Member of the Académie Française, and _premier commis des batimens du
Roi_, was born, as he himself tells us in the _Mémoires_ he left to
his children, in Paris, on the 12th of January, 1628; and at eight
and a half years of age was sent to the College of Beauvais, where he
gave early proof of his literary abilities. He died in 1703. Although
the author of many creditable compositions, both in prose and verse,
he is indebted for his celebrity to that collection of Fairy tales
which, under the title of _Histoires, ou Contes du Tems passé_, were
first published in 1697, and speedily obtained a world-wide popularity
as _Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_, known in England as _Mother Goose's
Fairy Tales_.
They were published by Perrault, under the name of his son, Perrault
D'Armancour, at that time a child only ten years old, whose name is
appended to the dedication of the first edition to "Mademoiselle,"
_i.e_., Elizabeth Charlotte d'Orleans, sister of Philippe, Duke of
Chartres, and, after the death of Louis XIV., Regent of France.
Mademoiselle was born 13th September, 1676. The title, _Contes de ma
Mère l'Oye_, has given rise to much controversy, and a great deal of
paper, not to say learning, has been wasted in the attempt to discover
the original source of the stories, and the reason of their being
called those of "Ma Mère l'Oye." The former question I shall reserve
for discussion in my notices of the tales themselves. The latter we
will dispose of at once. Monsieur Colin de Plancy, in his valuable
edition of the _Œuvres Choisis de Charles Perrault_, 8vo, Paris,
1826; and Baron Walkenaër in his _Lettres sur les Contes des Fées
attribués à Perrault, &c_., Paris, 12mo, same date, have pretty well
exhausted the subject. The three principal derivations that have been
insisted upon, are:--
Firstly. That in an ancient _fabliau_, "a goose is represented telling
stories to her goslings, worthy of them and of her."
Secondly. That in the frontispiece to the first edition of Perrault's
_Fairy Tales_, an old woman is represented spinning, and beside her are
three children, one boy and two girls, whom she is apparently amusing
by her stories; and that as underneath this are the words _Contes de
ma Mère l'Oye_,[47] this old woman is no less a personage than Ma Mère
l'Oye _in propria persona_.
Thirdly. That Ma Mère l'Oye is one and the same individual with La
Reine Pédauque, the goose or bird-footed Queen, a soubriquet applied by
some to a Bertha, Queen of France; and by others to St. Clotilde and
the Queen of Saba.
The first is an assertion without proof. The second a mere opinion,
which is instantly met by another--namely, that the old woman is
repeating to her hearers the stories of Ma Mère l'Oye. The third is a
tangible proposition, and has been dealt with accordingly.
At St. Marie de Nesle, in the diocese of Troyes, at St. Bénigne de
Dijon, at St. Pierre de Nevers, St. Pourcain in Auvergne, and in divers
other churches in France, the statue is to be seen of a queen with a
web-foot, and therefore called La Reine Pied-d'oie, or Pédauque.[48]
This statue is said by Mabillon, but without giving any authority for
his assertion, to represent St. Clotilde.
The Abbé Lebœuf believes that the origin of this name is to be found
at Toulouse. He quotes a passage in Rabelais, who, speaking of certain
large-footed persons, says, "they were splay-footed, like geese, or
Queen Pédauque in her portrait formerly at Toulouse;" "and the Abbé
concludes," says Monsieur de Plancy, "curiously enough, that the Queen
Pédauque is the Queen of Saba;" supporting his opinion by the following
tale in the _Targum of Jerusalem_:--
"The Queen of Saba was so fond of bathing, that she plunged every day
in the sea. When she went to visit Solomon, he received her in an
apartment of crystal. The Queen of Saba on entering it, imagined that
the Monarch was in the water, and in order to pass through it to him,
she lifted her robe. The King then seeing her feet, which were hideous,
said to her: 'Your face unites all the charms of the most beautiful
women, but your legs and feet correspond but little to it.'"
