Charles Perrault
Born in Paris in 1628; died there in 1703. A member of the Académie française and for twenty years a senior official in the king's building works, he published «Histoires ou contes du temps passé» in 1697 — the book its frontispiece calls «Contes de ma mère l'Oye» — and with it the literary versions of Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood that Europe came to know.
Tales from the oral tradition, set down by an academician, make an unusually kind first text: short, repeated scenes, the same few characters meeting the same few dangers, and a vocabulary that comes back — 40% of the dictionary words in these five appear in more than one of them, against 28% across Daudet's three. The room holds five of them.
The five tales
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Le petit Chaperon rouge free | Little Red Riding Hood | 683 | 36 |
| Les Fées first scene free | The Fairies | 860 | 41 |
| Le maître Chat ou le Chat botté | The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots | 1586 | 49 |
| La Barbe-Bleue | Bluebeard | 1804 | 69 |
| Cendrillon | Cinderella | 2208 | 89 |
What the five ask of a reader
7,141 running words across 284 sentences, drawn from 913 distinct dictionary words. Of the whole French shelf's vocabulary, 487 words appear in Perrault and nowhere in Daudet, and 426 in both — which is why a reader who finishes these five has already met a good part of what Alphonse Daudet will ask.
The past tense the tales are told in
A French course teaches «il a été» for years before it teaches «il fut». A tale does it the other way round: the narration moves in the passé simple, the tense of written storytelling. In these five, four forms that can only be the passé simple — «fut», «furent», «eut», «eurent» — appear 33 times, about 4.6 in every thousand words, against 2.0 in Daudet's three. Every one of them is glossed back to its infinitive where it stands, so a reader meets the tense in use rather than in a table.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands — dictionary form and meaning, without leaving the sentence — and an English line sits under each sentence, out of your eyeline until you ask for it. «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is free, entire, and needs no account, and the opening scene of «Les Fées» comes free after it; the rest is part of the library at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house.
A note on the printing
The text is set from the Casterman printing of 1902, which is modern French: nothing in it needs the spelling of 1697 to be read. Where a word is printed in a form a modern dictionary files differently, the room gives today's spelling beside it — the ledger lists every such word.
All eight French tales · Alphonse Daudet · the shelf, counted · the Russian authors