Page:The sleeping beauty and other fairy tales from the old French (1910).djvu/11





NCE upon a time I found myself halting between two projects, both magnificent. For the first, indeed—which was to discover, digest and edit all the fairy tales in the world—I was equipped neither with learning, nor with command of languages, nor with leisure, nor with length of years. It is a task for many men, clubbing their lifetimes together. But the second would have cost me quite a respectable amount of toil; for it was to translate and annotate the whole collection of stories in the Cabinet des Fées.