Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) spent almost his whole working life as a French government official and wrote his fairy tales at the very end of it. The book he published in 1697 is the reason Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood have a settled shape at all, rather than changing with every telling.

He was Colbert’s man at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1663, was elected to the Académie française in 1671, and was pushed out of office in 1683 at the age of fifty-five. When Paris argued over whether the writers of antiquity could ever be surpassed, he argued that his own century had already done it. His brother Claude was an architect and worked on the Louvre.

Histoires ou contes du temps passé appeared when Perrault was sixty-nine, and the title page carried his son’s name, Pierre Darmancourt. Readers soon called it something else: Contes de ma mère l’Oye, Mother Goose’s tales.

Perrault did not invent these stories. He took what people were telling each other and wrote it down to last, briefly and with a moral in verse at the end.