Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales From the Old French

Charles Perrault wrote the versions of these tales that have haunted our collective imagination for three centuries. This collection gathers the original French texts that gave Sleeping Beauty her cursed sleep, Blue Beard his terrible tower, and Cinderella her glass slipper, stories that predate Disney by nearly two hundred years and possess a darkness and wit that their sanitized descendants have lost. These are not gentle nursery rhymes but sharp, sophisticated fictions written for the court of Louis XIV, where fairy tales served as vehicles for satire, social commentary, and moral instruction wrapped in enchantment. The prose carries the elegant economy of 17th-century French literature, each sentence building toward a moral that lands like a blade. Here beauty sleeps for a hundred years, sisters have their eyes pecked out, and wicked stepmothers meet gruesome ends. This is the source material behind every fairy tale adaptation you've ever encountered, and it remains the most vital and disturbing version of each story. For readers who have ever wondered what lies beneath the polish of the familiar fairy tale, these are the originals in all their savage, glittering glory.