Perrault, CHARLES, immortal as the author of 'Puss-in-Boots,' 'Cinderella,' and 'Bluebeard,' was born at Paris, January 12, 1628, the youngest of an advocate's four sons. He was sent at nine to the Collège de Beauvais, but quarrelled with his masters, and had the rest of his education left to chance. He studied law fitfully, and took his license at Orleans in 1651, but soon tired of the humdrum routine of the profession, and filled from 1654 till 1664 an easy post under his brother, the Receiver-general of Paris. In 1663 he became a kind of secretary or assistant to Colbert in matters of architecture and art generally, and for twenty years enjoyed a salary, if not his master's friendship throughout, while by his influence he was admitted to the Academy in 1671. His poem, 'Le Siècle de Louis XIV.,' read to the Academy, and Boileau's angry criticisms thereon, opened up the famous and foolish dispute about the relative merits of the ancients and moderns; to the modern cause Perrault contributed his ambitious but poorly argued Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (4 vols. 1688-96). The same quarrel inspired his Éloges des Hommes Illustres du Siècle de Louis XIV. (2 vols. folio, 102 portraits; 1696-1700), the labour of his latest years. He died May 16, 1703. His Mémoires appeared in 1769.
All his writings would already have been forgotten but for the happy inspiration which prompted him to publish in 1697 his eight inimitable prose fairy-tales, the Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé, with the title on the frontispiece of 'Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye.' These had already appeared anonymously from 1696 to 1697 in Moetjens' Recueil, a little miscellany published at the Hague since 1694. The same volume contained a reprint of three tales in verse by Perrault (Peau d'Ane, Les Souhants Ridicules, and Griselidis), which had already appeared both in Moetjens' Recueil and in small volumes at Paris in 1694-95. The prose contes, on the other hand, were expressly stated to be by P. Darmandour, Perrault's little boy, to whom the 'Privilege du Roy' is granted. M. Paul Lacroix attributes the complete authorship to the son; it is more reasonable to believe with Andrew Lang that, if the naïveté and popular traditional manner point to the conservatism of the child and the native inspiration of his nurse, many a happy touch is due to the elderly academician and wit. But whatever the method of composition of these tales, the resultant is a group of masterpieces in the most difficult of arts, the same judgment of which is renewed generation after generation. It were impertinence to praise these stories; it is enough to enumerate their names: 'La Belle au Bois Dormant' (The Sleeping Beauty); 'Le Petit Chaperon Rouge' (Little Red Riding Hood); 'La Barbe Blene' (Bluebeard); 'Le Maître Chat, ou le Chat Botté' (Puss-in-Boots); 'Les Fées' (The Fairy); 'Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre' (Cinderella); 'Riquet à la Houppé' (Riquet of the Tuft); and 'Le Petit Poucet' (Hop o' my Thumb, Tom Thumb).
There are editions of the tales by Giraud (Lyons, 1865), Lefèvre (Paris, 1875), Paul Lacroix (Jouast, Paris, 1876), and Andrew Lang (Clar. Press, Oxford, 1888). The last has an exhaustive Introduction of 115 pages. See also Charles Deulin's Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye avant Charles Perrault (Paris, 1879); and Deschanel's Boileau, Charles Perrault, &c. (Paris, 1888).