Popular Tales

The eight tales Perrault published in 1697 and thereby fixed for Europe: the sleeping beauty, little red riding hood, bluebeard, puss in boots, the fairies, cinderella, ricky of the tuft and hop o' my thumb. He was a senior civil servant and a leader of the moderns in the great literary quarrel; the tales were an argument in it. Each ends in a verse moral, and several of the morals are jokes. Fifty-nine plates of country fairs, gleaners and candlelit interiors by painters from Adam de Coster to Millet carry the peasant world the tales were drawn from.