Even if we could suppose Solomon to have been so ungallant, there does
not appear much in this Hebrew story to bear upon the subject; for what
possible reason was there for attributing these stories to the Queen of
Saba? Bullet, _doyen_ of the University of Besançon, goes back to the
eleventh century, in France, for the source of this epithet. The Good
King Robert had married his relative, Bertha; Gregory V. compelled him
to divorce her, and imposed on him a penance of seven years. The King,
who loved Bertha, refused obedience, and the Pope excommunicated him.
He was deserted by everybody except two servants. In the meanwhile,
Bertha was said to have been brought to bed of a monster resembling
an ill-formed duck, or, according to others, a goose. Abbon, Abbot of
Fleury, brought the supposed offspring to the King, who, horrified at
the sight of it, repudiated Bertha, leaving her, however, the title of
Queen. The dreadful story was circulated that she had given birth to a
goose, and that she had herself become goose-footed, as a punishment
for her criminal marriage. Her name of Bertha gave more authority to
this story in the eyes of the people. They remembered that Bertha or
Bertrade, wife of Pepin-le-bref, was surnamed "Bertha with the Great
Foot," because she had one foot larger than the other; and they called
the repudiated wife of Robert, "Bertha au pied d'Oie." It is possible
also, remarks Mons. de Plancy, that this fable was invented to flatter
Queen Constance, who succeeded her, for it was the period of credulity
and superstition. Constance went to Toulouse. She was lodged in front
of an aqueduct so narrow that a man could not pass through it. To amuse
the Princess, they told her it was the bridge of Queen Goose, or of the
queen with the goose's foot. This story was afterwards amplified, and
it became a saying that Queen Pédauque was of Toulouse.
In the _Contes d'Entrapel_, by Noël Dufail, published during the latter
half of the sixteenth century, a man is made to swear by "the spindle
of Queen Pédauque;" and therefore Bullet assumes that she must have
been Queen Bertha, because there is an old French saying, "when Queen
Bertha spun,"[49] which is applied to any marvellous story of bygone
days, or to events that are said to have happened "once upon a time."
This is very inconclusive. In the middle ages, spinning was a favourite
occupation of queens and princesses, and Queen Bertha was by no means
an exception.[50] There is another French saying, similarly applied to
an incredible tale--"It is of the time when King Robert sang to the
lute," the said King Robert being the husband of Queen Bertha. This
is all tantamount only to our old English sayings, "When Adam was a
little boy," and "When Adam delved and Eve span," &c. It is also more
than probable that the Bertha of the proverb is identical with the Frau
Berchta of German superstition. She is said to live in the imaginations
of the upper German races in Austria, Bavaria, Swabia, Alsace,
Switzerland, and some districts of Thuringia and Franconia. She appears
in _The Twelve Nights_ as a woman with shaggy hair, to inspect the
spinners, when fish and porridge are to be eaten in honour of her, and
all the distaffs must be spun off. This superstition was also common in
England:--
Partly work and partly play
You must on St. Distaff's day.
That is, the day after Twelfth Day, and is evidently the relic of some
pagan rite in honour, most probably, of Freya or Frega, the Venus of
the Scandinavians. "Dame Bertha horned," is one of the characters in_
Les Evangiles des Conoilles_ (Quenouilles), the joint composition
of Jean d'Arras and three other writers, in 1475. It was translated
into English, and printed by Winkyn de Worde, with the title of _The
Gospelles of Distaffs_.[51]
A writer who signs himself Philetymus, has acutely pointed out a more
probable origin of the title of_ Contes de ma_ (or _de le_) _Mère
l'Oye_, which it is clear, from passages in Boileau and Molière, was
applied to a certain collection of old stories, long before Perrault
published his _Histoires du Temps Passé_. This writer refers us to
the customs of antiquity and the superstitions of the middle ages.
