Five-minute digest
Beauty and the Beast
Summary
A rich merchant has three sons and three daughters. The youngest daughter is so lovely that everyone calls her Beauty, and she is also the kindest; she spends her time reading good books, while her two proud elder sisters go to balls and plays and refuse every suitor below a duke or an earl. When the merchant loses his fortune and the family moves to a small house in the country, the elder sisters sulk and lie in bed till ten, but Beauty rises at four, cleans the house, cooks breakfast, and sings while she spins, and she grows stronger and healthier than before. A year later the merchant hears that one of his ships has come in and sets off to claim the cargo. The elder sisters beg for gowns and jewels; Beauty asks only for a rose, so as not to seem to rebuke them. The merchant's lawsuit leaves him as poor as before, and on the way home, lost in a snowy forest, he finds an empty palace lit from top to bottom, where a fire, a supper and a bed are ready for him. In the morning he picks a branch of roses from the garden for Beauty, and a terrible Beast appears and condemns him to death for the theft, but agrees to spare him if one of his daughters will come willingly to die in his place. Beauty insists on going. Instead of devouring her, the Beast gives her a splendid apartment with a library and harpsichord, a magic mirror in which she can see her home, and his company at supper every evening at nine. He tells her plainly that he is ugly and has no wit, and each night he asks whether she will be his wife; each night she gently says no, though she comes to value his kindness and good sense. When the mirror shows her father sick with grief, the Beast lets her go home for a week on her promise to return. Her jealous sisters, unhappily married to a vain husband and a spiteful wit, pretend affection to keep her longer, hoping the Beast will devour her for breaking her word. On the tenth night Beauty dreams that the Beast lies dying in the garden. She returns by laying her ring on the table, finds him senseless by the canal, having resolved to starve himself, and promises to marry him. At once he becomes a handsome prince, freed from a wicked fairy's spell. The fairy who had appeared in Beauty's dreams praises her for preferring virtue to wit and looks and turns the sisters into statues at the palace gate until they own their faults. Beaumont's tale, a much shortened rewriting of the long novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1740), appeared in Le Magasin des enfants, published in London in 1756. The library text is an anonymous English version printed in an early nineteenth-century chapbook for juvenile readers.
Top Lessons
Goodness is worth more than a handsome face
Beauty decides that what makes a marriage happy is not wit or good looks but virtue, sweetness of temper and kindness, and the Beast has all three. Her sisters marry a handsome man and a clever man and are miserable. Beaumont wrote the tale for girls in the schoolroom, and her point is clear: judge people by their character, not by their appearance or their cleverness.
Keeping a promise
The merchant swears to return to the palace, and Beauty promises to come back after a week. When she lets her sisters persuade her to stay longer, the Beast nearly dies of grief. The story treats a promise as something sacred, and Beauty's tears when she dreams of the dying Beast show that she knows she has done wrong.
Contentment in hard times
When the family loses its money, Beauty tells herself that crying will not make things better and sets to work, rising at four to clean and cook. Her sisters lament their lost gowns and do nothing. Work and cheerfulness make Beauty stronger and healthier, while idleness makes her sisters bitter.
Envy is hard to cure
The fairy says that pride, anger, gluttony and idleness can sometimes be overcome, but that turning an envious heart is almost a miracle. The sisters' punishment is to stand as statues watching Beauty's happiness until they admit their faults. The tale warns young readers that envy hurts the envious most of all.
Verified Quotes
“were I to cry ever so much, that would not make things better, I must try to make myself happy without a fortune.”
“there are many that deserve that name more than you, and I prefer you, just as your are, to those, who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart.”
Frequently cited
“it is neither wit nor a fine person in a husband, that makes a woman happy; but virtue, sweetness of temper, and complaisance: and Beast has all these valuable qualifications.”
“you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty, and deserve to find a person in whom all these qualifications are united”
“Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness, are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle.”
Medical Lens
The tale is a moral fable, and its few bodily details serve the moral. Beauty's hard country work makes her stronger and healthier, while idleness leaves her sisters listless. Grief is shown as able to make people ill: the magic mirror shows Beauty's father pining himself sick at her absence, and the Beast, believing himself abandoned, resolves to starve himself and is found senseless in the garden, revived when Beauty pours water on his head. These are conventional eighteenth-century pictures of love-sickness and grief, not clinical observations, and reading them in modern terms is an interpretation.
- Beauty's stay at the palace
In the magic mirror Beauty sees that her father has pined himself sick with grief at losing her.
- The return and the transformation
Beauty finds the Beast senseless by the canal; he says he had resolved to starve himself for grief at losing her.