Perrault’s court tales taught the Grimms their French steps
Charles Perrault (1628–1703), Académie française member, helped invent the literary fairy tale. His polished versions of older stories shaped the German Grimm corpus more than a century later and still feed every medium from picture books to film.
Seventh child of a wealthy Paris bourgeois couple, he trained in law, aided Colbert, and nudged brother Claude onto the Petit Conseil with Le Vau and Le Brun for Louvre work in 1667. He joined the Academy of Sciences’ creation, restored painting academy business, and entered the Académie française in 1671. Marriage to Marie Guichon in 1672 ended with her death in 1678.
Versailles labyrinth fountains on Aesop themes (built 1672–1677) show the same taste for moralised wonder. Mother Goose tales fixed Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Puss in Boots in salon French rather than peasant dialect.
Born in Paris on 12 January 1628, he served from 1663 as secretary of the new Academy of Inscriptions under Colbert. In 1669 he persuaded Louis XIV to fill the Versailles labyrinth with thirty-nine fountains, each depicting an Aesop fable, with water jets from the animals' mouths suggesting conversation. His 1674 defence of Quinault and Lully's opera Alceste helped ignite the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, in which he championed contemporary writers with Le Siècle de Louis le Grand in 1687. Colbert forced him into retirement at 56 in 1682.
The tales came late. In 1697 he published Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, subtitled Tales of Mother Goose, under the name of his youngest son, Pierre Darmancourt, probably to avoid the Ancients' scorn. He borrowed real settings, reportedly using the Château d'Ussé for Sleeping Beauty. Little Red Riding Hood closes with an explicit moral warning young women that tame wolves are the most dangerous kind. Some versions of Sleeping Beauty told today borrow from the Grimms' Little Briar Rose, itself adapted from his. He died in Paris on 16 May 1703.
Source: Charles Perrault
