Author: Charles Perrault, trans: Christopher Betts
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009
Price: £14.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780199236831

Charles Perrault benefitted from the policy of promoting common­ers that gradually gave rise to a monarchist meritocracy in Louis XIV’s France. He became an aide to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the emotionally frozen but driven minister of finance who – despite the king’s lunatic extravagance – brought France back from the edge of bankruptcy. The first Moral of “Puss in Boots”, as Betts points out in his excellent introduction, could have been written with the author in mind: “Young men, when all is said and done / Will find sharp wits and commonsense / Worth more than an inheritance.” After Colbert’s death, he put his considerable energies into the newly instituted Académie Française. He was critical of class­ical education, and believed that European myths were as valuable as their Roman and Greek equival­ents. This, and his convict­ion that children should receive a moral education from such tales, led to the first Contes.

Perrault’s tales are the stuff of kiddie nightmares (incest, murder, sexual abuse, cannibalism and abandonment), with an improving Moral coming right after the ‘happy ever after’ ending which, itself, comes after the deaths of various minor characters or the protagonist’s drawn-out miseries.

Bruno Bettelheim theorised that fairy tales are psychodramas that enable children to process and overcome their very real fears. “Hop o’ My Thumb”, the tale of children abandoned because their parents could not feed them, had a certain plaus­ibility at a time when the first of two massive famines was devastating the country; two million died in just over a decade. The threat of being eaten appears in several tales. Little Red Riding Hood, who in Perrault’s version does not survive the encounter with her grandmother’s killer, also warns against sexually predatory adults. The wolf, with his impressively large parts, lying ‘naked’ in her grandmother’s bed, hardly needs a Freud to untangle the meaning; and in any case, the Moral warns that nice girls can be “…caught/ By wolves who take them off to eat”. “Donkey-Skin” (510B in the Aarne-Thompsdon-Uther system which groups similar tales and enables one to examine, for instance, Staporola’s, Basile’s and the Grimm Brothers’ variants) is the tale of a widower who wants to marry his daughter; the Moral concludes, in a slightly ‘hey, what can you do?’ way, that “…love deranged defies all sense /Against it, reason is a poor defence”. Even if you accept that children love fairy tales’ gorier aspects, this is top-shelf stuff and – pace Bettelheim – not totally cathartic.

This is a new translation by Christopher Betts, and it’s magnificent. The verse and the later prose tales leap off the page, as do the wonderful Doré illustrations. The spread of the ogre cutting his daughters’ throats (complete with bird carcass on the bedding) is particularly striking. In addition to the fine introduction, there are notes and appendixes. Even if the fruit of your loins is a brutal little thug, this is definitely a book for adults.