
There is, amidst all this suggestion, one fact to repose upon. It is, that Perrault was not the inventor of the stories he published; that he merely transmitted to writing, no doubt with some touches of his own, tales of the nursery which had descended orally from the earliest ages of the Celtic occupation of Armorica or Bretagne, to the peculiar superstitions of which we shall find, as we proceed, they all have more or less reference, and that the particular stories printed in the first edition of his Histoires du Temps Passé, had long been popularly known as Contes de ma Mère l'Oye. In 1678, at the age of fifty, Perrault retired from his public office to dedicate himself entirely to literature and the education of his children. Some ten years afterwards he composed a novel in verse, founded on a celebrated tale in the Decamerone of Boccaccio, and well known to us as Patient Grizzel, his title being La Marquise de Salusses; ou, la Patience de Griselidis. It was published at Paris, by Jean Baptiste Coignard, in 1691. La Fontaine had, as early as 1678, said, in the fourth Fable of his eighth Book, Le Pouvoir des Fables—
——"Et moi même Au moment que je fais cette moralité Si Peau d'Ane m'etait conté J'y prendrais un plaisir extrême."
These lines it would seem induced Perrault to versify the old nursery story of Peau d'Ane, with which Louis XIV., when an infant, used to be rocked to sleep; and in 1694, on the publication of the second edition of his Griselidis, he added to it his metrical version of Peau d'Ane, and Les Souhaits Ridicules, known to us as The Three Wishes. The success of these stories led him to publish, in 1697, his collection of Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, under the title of Histoires du Temps Passé, and in the name of his son, as before stated. This collection consisted of eight stories only, all in prose: La Belle au Bois Dormant, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Barbe Bleue, Le Chat Botté, Les Fées, Cendrillon, Riquet à la Houpe, and Le Petit Poucet—a proof that Peau d'Ane was not one of the Contes de ma Mère l'Oie, any more than Griselidis or Les Souhaits Ridicules. The same eight stories alone appear in the second edition in 1707 (four years after the death of Perrault), and in the third edition by Nicolas Gosselin, in 1724. It is not until 1742, when an edition of the Histoires du Temps Passé was published at the Hague,[52] that we find any addition to the first eight stories, and then we have for the first time the story of L'Adroite Princesse; ou, Les Aventures de Finette, presented to us, with a dedication to the Countess of Murat, as a story by Perrault, although a story with that title and on that subject was published by Madlle. Lheritier in 1696, in a work entitled, Œuvres Mêlées, contenant Nouvelles et autres Ouvrages en Verse et en Prose, in which also appears a letter from the author to the daughter of Perrault. But even in the Hague edition of 1742, there is no Peau d'Ane, and it is only in comparatively modern collections that a prose version of that story, as well as the one in verse actually written by Perrault, is, with L'Adroite Princesse, Griselidis, and Les Souhaits Ridicules, added to the eight original Contes de ma Mère l'Oie, or Histoires du Temps Passé.
From these eight stories I have selected six, omitting only Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, and Les Fées, so well known in the nursery as Little Red Riding Hood (why "Riding?") and Toads and Diamonds, and for the atmosphere of which they are alone calculated. On the others I shall now offer a few observations in their order of publication, and in the same spirit as those appended to the Fairy Tales of the Countess d'Aulnoy.