(1628 - 1703) remains one of the most popular storytellers in the world. “Puss in Boots”, “Tom Thumb”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Cinderella” and other works of the author included in the collection “Tales of Mother Goose” are familiar to all of us from childhood. But few people know the real history of these works.
We have collected 5 interesting facts about them.
Fact #1
There are two editions of fairy tales: “children’s” and “author’s”. While parents read the first to their children at night, the second amazes even adults with its cruelty. Thus, no one comes to the aid of Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, the prince’s mother in “Sleeping Beauty” turns out to be a cannibal and orders the butler to kill her grandchildren, and Little Thumb tricks the Ogre into killing his daughters. If you haven't read the author's version of fairy tales, then it's never too late to catch up. Believe me, it's worth it.
"Tom Thumb". Engraving by Gustave Doré
Fact #2
Not all Mother Goose Tales were written by Charles Perrault. Only three stories from this collection are entirely his own - “Griselda”, “Amusing Desires” and “Donkey Skin” (“Donkey Skin”). The rest were composed by his son, Pierre. My father edited the texts, supplemented them with moral teachings and helped publish them. Until 1724, the tales of father and son were published separately, but later the publishers combined them into one volume and attributed the authorship of all the stories to Perrault the Elder.
Fact #3
Bluebeard had a real historical prototype. He became Gilles de Rais, a talented military leader and associate of Joan of Arc, who was executed in 1440 for practicing witchcraft and killing 34 children. Historians are still arguing whether it was a political process or another episode of a “witch hunt.” But everyone unanimously agrees on one thing - Ryo did not commit these crimes. Firstly, not a single material evidence of his guilt could be found. Secondly, his contemporaries spoke of him exclusively as an honest, kind and very decent person. However, the Holy Inquisition did everything possible so that people would remember him as a bloodthirsty maniac. No one knows when exactly popular rumor turned Gilles de Rais from a child killer to a wife killer. But they began to call him Bluebeard long before the publication of Perrault’s fairy tales.
"Blue Beard". Engraving by Gustave Doré
Fact #4
The plots of Perrault's fairy tales are not original. Stories about Sleeping Beauty, Little Thumb, Cinderella, Rick with the Tuft and other characters are found both in European folklore and in the literary works of their predecessors. First of all, in the books of Italian writers: “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, “Pleasant Nights” by Giovan Francesco Straparola and “The Tale of Tales” (“Pentamerone”) by Giambattista Basile. It was these three collections that had the greatest influence on the famous Mother Goose Tales.
Fact #5
Perrault called the book "Tales of Mother Goose" to annoy Nicolas Boileau. Mother Goose herself - the character of French folklore, the “queen with the crow's foot” - is not in the collection. But the use of her name in the title became a kind of challenge to the literary opponents of the writer - Nicolas Boileau and other classicists, who believed that children should be raised on high ancient models, and not on common folk tales, which they considered unnecessary and even harmful for the younger generation. Thus, the publication of this book became an important event in the famous “dispute about the ancients and the modern”.
"Puss in Boots". Engraving by Gustave Doré
On January 12, 1628, labor began in Paquette Le Clerc. The Perrault couple had already raised four sons and were expecting a girl this time. However, twins were born. The father decided to name them in honor of the French kings - Charles and Francois. But six months later Francois died. The death of one twin, even in early childhood, becomes a deep trauma for the other. Charles grew up withdrawn, afraid of everything, alienated from people. But his father still decided to give him an education, and 8-year-old Charles entered Beauvais College.
Studying turned out to be a real nightmare. The teachers considered the guy an idiot, and his classmates avoided him. They were afraid to hurt him because his older brothers studied with him. But his friend got it. He was fat, they mocked and ridiculed him. One day, three teenagers pushed the guy into a puddle and started beating him. Charles could not stand it and rushed at them. He bit, scratched and pulled out hair. The guys were confused. They belonged to the most noble families of France and were not used to being given such a rebuff. The next morning, for the first time in five years, Charles raised his hand in class. To the surprise of his teacher and classmates, he answered the lesson in brilliant Latin. And got the highest score. Perrault became so bold that he later even began to argue with the teacher. And when he was forbidden to take part in disputes, he and a friend dropped out of college and continued to study on their own.
