The Fairy Tales Part 1 of Charles Perrault
1.
Little Red Riding Hood
2.
The Fairy
3.
Blue Beard
4.
The Sleeping Beauty in the
Wood
Charles Perrault
12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703 was a
French author and member of the
Académie française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known of his tales include Le
Petit Chaperon rouge Little Red Riding Hood,
Cendrillon Cinderella,
Le Chat Botté
Puss in
Boot),
La Belle au bois dormant The Sleeping Beauty and
La Barbe bleue Bluebeard.
Many of Perrault's stories, continue to be printed and have been adapted to opera, ballet, theatre, and film,
Disney. Perrault was an influential figure in the
17th-century French literary scene, and was the leader of the
Modern faction during the
Quarrel of the
Ancients and the
Moderns.
He was born in
Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, the seventh child of
Pierre Perrault and Paquette Le Clerc. He attended good schools and studied law before embarking on a career in government service, following in the footsteps of his father and older brother
Jean.
He took part in
the creation of the Academy of Sciences as well as the restoration of the
Academy of
Painting. In 1654, he moved in with his brother
Pierre, who had a post as the principal tax collector of the city of Paris. When the
Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was founded in 1663, Perrault was appointed its secretary and served under
Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to
King Louis XIV.
Jean Chapelain,
Amable de Bourzeys, and
Jacques Cassagne the
King's librarian were also appointed.
Using his influence as
Colbert's administrative aide, he was able to get his brother,
Claude Perrault, employed as designer of the new section of the
Louvre, built between 1665 and 1680, to be overseen by Colbert. His design was chosen over designs by
Gian Lorenzo Bernini with whom, as Perrault recounts in his Memoires, he had stormy relations while the
Italian artist was in residence at
Louis's court in 1665 and
François Mansart.
One of the factors leading to this choice included the fear of high costs, for which other architects were infamous, and second was the personal antagonism between
Bernini and leading members of Louis's court, including Colbert and Perrault;
King Louis himself maintained a public air of benevolence towards Bernini, ordering the issuing of a royal bronze portrait medal in honor of the artist in 1674.
In 1668, Perrault wrote La Peinture '’Painting’’ to honor the king's first painter,
Charles Le Brun. He also wrote Courses de testes et de bague
Head and
Ring Races, 1670, written to commemorate the 1662 celebrations staged by Louis for his mistress, Louise-Françoise de
La Baume le Blanc, duchesse de La
Vallière.
Perrault married
Marie Guichon, age 19, in 1672; she died in 1678.
In 1669 Perrault advised
Louis XIV to include thirty-nine fountains each representing one of the fables of
Aesop in the labyrinth of
Versailles in the gardens of Versailles. The work was carried out between 1672 and 1677.
Water jets spurting from the animals mouths were conceived to give the impression of speech between the creatures. There was a plaque with a caption and a quatrain written by the poet
Isaac de Benserade next to each fountain. Perrault produced the guidebook for the labyrinth, Labyrinte de Versailles, printed at the royal press, Paris, in 1677, and illustrated by
Sebastien le Clerc.
Philippe Quinault, a longtime family friend of the Perraults, quickly gained a reputation as the librettist for the new musical genre known as opera, collaborating with composer
Jean-Baptiste Lully. After Alceste 1674 was denounced by traditionalists who rejected it for deviating from classical theater, Perrault wrote in response
Critique de l'
Opéra 1674 in which he praised the merits of Alceste over the tragedy of the same name by
Euripides. His treatise was one of the first documents of the literary debate that was later to become known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
Perrault was elected to the Académie française in 1671 and initiated the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which pitted supporters of the literature of
Antiquity (the "Ancients") against supporters of the literature from the century of Louis XIV the "Moderns". He was on the side of the Moderns and wrote Le Siècle de
Louis le Grand (
The Century of
Louis the Great, 1687 and Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes
Parallel between
Ancients and Moderns, 1688–1692 where he attempted to prove the superiority of the literature of his century.
Charles Perrault died in Paris in 1703 at age 75.