Tales of Passed Times - Illustrated by Charles Robinson

Tales

of

Passed Times

Told By

Master Charles Perrault

Illustrated by

Johnny Gruelle

Copyright © 2015 Pook Press

An imprint of Read Publishing Ltd.

Home Farm, 44 Evesham Road, Cookhill, Alcester,

Warwickshire, B49 5LJ

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or

copied in any way without the express permission of

the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Charles Perrault

Charles Robinson

The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

Little Red Riding-Hood

Blue Beard

Master Cat; Or, Puss In Boots

The Fairies

Cinderella; Or, The Little Glass Slipper

Riquet With The Tuft

Little Thumbling

Beauty And The Beast

The Benevolent Frog

Princess Rosette

List of Illustrations

She fell into a swoon.

Grandma, what great ears you have!

Your tears are useless said Bluebeard, you must die!

Puss among the reapers.

She gave it to the Woman.

The King’s son gave her his hand.

Then said the Princess I wish that you may be the handsomest prince in the world.

The boys followed him.

Her father was just arriving.

She saw beside her a woman of a gigantic size.

Oh, you are jesting; replied the King of the Peacocks.

Biography

of

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault was born on 12th January 1628. He was a French author and member of the Académie française, who laid the foundations for a new literary genre; the fairy tale. The best known of Perrault’s tales include Le Petit Chaperon (Little Red Riding Hood), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots), La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty) and La Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard). Many of Perrault’s stories, which were re-written by the brothers Grimm, continue to be printed and have been adapted to opera, ballet (such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty), theatre and film (Walt Disney). Perrault was a highly influential figure in the seventeenth century French literary scene and was also the leader of the ‘Modern faction’ during the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.’

Perrault was born into a wealthy bourgeois Parisian family, the seventh child of Pierre Perrault and Paquette Le Clerc. He attended good schools in the city and studied law before embarking on a career in government service (following in the footsteps of his father and older brother Jean). Perrault also 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 purchased a post as the principal tax collector of the city of Paris. ‘Buying’ official government roles was a common practice in seventeenth century France, as chances for self-aggrandizement were rife! Following on from this, when the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was founded in 1663, Perrault was appointed as its secretary, and served under Jean Baptiste Colbert (finance minister to Louis XIV).

In 1668 Perrault wrote La Peinture (Painting) to honour the King’s first painter, Charles Le Brun. He also wrote Courses de testes et de Bague (Head and Ring Races, 1670) to commemorate the 1662 celebrations staged by Louis for his mistress, Louise-Françoise de La Baume le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière. Perrault himself got married in 1672, to Marie Guichon (aged just nineteen). She sadly died only six years later. This was a very busy time in Perrault’s life and in 1669 he helped Louis XIV design the gardens of Versailles. Perrault persuaded the King to include thirty-nine fountains, each representing one of the fables of Aesop in the labyrinth section of the Versailles gardens, and 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.

On being elected to the Académie française in 1671, Perrault initiated the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which pitted supporters of the literature of Antiquity (the ‘Ancients’) against supporters of the literature from the century of Louis XIV (the ‘Moderns’). Perrault 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. Le Siècle de Louis le Grand was written in celebration of Louis XIV’s recovery from a life-threatening operation. Perrault argued that because of Louis’s enlightened rule, the present age was superior in every respect to ancient times.

Despite this pandering to the crown, in 1695, when he was sixty-seven years old, Perrault lost his post as secretary. It was at this point that he decided to dedicate himself to his children and began writing stories, inspired by old oral traditions of French and European folklore. In 1697 Perrault published Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé), subtitled Tales of Mother Goose (Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye). It was an enormous success, mostly inspired by earlier fairy tales written in the salons, notably by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, who coined the phrase ‘fairy tale.’ Barneville in fact, was writing such stories as early as 1690. Even so, many of the most well-known tales that we hear today, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood are told as he wrote them. Perrault had actually published his collection under the name of his last son (born in 1678), Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt (‘Armancourt’ being the name of a property he bought for him), probably fearful of criticism from the ‘Ancients.’

In the tales, Perrault used images from around him, such as the Chateau Ussé for The Sleeping Beauty and in Puss in Boots the Marquis of the Château d’Oiron, and contrasted his folktale subject matter with details, asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion.  Perrault died in Paris, the city of his birth – and adult life – in 1703 at the age of seventy-five.