Charles successfully graduated from university and became a lawyer. But he didn’t practice for long. “I would willingly burn all the court files,” he said. “There’s nothing better in the world than to reduce the number of lawsuits.” Perrault began writing poems. Some were dedicated to the queen. The 25-year-old lawyer was noticed at court, and Finance Minister Nicolas Fouquet invited Perrault to work. Charles collected taxes and wrote poems. They were printed in 1653. He met politicians and writers, attended balls and social salons. He wrote light comedies, poems and tragedies. A few years later he was already a famous writer. But subsequently his patron fell out of favor. Fouquet was accused of conspiracy and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Charles managed to stay at court. The new minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, liked him, and he made him his first secretary. Colbert knew very well the whims and weaknesses of his monarch. He created a special “bureau”, which was supposed to glorify Louis XIV, and appointed Charles as its chairman. Perrault became in charge of royal construction and tapestry workshops. Sometimes he himself developed designs and came up with mottos and slogans for triumphal arches. The king was pleased, and even sometimes consulted with Charles. Perrault became rich and became a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He acquired personal apartments in the Louvre and Versailles, eight houses in Paris, and the castle of Rosier.
In 1672, 44-year-old Charles married the 19-year-old daughter of the royal treasurer, Marie Guichon. Until then, he avoided women because of his innate shyness. But the girl gave a good dowry, and he was tempted to pool capital. Charles fell in love with his wife after the wedding. “You are my magical princess,” he loved to tell her. Marie bore him three sons. But in October 1678 she fell ill with smallpox and died. Perrault took the loss seriously. He left the court and decided to devote himself to children. Charles himself took up their upbringing and education.
At 67, I decided to write some fairy tales with moral instructions for them. Usually he didn’t come up with them himself: some he remembered from childhood, others were collected by his 15-year-old son Pierre. He was the first to publish the fairy tales “Griselda”, “Funny Desires” and “Donkey Skin”. And in 1697 he published the collection “Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Past Times with Moral Instructions.” It included “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Bluebeard”, “Puss in Boots”, “Cinderella”, “Rikke with the Tuft” and “Tom Thumb”. Up to 50 books were sold every day in Claude Barbin's Parisian store! Over the course of a year, the publisher repeated the circulation three times.
The first editions were signed with Pierre's name. Everyone knew Charles as a serious writer, and he was afraid that now he would be laughed at. In addition, he wanted to glorify his beloved son and help him make a career at court. 19-year-old Pierre received a noble title and entered the circle of close friends of the princess. However, six months later, in a street fight, he stabbed to death a man of his own age, the son of a carpenter. Pierre was arrested, and the mother of the murdered man began a lawsuit against him. Perrault barely managed to get his son out of prison. He paid the woman 2,079 livres, and Pierre was released. His father bought him the rank of lieutenant in the royal regiment, and he went to the front. On May 2, 1700, he died in battle. Charles took the tragedy seriously. He died on May 16, 1703.
The World Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales calls Perrault the kindest storyteller in history. Apparently, he was the first to create real children's fairy tales - good ones and with a happy ending. After all, the folk stories he used were quite cruel. In “Cinderella,” for example, the stepmother cuts off the girl’s legs so that she does not run to the ball. And Sleeping Beauty wakes up not from a kiss, but from the birth of two children, whom the handsome prince “gave” to her and went to himself. “Little Red Riding Hood” also ends tragically, and the Brothers Grimm “wrote a happy ending” for her. The authors of the website of the European Society for the Protection of Wolves from Little Red Riding Hood claim that because of this fairy tale, these predators were exterminated in Europe.
I.S. TurgenevPerrault's Fairy Tales (1867)
Perrault's tales are especially popular throughout Europe; Russian children know them comparatively less, which is probably due to the lack of good translations and publications. Indeed, despite their somewhat scrupulous Old French grace, Perrault's fairy tales deserve an honorable place in children's literature. They are cheerful, entertaining, relaxed, not burdened with either unnecessary morality or authorial pretension; the spirit of folk poetry that once created them is still felt in them; they contain exactly that mixture of the incomprehensibly miraculous and the everyday-simple, the sublime and the funny, which constitutes the hallmark of real fairy-tale fiction. Our positive and enlightened time is beginning to abound with positive and enlightened people who do not like precisely this admixture of the miraculous: raising a child, according to their concepts, should be not only an important matter, but also a serious one, and instead of fairy tales, he should be given small geological and physiological treatises. Be that as it may, it seems to us very difficult and hardly useful for the time being to banish everything magical and wonderful, to leave the young imagination without food, to replace a fairy tale with a story. The child undoubtedly needs a teacher, and he also needs a nanny.
