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<div class="transnote">
<p>Transcriber's Note: You can click on the plates to display a larger version.</p>
<p>One plate is missing from The Internet Archive images. No suitable copy could be found.
It was decided to publish without it.</p>
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<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="pl01"></SPAN> <SPAN href="images/large_pl01.jpg"><ANTIMG src="images/pl01.jpg" width-obs="600" height-obs="736" alt="The Slepping Beauty" /></SPAN></div>
<p class="caption">And there, on a bed the curtains of which were drawn
wide, he beheld the loveliest vision he had ever seen.</p>
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<h1>The Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales</h1>
<p class="edition"><span class="smcap">From the Old French</span></p>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/h01.jpg" width-obs="450" height-obs="256" alt="" /></div>
<p class="author"><span style="font-size:smaller;">retold by</span>
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch<br/><br/>
<span style="font-size:smaller;">illustrated by</span>
Edmund Dulac</p>
<p class="editor"><span class="smcap">New York</span><br/><br/>
HODDER <span class="smcap">and</span> STOUGHTON</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2>CONTENT</h2>
<p><SPAN href="#PREFACE">PREFACE</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#ILLUSTRATIONS">ILLUSTRATIONS</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#THE_SLEEPING_BEAUTY">THE SLEEPING BEAUTY</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#BLUE_BEARD">BLUE BEARD</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#CINDERELLA">CINDERELLA</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#BEAUTY">BEAUTY AND THE BEAST</SPAN></p>
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<h2><SPAN name="PREFACE"></SPAN>PREFACE</h2>
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<p>Once 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 <i>Cabinet des Fées.</i></p>
<p>Now the <i>Cabinet des Fées</i>, in the copy on my
shelves, extends to forty-one volumes, printed, as
their title-pages tell, at Geneva between the years
1785 and 1789, and published in Paris by M.
Cuchet, Rue et Hôtel Serpente. The dates may
set us moralising. While the Rue Serpente unfolded,
as though</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Tranquilla per alta,</i><br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>its playful voluminous coils, the throne of France
with the Ancien Régime rocked closer and closer
to catastrophe. In 1789 (July), just as M. Cuchet
(good man and leisurable to the end) wound up
his series with a last volume of the <i>Suite des Mille
et Un Nuits</i>, they toppled over with the fall of
the Bastille.</p>
<p>Even so in England—we may remind ourselves—in
1653, when the gods made Oliver Cromwell
Protector, Izaak Walton chose to publish a book
about little fishes. But the reminder is not quite
apposite: for angling, the contemplative man's
recreation, was no favourite or characteristic or
symbolical pursuit of the Order which Cromwell
overthrew (and, besides, he did not overthrow it);
whereas, M. Cuchet's forty-one volumes most pertinently
as well as amply illustrated some real
qualities, and those the most amiable of the
Ancien Régime. When we think of the French
upper classes from the days of Louis <span class="smcap">xiv.</span> to the
Revolution, we associate them with a certain elegance,
a taste fastidious and polite, if artificial, in
the arts of living and the furniture of life; and in
this we do them justice. But, if I mistake not, we
seldom credit them with the quality which more
than any other struck the contemporary foreign
observer who visited France with a candid mind—I
mean their good temper. We allow the Bastille
or the guillotine to cast their shadows backward
over this period, or we see it distorted in the glare
of Burke's rhetoric or of Carlyle's lurid and fuliginous
history. But if we go to an eyewitness, Arthur
Young, who simply reported what he saw, having
no rhetorical axe to grind or guillotine to sharpen,
we get a totally different impression. The last of
Young's <i>Travels in France</i> (1787–1789) actually
coincided with the close of M. Cuchet's pleasant
enterprise in publishing; and I do not think
it fanciful to suppose that, had this very practical
Englishman found time to read at large in the
<i>Cabinet des Fées</i>, he would have discovered therein
much to corroborate the evidence steadily and
unconsciously borne by his own journals—that the
urbanity of life among the French upper classes
was genuine, reflecting a real and (for a whole
society) a remarkable sunniness of disposition.
Unconscious of their doom, the little victims played.
But they did play; and they fell victims, not to
their own passions, but to a form of government
economically rotten.</p>
<p>Of all the volumes in the <i>Cabinet</i>, possibly the
most famous are the first and second, containing the
fairy tales of Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy,
and vols. 7–11, containing M. Galland's version (so
much better than any translation) of <i>The Arabian
Nights</i>. I hope that one of those days Mr. Dulac
will lay the public under debt by illustrating all
these, and the stories of Antony Hamilton to boot.
Meanwhile, here are three of the most famous tales
from Perrault's wallet, and one, the evergreen
<i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, by an almost forgotten
authoress, Madame de Villeneuve.</p>
<p>The ghost of Charles Perrault, could it walk
to-day—<i>perruque</i> and all—might well sigh over
the vanity of human pretensions. For Monsieur
Perrault was a person of importance in his lifetime
(1628–1703), and a big-wig in every sense
of the term. Colbert made him Secretary of the
Academy of Inscriptions, and anon Controller of
Public Works—in which capacity he suggested to
his architect-brother, Claude Perrault, the facade
of the Louvre with its renowned colonnade. He
flattered his monarch with a poem <i>Le Siècle de
Louis le Grand</i>. 'Je ne sais,' observes a circle,
'si ce roi, malgré son amour excessif pour la
flatterie, fut content: les bornes étaient outre-passées.'
