On August 6, 1676, Madame de Sévigné tells her daughter that at Versailles the ladies _mitonnent,_ or narrate fairy tales, concerning the Green Isle, and its Princess and her lover, the Prince of Pleasure, and a flying hall of glass in which the hero and heroine make their voyages. It is not certain whether these exercises of fancy were based on memories of the _Pentamerone_, and other semi-literary Italian collections of Folk-Tales, or whether the witty ladies embroidered on the data of their own nurses. As early as 1691, Charles Perrault, inventing a new _genre_ of minor literature, did some Folk-Tales into verse, and, in 1696, he began to publish his famous _Sleeping Beauty_, and _Puss in Boots_, in Moetjens's miscellany, printed at the Hague. In 1696 Mlle. L'Héritière put forth a long and highly embroidered fairy tale, _Les Enchantements de l'Eloquence_, in her _Bizarrures Ingénieuses_ (Guignard), while Perrault's own collected _Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_ were given to the world in 1697 (Barbin, Paris).
The work of Mlle. L'Héritière was thoroughly artificial, while the immortal stories of Perrault have but a few touches of conscious courtly wit, and closely adhere to the old nursery versions. Perrault, in fact, is rather the ancestor of the Grimms and the other scholarly collectors, than of the literary letters of fairy tales. The Fairy Godmothers of modern _contes_ play quite a small part in Perrault's works (though a larger part than in purely popular narrative) compared with their _rôle_ in Madame d'Aulnoy, and all her successors. Much more truly than la Comtesse de M---- (Murat), author of _Contes des Fées_(1698), Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale, and the true Queen of the _Cabinet des Fées_.[2] To this witty lady of all work, author of _Mémoires de la Cour d'Espagne_, and of many novels, a mere hint from tradition was enough. From such hints she developed her stories, such as _Le Mouton, Le Nain jaune, Finette Cendron, Le Bon petit Souris_, and very many others. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies--who, once a year, take the forms of animals, its Queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious and its friendly _fées_; illustrious beings, the counsellors of kings, who are now treated with religious respect, and now are propitiated with ribbons, scissors, and sweetmeats.