The Enchanted Hour by Meghan Cox Gurdon

Author:Meghan Cox Gurdon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Reading Aloud Furnishes the Mind

Young children, as we clearly see,

Pretty girls, especially,

Innocent of all life’s dangers,

Shouldn’t stop and chat with strangers.

If this simple advice beats them,

It’s no surprise if a wolf eats them.

—Charles Perrault, Tales of Mother Goose

We almost never take this out because it is really fragile,” said Christine Nelson, a curator at the Morgan Library in New York. I was sitting across from her, in her office. She drew out a small navy-blue case and opened the lid. Inside, its glossy red leather binding embossed with gold, was the earliest surviving volume of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. This beautiful object had been created in 1695 as a gift for the teenage niece of Louis the Fourteenth, a girl known as “Mademoiselle.”

Nelson opened to the frontispiece, revealing a charming little painting. A plain-faced woman in a linen coif and rustic dress sits before a fire, holding a spindle of wool. She seems to be telling a story to three young people in elegant clothes, one of whom leans forward, touching the storyteller’s knees in her eagerness. Curled up by the fire, a plump little cat listens, too. On the wooden door behind the spindle holder, a sign reads: “Contes de Ma Mere l’Oye.”

Tales of My Mother Goose! More than three centuries ago, a careful hand (possibly Perrault’s son, Pierre) had dipped a pen in ink and in beautiful cursive committed the world’s first known collection of fairy tales to this folio. Now the pages were fragile, crisp, and speckled with age spots.

There I was, sitting in a modern office building, with trucks and cars rumbling up nearby Madison Avenue, and for a fraction of a second the book before me seemed to become a portal, like a wardrobe into Narnia or a portkey at Hogwarts, that could fling me into the past. I had the fleeting idea that if I were to touch the page, I might be flashed back to a place of silks and mirrors and a laughing girl, and that if I were to squint or tip my head at the right angle, I might go deeper still, through the story and out the other side, into the hazy Indo-European folkways where the stories began. It was the impression of a moment, and it was whimsical, I know, but the tales that Perrault collected have such broad cultural resonance today that I felt giddy to be so close to the first Mother Goose.

Charles Perrault is credited with creating the literary tradition of the fairy tale, but of course the stories he told weren’t his. They had come from deep in the trackless past and were, by word of mouth, on their way into the future when he plucked them from the air and wrote them down. He and other collectors and folklorists over the centuries and across the world—enterprising individuals such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Andrew Lang, Moltke Moe, Lafcadio Hearn, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many

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