The witty publisher of Perrault's fairy tales, J. Getzel, known in literature under the pseudonym P. Stahl, in his preface notes very rightly that one should not be afraid of the miraculous for children. Not to mention the fact that many of them do not allow themselves to be completely deceived and, amused by the beauty and cuteness of their toy, in fact know very firmly that this never happened (remember, gentlemen, how you rode on sticks, because you you knew that these were not horses under you, but the case still turned out to be completely believable and the pleasure was excellent); but even those children (and these are for the most part the most gifted and intelligent heads) who unconditionally believe in all the miracles of a fairy tale are very good at immediately renouncing this belief as soon as the hour comes. Children, like adults, take from books only what they need and as long as they need it. Goetzel is right: the dangers and difficulties of child education do not lie in this direction. We have just said that we believe that one of the reasons for the relative obscurity of Perrault’s fairy tales is the lack of good translations and editions. It is left to the public to judge how satisfactory our translation is; As for this publication, there has never been anything like it, not only here in Russia, but also abroad; and the name of the brilliant draftsman Gustav Doré has become too loud and does not need any praise.
Charles Perrault was born in Paris in 1628 and died there in 1697.
In 1693, being sixty-five years old, he published the first edition of his fairy tales Contes de ma me`re L`Oie under the name of his eleven-year-old son and written for him.
Charles Perrault should not be confused with his brother, Claudius, physician and architect, author of the Louvre Colonnade. The article was written by I.S. Turgenev for the publication: "Perrault's Fairy Tales. Translation from French by Ivan Turgenev. Drawings by Gustav Doré. St. Petersburg, M.O. Wolf Publishing House, 1866."
The writer worked on the translation for about two years and was dissatisfied with it, as evidenced by one of his letters. Nevertheless, this was, most likely, the best translation of Perrault's Fairy Tales into Russian for the entire period of their publication in Russia (almost a hundred years). And the magnificent illustrations by G. Doré, seen for the first time by our readers, gave the publication a special charm. Over the past one hundred and forty years, literary historians have clarified the dates of the life and work of the great storyteller - C. Perrault died in 1703, and the first edition of his Fairy Tales was published in 1697.
But I.S. Turgenev’s thoughts about fairy-tale fiction, about the attitude of children towards it and about “Tales of Mother Goose”, which have survived centuries, are not at all outdated. The warning remains relevant: do not confuse Charles Perrault with his brother Claudius, a physician and architect. Unfortunately, in several publications from 1993-2006 that published articles about Charles Perrault, he was credited with knowledge in medicine and construction. Only in the Illustrated Encyclopedia "Russica. (History. 16-18 centuries)" there are a few words about the storyteller's brothers. Claude Perrault was a physician, mathematician, physicist and famous architect, and Nicolas was a doctor of theology.
Charles Perrault (1628-1703) - French storyteller, critic and poet, was a member of the French Academy.
Childhood
On January 12, 1628, twin boys were born into the family of Pierre Perrault in Paris. They were named Francois and Charles. The head of the family worked as a judge in the Parliament of Paris. His wife took care of the housework and raising the children, of whom there were already four before the birth of the twins. 6 months later, little Francois fell ill with pneumonia and died, and his twin brother Charles became a favorite in the family and in the future glorified the Perrault family throughout the world with his famous fairy tales. In addition to Charles, his older brother Claude, a great architect, author of the eastern façade of the Louvre and the Paris Observatory, was also famous.
The family was wealthy and intelligent. Charles's paternal grandfather was a wealthy merchant. Mom came from a noble family and lived on the village estate of Viri before her marriage. As a child, Charles often visited there and, most likely, later drew stories from there for his fairy tales.
Education
Parents made every effort to ensure that their children received a decent education. While the boys were little, their mother taught them reading and writing. The father was very busy at work, but in his free time he always helped his wife. The Perrault brothers all studied at Beauvais University College, and dad sometimes tested their knowledge. All the boys performed excellently in their studies; during the entire period of study they were not caned, which was very rare at that time.
When Charles was 13 years old, he was kicked out of class for arguing with the teacher. The guy dropped out of school because he disagreed with his teachers in many ways.
He received further education independently with his best friend Boren. In three years they taught themselves Latin, French history, Greek and ancient literature. Charles later said that all the knowledge that was useful to him in life was obtained during the period of self-study with a friend.
Having reached adulthood, Perrault studied law with a private teacher. In 1651 he was awarded a law degree.
Career and creativity
While still in college, Perrault wrote his first poems, comedies and poems.
