Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales from the Old French

Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch here gives us these four fairy tales that have been perennial favorites for centuries. The first three fairy tales are ';The Sleeping Beauty,' ';Blue Beard,' and ';Cinderella,' all three of which were popularized in France by Charles Perrault in 1697 in hisTales of Mother Goose. The last tale in the compilation is ';Beauty and the Beast,' this version attributed to Gabrielle de Villeneuve, who published it in 1740 and 1756.Quiller-Couch had this to say regarding his translation of these tales: ';I began by translating Perrault's tales, very nearly word for wordthe translations, when finished, did not satisfy me, and so I turned back to the beginning and have rewritten the stories in my own way, which (as you may say with the Irish butler) ';may not be the best claret, but ';tis the best we've got''