The poem, as a poem, had little success;
but by positing that the Age of Louis was the
greatest in history, and suggesting that the moderns
were as good as the ancients or better, it started a
famous controversy. Boileau, Racine, La Bruyère,
honoured him by taking the other side, and forced
him to develop his paradox in a book of dialogues,
<i>Parallèles des Anciens et des Modernes</i>. But his
best answer was his urbane remark (for he kept his
temper admirably) that these gentlemen did ill to
dispute the superiority of the moderns while their
own works gave proof of it. He wrote other
poems, other tractates (including one on the 'Illustrious
Men of his Age'), besides occasional tracts
on matters of high politics: and his memory is
kept alive by one small packet of fairy-tales—stories
which he heard the nurse telling his little boy, and
set down upon paper for a recreation! That is the
way with literary fame. To take an English example:
it is odds that Southey, poet-laureate and
politician of great self-importance in his day, will
come finally to be remembered by his baby-story
of <i>The Three Bears</i>. It will certainly outlive
<i>Thalaba the Destroyer</i>, and possibly even the <i>Life
of Nelson</i>.</p>
<p>As for Gabrielle Susanne, wife of M. de Gallon,
Seigneur de Villeneuve and lieutenant-colonel of
infantry (whom she outlived), she wrote a number
of romantic stories—<i>Le Phénix Conjugal, Le Juge
Parvenu, Le Beau-Frère Supposé, La Jardinière
de Vincennes, Le Prince Azerolles</i>, etc. I am not—perhaps
few are—acquainted with these works.
Madame de Villeneuve died in 1755 and lives only
by grace of her <i>La Belle et La Bête</i>; and that
again lives in despite of its literary defects. It has
style; but the style inheres neither in its language,
which is loose, nor in its construction. The story,
as she wrote it, tails off woefully and drags to an
end in mere foolishness.</p>
<p>Since Perrault, who is usually accepted as the
fountainhead of these charming French fairy-stories,
belongs almost entirely to the seventeenth century,
it may be asked why Mr. Dulac has chosen to
depict his Princes and Princess in costumes of the
eighteenth? Well, for my part, I hold that he
has obeyed a just instinct in choosing the period
when the literature he illustrates was at the acme
of its vogue. But his designs, in every stroke of
which the style of that period is so unerringly felt,
provide his best apology.</p>
<p>My own share in this volume is, perhaps, less
easily defended. I began by translating Perrault's
tales, very nearly word for word; because to me
his style has always seemed nearly perfect for its
purpose; and the essence of 'style' in writing is
propriety to its purpose. On the other hand the
late M. Ferdinand Brunetière has said that Perrault's
is 'devoid of charm,' and on this subject M.
Brunetière's opinion must needs out-value mine
ten times over. Certainly the translations, when
finished, did not satisfy me, and so I turned back
to the beginning and have rewritten the stories in
my own way, which (as you may say with the Irish
butler) 'may not be the best claret, but 'tis the best
ye've got.'</p>
<p>I have made bold, too, to omit Perrault's conclusion
of <i>La Belle au Bois Dormant</i>. To my
amazement the editor of the <i>Cabinet des Fées</i>
selects this lame sequel—it is no better than a
sequel—of a lovely tale, and assigns to it the
credit of having established 'la véritable fortune
de ce genre.' Frankly, I cannot believe him.
Further, I have condensed Madame de Villeneuve's
narrative and obliterated its feeble ending. In
taking each of these liberties I have the warrant
of tradition, which in the treatment of fairy-tales
speaks with a voice more authoritative than the
original author's, for it speaks with the united voices
of many thousands of children, his audience and
best critics. As the children have decreed that in
Southey's tale of <i>The Three Bears</i> the heroine shall
be a little girl, and not, as Southey invented her,
a good-for-nothing old woman, so they have
decreed the story of <i>The Sleeping Beauty</i> to end
with the Prince's kiss, and that of <i>Beauty and the
Beast</i> with the Beast's transformation. And as
<i>Beauty and the Beast</i> is really but a variant of
the immortal fable of <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, I might—had
I room to spare—attempt to prove to
you that the children's taste is here, as usually,
right and classical.</p>
<p class="signature">ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH</p>
<hr class="chap" />
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<h2><SPAN name="ILLUSTRATIONS"></SPAN>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
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<table>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="tdc"><h3>THE SLEEPING BEAUTY</h3></td></tr>
<tr><td><i>And there, on a bed the curtains of which were drawn
wide, he beheld the loveliest vision he had ever
seen</i> (<SPAN href="#Page_20">20</SPAN>)</td><td class="tdr"><SPAN href="#pl01">Frontispiece</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td><i>Her head nodded with spite and old age together, as she
bent over the cradle</i> (<SPAN href="#Page_5">5</SPAN>)</td><td class="tdr">7</td></tr>
<tr><td><i>They grew until nothing but the tops of the castle towers
could be seen</i> (<SPAN href="#Page_15">15</SPAN>)</td><td class="tdr"><SPAN href="#pl03">17</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="tdc">
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