Perrault and Daudet, counted
The French room's ledger: Charles Perrault's five fairy tales and three stories by Alphonse Daudet, counted exactly as they are served in the reading room. Nothing on this page is estimated or typed in by hand; every figure is computed from the room's own data files when the page is asked for, and the same table is a file.
The shelf, whole
12,660 running words across 687 sentences, containing 1,610 distinct lemmas — of which 50.4% occur exactly once across the whole shelf. 608 of those 1,610 lemmas (38%) appear in more than one tale.
The two halves
| Author | Tales | Words | Sentences | Distinct lemmas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charles Perrault | 5 | 7,141 | 284 | 913 |
| Alphonse Daudet | 3 | 5,519 | 403 | 1,123 |
426 lemmas appear in both halves; 487 only in Perrault and 697 only in Daudet. The passé simple markers «fut», «furent», «eut» and «eurent» occur 44 times on the shelf.
The tales, one by one
Own lemmas to 95 is how many of a tale's own dictionary words, commonest first, cover 95% of its running text.
| Tale | In English | By | Words | Sentences | Lemmas | Appear once | Own lemmas to 95 | Words per sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Le petit Chaperon rouge free | Little Red Riding Hood | Perrault, 1697 | 683 | 36 | 178 | 48% | 144 | 19.0 |
| Les Fées first scene free | The Fairies | Perrault, 1697 | 860 | 41 | 243 | 56% | 200 | 21.0 |
| Le maître Chat ou le Chat botté | The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots | Perrault, 1697 | 1,586 | 49 | 356 | 54% | 277 | 32.4 |
| Le curé de Cucugnan | The Priest of Cucugnan | Daudet, 1869 | 1,705 | 156 | 516 | 65% | 431 | 10.9 |
| La Dernière Classe | The Last Lesson | Daudet, 1873 | 1,755 | 98 | 486 | 57% | 399 | 17.9 |
| La Barbe-Bleue | Bluebeard | Perrault, 1697 | 1,804 | 69 | 416 | 53% | 326 | 26.1 |
| La chèvre de monsieur Seguin | Monsieur Seguin’s Goat | Daudet, 1869 | 2,059 | 149 | 572 | 62% | 470 | 13.8 |
| Cendrillon | Cinderella | Perrault, 1697 | 2,208 | 89 | 471 | 53% | 361 | 24.8 |
The same rows, said in sentences
«Le petit Chaperon rouge» carries 683 words in 36 sentences; 144 of its 178 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Les Fées» carries 860 words in 41 sentences; 200 of its 243 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Le maître Chat ou le Chat botté» carries 1,586 words in 49 sentences; 277 of its 356 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Le curé de Cucugnan» carries 1,705 words in 156 sentences; 431 of its 516 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La Dernière Classe» carries 1,755 words in 98 sentences; 399 of its 486 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La Barbe-Bleue» carries 1,804 words in 69 sentences; 326 of its 416 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La chèvre de monsieur Seguin» carries 2,059 words in 149 sentences; 470 of its 572 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Cendrillon» carries 2,208 words in 89 sentences; 361 of its 471 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
What these printings spell differently
The printings are modern French. This is the whole of the difference a modern dictionary would notice, and the room prints today's spelling beside each one.
| As printed | As spelled today |
|---|---|
| Angelus | Angélus |
| baillant | bâillant |
| sophas | sofas |
The file
perrault-daudet-counted.csv — one row per tale, the columns above, openable in any spreadsheet.
Method
Mined, never made. The tales are public-domain texts, entire and in the French they were printed in — no invented sentences, no simplified retellings. Words are counted with the same tokenizer the room's gloss apparatus uses, which splits «l’enfant» into two words and keeps «mère-grand» as one, and mapped to dictionary forms through the room's own form-to-lemma table, so these figures and the ones on each tale's own page are the same arithmetic.
The other three rooms keep their own ledgers: Russian classics, counted, which carries the fuller coverage ladder, Grimm, counted, and Quiroga, counted.