Biography

of

Charles Robinson

Charles Robinson was born in Islington, London, England in 1870. The son of an illustrator, and the brother of famous illustrators Thomas Heath Robinson and William Heath Robinson, he served a seven-year apprenticeship as a printer and took art lessons in the evenings. In 1892, Robinson won a place at the Royal Academy, but was unable to take it up due to lack of finances.

It wasn’t until the age of 25 that Robinson began to sell his work professionally. His first full book was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1895). The work was very well-received, going through a number of print runs. Over the rest of his life, Robinson illustrated many more fairy tales and children’s books, including Eugene Field’s Lullaby Land (1897), W. E. Cule’s Child Voices (1899), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Sintram and His Companions (1900), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1907), Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1910) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911).

Robinson was also an active painter, especially in later life, and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1932. He died in 1937, aged 67.

It is to Perrault that we owe our acquaintance with the greater number of good old-fashioned fairy-tales, but an edition of these, although it includes such intimate friends of our childhood as Blue Beard, the Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding-Hood, is hardly complete without Beauty and the Beast; a version of this tale, by Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont, has, therefore, been added to this collection. It has also been increased, space permitting it, by the insertion of two tales by Mme. la Comtesse d’Aulnoy; her writings, of a less robust class than those of Perrault, possess in their atmosphere of hidden magic, the charm which resides in that special feature of fairyland, and the addition of The Benevolent Frog and Princess Rosette will not, we think, be unwelcome to the youthful reader.

The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

There were once a King and Queen, who were very unhappy at not having any children, more unhappy than words can tell. Vows, pilgrimages, everything was tried, but nothing was of any avail; at length, however, a little daughter was born to them.

There was a splendid christening. For godmothers, they gave the young Princess all the fairies they could find in the country—they were seven in number—in order that each making her a gift, according to the custom of fairies in those days, the Princess might, by these means, become possessed of all imaginable perfections. When the ceremony was over, all the company returned to the King’s palace, where a great banquet had been prepared for the fairies. The table was magnificently laid for them, and each had placed for her a massive gold case, containing a spoon, a fork, and a knife of fine gold, set with diamonds and rubies.

But as they were all taking their seats, there was seen to enter an old fairy, who had not been invited, for everyone thought that she was either dead or enchanted, as she had not been outside the tower in which she lived for upwards of fifty years. The King ordered a cover to be laid for her, but there was no possibility of giving her a massive gold case, such as the others had, because there had been only seven made expressly for the seven fairies. The old fairy thought she was treated with contempt, and muttered some threats between her teeth. One of the young fairies, who chanced to be near her, overheard her grumblings, and was afraid she might bestow some evil gift on the young Princess. Accordingly, as soon as they rose from table, she went and hid herself behind the hangings, in order to be the last to speak, and so enable herself to repair, as far as possible, any harm the old fairy might have done. Meanwhile the fairies began bestowing their gifts on the Princess. The youngest, as her gift, promised that she should be the most beautiful person in the world; the next fairy, that she should have the mind of an angel; the third, that every movement of hers should be full of grace; the fourth, that she should dance to perfection; the fifth, that she should sing like a nightingale; the sixth, that she should play on every kind of instrument in the most exquisite manner possible. It was now the turn of the old fairy, and she said, while her head shook more with malice than with age, that the Princess should pierce her hand with a spindle, and die of the wound.

The whole company trembled when they heard this terrible prediction, and there was not one among them who did not shed tears. At this moment the young fairy advanced from behind the tapestry, and said, speaking that all might hear,—

Comfort yourselves, King and Queen; your daughter shall not die of the wound. It is true that I have not sufficient power to undo entirely what my elder has done. The Princess will pierce her hand with a spindle, but, instead of dying, she will only fall into a deep sleep, which will last a hundred years, at the end of which time a king’s son will come and wake her.

The King, in the hope of preventing the misfortune foretold by the old fairy, immediately sent forth a proclamation forbidding everyone, on pain of death, either to spin with a spindle, or to have spindles in their possession.

Fifteen or sixteen years had passed, when, the King and Queen being absent at one of their country houses, it happened that the Princess, while running about the castle one day, and up the stairs from one room to the other, came to a little garret at the top of a turret, where an old woman sat alone spinning with distaff and spindle, for this good woman had never heard the King’s proclamation forbidding the use of the spindle.

What are you doing there? asked