Page:The fairy tales of Charles Perrault (Clarke, 1922).djvu/24



FAIRY · TALES · OF · PERRAULT la Houppe" ("Riquet of the Tuft"), and "Le Petit Poucet" ("Tom Thumb").

''Perrault was not so shy in admitting the authorship of his three verse stories—"Griselidis," "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and "Peau d'Asne." The first appeared, anonymously it is true, in 1691; but, when it came to be reprinted with "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and "Peau d'Asne " in 1695, they were entrusted to the firm of Coignard and described as being by "Mr Perrault, de l'Academic Françoise." La Fontaine had made a fashion of this sort of exercise.''

''It would not be fair to assume that P. Darmancour had no connection whatever with the composition of the stories which bore his name. The best of Perrault's critics, Paul de St Victor and Andrew Lang among others, see in the book a marvellous collaboration of crabbed age and youth. The boy, probably, gathered the stories from his nurse and brought them to his father, who touched them up, and toned them down, and wrote them out. Paul Lacroix, in his fine edition of 1886, goes as far as to attribute the entire authorship of the prose tales to Perrault's son. He deferred, however, to universal usage when he entitled his volume "Les Contes en prose de Charles Perrault."''

''"Les Contes du Temps Passé" had an immediate success. Imitators sprung up at once by the dozen, and still persist; but none of them has ever rivalled, much less surpassed, the inimitable originals. Every few years'' 18