In 1653, his first work was published - a poetic parody “The Walls of Troy, or the Origin of Burlesque.” But Perrault perceived literature as a hobby; he built his career in a completely different direction.
As his father wanted, after receiving a law degree, Charles worked as a lawyer for some time, but this type of activity soon seemed uninteresting to him. He went to work as a clerk for his older brother, who by that time ran an architectural department. It should be noted that Charles Perrault built his career successfully, rose to the rank of adviser to the King, chief inspector of buildings, then headed the Committee of Writers and the department of the Glory of the King.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a statesman and chief controller of finances who actually ruled France during the time of Louis XIV, patronized Charles. Thanks to such a patron, in 1663, during the creation of the Academy of Inscriptions and Beaux-Letters, Perrault received the position of secretary. He achieved wealth and influence. Along with his main occupation, Charles successfully continued to write poetry and engage in literary criticism.
But in 1683, Colbert died, and Perrault became disgraceful at court, first he was deprived of his pension, and then the position of secretary.
During this period, the very first fairy tale about a shepherdess, called “Grisel,” was written. The author did not pay special attention to this work and continued to engage in criticism, writing a large four-volume collection of dialogues “Comparison of Ancient and Modern Authors,” as well as publishing the book “Famous People of France in the 17th Century.”
When his next two works, “Donkey Skin” and “Funny Desires,” were published in 1694, it became clear that a new era of storyteller Charles Perrault had arrived.
In 1696, the fairy tale “The Sleeping Beauty”, published in the magazine “Gallant Mercury”, instantly became popular. And just a year later, the success of the published book “Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Bygone Times with Teachings” turned out to be incredible. Perrault heard the plots of the nine fairy tales included in this book when his son’s nurse told them to his baby before bed. He took folk tales as a basis and gave them artistic treatment, thereby opening the way for them into high literature.
He managed to link long-standing folk works to modernity; his fairy tales were written so accessible that they were read by people from high society and from ordinary classes. More than three centuries have passed, and all over the world mothers and fathers read to their children before bed:
- "Cinderella" and "Tom Thumb";
- "Puss in Boots" and "Little Red Riding Hood";
- "Gingerbread House" and "Bluebeard".
Based on the plots of Perrault's fairy tales, ballets were staged and operas were written in the best theaters in the world.
Perrault's fairy tales were first translated into Russian in 1768. In terms of the number of works published in the USSR, Charles became fourth among foreign writers after Jack London, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
Personal life
Charles Perrault married quite late, at 44 years old. His chosen one was a young, 19-year-old girl, Marie Guchon. They had four children. But the marriage did not last long; Marie died at the age of 25 from smallpox. Charles never remarried and raised his daughter and three sons on his own.
In the Chevreuse Valley, not far from Paris, is the Domain of Puss in Boots, the castle-museum of Charles Perrault, where wax figures of characters from his fairy tales can be found on every corner.
>Biographies of writers and poets
Brief biography of Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault is an outstanding French writer, storyteller, poet and critic of the classic era. He is best known as the author of the fairy tales “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “Bluebeard”, etc. C. Perrault was born on January 12, 1628 in Paris in the family of a parliamentary judge. He was the youngest of seven children. The Perrault family tried to provide their children with a good education, so at the age of eight, Charles was sent to college in the north of France. However, the young man never completed his studies, deciding to pursue a legal career. But he quickly became bored with this too. Soon he became a clerk for his brother-architect, Claude Perrault, who became famous as the author of the eastern façade of the Louvre.
Despite the fact that Perrault became a prolific writer, little of his fiction has survived, with the exception of fairy tales. The writer's first work appeared in 1653. It was a poem in a comic style, "The Walls of Troy, or the Origin of Burlesque." It did not bring great fame to the poet, but it marked the beginning of his literary career. C. Perrault enjoyed the confidence of the statesman and de facto ruler of France after 1665, Jean Colbert. Thus, the writer could largely determine the policy of the court. In 1663 he was appointed secretary of the new Academy. However, after Colbert's death (1683), he lost everything: his secretary's position and his literary pension.
In the history of literature, Charles Perrault is also known as the founder of the “dispute about ancient and modern.” So, in 1687, he published the poem “The Age of Louis the Great”, and then dialogues about the parallels between ancient and modern views on art and science. In his works, he highlighted the art of the Louis Age as an opportunity for progress and deviation from the unchanging ancient ideal. He saw the future of literature in the development of the novel as a successor to the ancient epic. In 1697, the collection “Tales of Mother Goose” appeared, which included 7 revised folk tales and one tale composed by Perrault himself. This was the fairy tale “Rike the Tuft”, which widely glorified the writer.
