Charles Perrault, detail of a portrait by Charles Le Brun (c. 1670). Source · Public domain
About Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault (1628–1703) was a Parisian lawyer, poet and royal official who served for two decades as a chief assistant to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, in overseeing the king's buildings and the arts. He was elected to the Académie française in 1671 and became a leading voice for the Moderns in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, notably in his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688–1697). In old age he turned to verse and prose tales, and the eight prose tales of Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) made his name lasting.
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper is the sixth of the eight prose tales in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (Paris, 1697), where it is titled Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre. The library stores the tale alone, in Robert Samber's English translation of 1729 as revised by J. E. Mansion for the 1922 Harrap edition illustrated by Harry Clarke, so the heroine is spelled Cinderilla throughout.
The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood opens with a king and queen who long for a child and at last have a daughter. Seven fairies are invited to the christening and given golden table cases, but an old fairy, forgotten because she has not left her tower in fifty years, arrives without one and feels slighted.
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