He recals to us that the ancient Romans confided their dwellings
to the care of their geese. He alludes to the two hundred thousand
Crusaders who, in 1096, directed their march by the flight of a goose
from Hungary to Jerusalem; to the guardian fairies of the Château
de Piron in the Contentin, who, at the time of the invasion of the
Normans, transformed themselves into wild geese; to the _benevolent_
and _protecting_ dwarfs of the Canton of Berne, who are said to have
been all goose-footed; and above all, to Marguerite de Navarre, who,
in her _Heptameron_, calls herself Oisille; and he concludes by
saying, "C'est que la bonne dame Oisille, veuve de grand expérience
y représente la Mère l'Oie; c'est que du conté le moins discret elle
sait tirer toujours une conclusion favorable à la morale.... Contes de
la Mère l'Oie c'est à dire contes de la vieille grand mère, jaseuse et
criande comme l'Oie mais comme l'Oie, surtout gardienne vigilante de la
maison.... J'allais dire de la Vertu."
There is, amidst all this suggestion, one fact to repose upon. It is,
that Perrault was not the inventor of the stories he published; that
he merely transmitted to writing, no doubt with some touches of his
own, tales of the nursery which had descended orally from the earliest
ages of the Celtic occupation of Armorica or Bretagne, to the peculiar
superstitions of which we shall find, as we proceed, they all have
more or less reference, and that the particular stories printed in
the first edition of his _Histoires du Temps Passé_, had long been
popularly known as _Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_. In 1678, at the age of
fifty, Perrault retired from his public office to dedicate himself
entirely to literature and the education of his children. Some ten
years afterwards he composed a novel in verse, founded on a celebrated
tale in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio, and well known to us as _Patient
Grizzel_, his title being _La Marquise de Salusses; ou, la Patience de
Griselidis_. It was published at Paris, by Jean Baptiste Coignard, in
1691. La Fontaine had, as early as 1678, said, in the fourth Fable of
his eighth Book, _Le Pouvoir des Fables_--
----"Et moi même
Au moment que je fais cette moralité
Si Peau d'Ane m'etait conté
J'y prendrais un plaisir extrême."
These lines it would seem induced Perrault to versify the old nursery
story of _Peau d'Ane_, with which Louis XIV., when an infant, used
to be rocked to sleep; and in 1694, on the publication of the second
edition of his _Griselidis_, he added to it his metrical version of
_Peau d'Ane_, and _Les Souhaits Ridicules_, known to us as _The Three
Wishes_. The success of these stories led him to publish, in 1697,
his collection of _Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_, under the title of
_Histoires du Temps Passé_, and in the name of his son, as before
stated. This collection consisted of eight stories only, all in prose:
_La Belle au Bois Dormant_, _Le Petit Chaperon Rouge_, _Barbe Bleue_,
_Le Chat Botté_, _Les Fées_, _Cendrillon_, _Riquet à la Houpe_, and _Le
Petit Poucet_--a proof that _Peau d'Ane_ was not one of the _Contes de
ma Mère l'Oie_, any more than _Griselidis or Les Souhaits Ridicules_.
The same eight stories alone appear in the second edition in 1707
(four years after the death of Perrault), and in the third edition by
Nicolas Gosselin, in 1724. It is not until 1742, when an edition of the
_Histoires du Temps Passé_ was published at the Hague,[52] that we find
any addition to the first eight stories, and then we have for the first
time the story of _L'Adroite Princesse; ou, Les Aventures de Finette_,
presented to us, with a dedication to the Countess of Murat, as a story
by Perrault, although a story with that title and on that subject was
published by Madlle. Lheritier in 1696, in a work entitled, _Œuvres
Mêlées, contenant Nouvelles et autres Ouvrages en Verse et en Prose_,
in which also appears a letter from the author to the daughter of
Perrault. But even in the Hague edition of 1742, there is no _Peau
d'Ane_, and it is only in comparatively modern collections that a prose
version of that story, as well as the one in verse actually written
by Perrault, is, with _L'Adroite Princesse_, _Griselidis_, and _Les
Souhaits Ridicules_, added to the eight original _Contes de ma Mère
l'Oie_, or _Histoires du Temps Passé_.
From these eight stories I have selected six, omitting only _Le Petit
Chaperon Rouge_, and _Les Fées_, so well known in the nursery as
_Little Red Riding Hood_ (why "Riding?") and _Toads and Diamonds_, and
for the atmosphere of which they are alone calculated. On the others I
shall now offer a few observations in their order of publication, and
in the same spirit as those appended to the Fairy Tales of the Countess
d'Aulnoy.