It is believed that it was C. Perrault who introduced the genre of folk tales into “high” literature. His tales not only influenced world literature, but also laid the foundation for the “fairytale” tradition. Following Perrault, fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and H.H. Andersen appeared. Operas and ballets were subsequently created based on the plots of his fairy tales. His tales first appeared in Russian in 1768. The great storyteller died on May 16, 1703.
Biography of Charles Perrault
Huge merit Perrault in that he selected several stories from the mass of folk tales and recorded their plot, which had not yet become final. He gave them a tone, a climate, a style that was characteristic of the 17th century, and yet very personal.
Among the storytellers who “legalized” fairy tales in serious literature, the very first and honorable place is given to the French writer Charles Perrault. Few of our contemporaries know that Perrault was a venerable poet of his time, an academician of the French Academy, and the author of famous scientific works. But it was not his thick, serious books that brought him worldwide fame and recognition from his descendants, but his wonderful fairy tales “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, “Bluebeard”.
Charles Perrault was born in 1628. The boy's family was concerned about the education of their children, and at the age of eight, Charles was sent to college. As historian Philippe Ariès notes, Perrault’s school biography is the biography of a typical excellent student. During their training, neither he nor his brothers were ever beaten with rods - an exceptional case at that time.
After college, Charles takes private law lessons for three years and eventually receives a law degree.
At twenty-three he returns to Paris and begins his career as a lawyer. Perrault's literary activity occurred at a time when a fashion for fairy tales appeared in high society. Reading and listening to fairy tales is becoming one of the common hobbies of secular society, comparable only to reading detective stories by our contemporaries. Some prefer to listen to philosophical fairy tales, others pay tribute to ancient fairy tales, passed down in the retellings of grandmothers and nannies. Writers, trying to satisfy these demands, write down fairy tales, processing plots familiar to them from childhood, and the oral fairy tale tradition gradually begins to turn into a written one.
However, Perrault did not dare to publish the fairy tales under his own name, and the book he published bore the name of his eighteen-year-old son, P. Darmancourt. He feared that, with all the love for “fairy-tale” entertainment, writing fairy tales would be perceived as a frivolous activity, casting a shadow with its frivolity on the authority of a serious writer.
Perrault's fairy tales are based on well-known folklore plots, which he presented with his characteristic talent and humor, omitting some details and adding new ones, “ennobling” the language. Most of all, these tales were suitable for children. And it is Perrault who can be considered the founder of world children's literature and literary pedagogy.
We call Charles Perrault a storyteller now, but in general during his lifetime (he was born in 1628, died in 1703). Charles Perrault was known as a poet and publicist, dignitary and academician. He was a lawyer, the first clerk of the French Minister of Finance Colbert.
When Colbert founded the Académie de France in 1666, one of its first members was Charles's brother, Claude Perrault, whom Charles had recently helped win a competition to design the façade of the Louvre. A few years later, Charles Perrault was also accepted into the Academy, and he was assigned to head the work on the “General Dictionary of the French Language”.
The story of his life is both personal and social, and politics mixed with literature, and literature, as if divided into what glorified Charles Perrault over the centuries - fairy tales, and what remained transient. For example, Perrault became the author of the poem “The Age of Louis the Great,” in which he glorified his king. His famous works are “Great Men of France”, voluminous “Memoirs” and many others. In 1695, a collection of poetic tales by Charles Perrault was published.
But the collection “Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Bygone Times with Teachings” was published under the name of Charles Perrault’s son Pierre de Armancourt - Perrault. It was the son who, in 1694, on the advice of his father, began to write down folk tales. Pierre Perrault died in 1699. In his memoirs, written a few months before his death (he died in 1703), Charles Perrault does not write anything about who was the author of the fairy tales or, more precisely, the literary record.
These memoirs, however, were published only in 1909, and twenty years after the death of the writer, academician and storyteller, in the 1724 edition of the book “Tales of Mother Goose” (which, by the way, immediately became a bestseller), authorship was first attributed to Charles Perrault alone . In a word, there are many “blank spots” in this biography. The fate of the storyteller himself and his fairy tales, written in collaboration with his son Pierre, is described in such detail for the first time in Russia in the book “Charles Perrault” by Sergei Boyko.
