https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/gI...e6LlUnQ2xE58Kn
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/wW...OE4RSLzS6Eds5t
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/yT...TGyCqgb7We_AJQ
Perrault's stories set the standard for the modern fairy tale. Perrault borrowed basic plots and the familiar opening "once upon a time" [il était une fois] from traditional stories told aloud, while modernizing them with both fashionable embellishments and the very act of putting them into writing. [The publication of the tales coincides with the rise of the modern novel: they came after Don Quixote and La Princesse de Clèves, but before Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones]. The backbone of these fairy tales persist within contemporary novels and movies, making our reading or cinema-going a fundamentally optimistic venture: when we hear "once upon a time," we've come to expect—and anxiously await—a "happily ever after."
Remember the "seven-league boots" from Sleeping Beauty? How about the shape-shifting ogre in Puss in Boots? Remind yourself with an English translation of Perrault's stories, or check out an illustrated 18th-century edition with text in both English and French.