Indeed it is very probable that weariness of the long novels and pompous plays of the age of Louis XIV made people find a real charm in the stories of _Cendrillon_, and _La Belle au Bois Dormant_. For some reason, however, the stories (as current in France) existed only by word of mouth, and in oral narrative, till near the end of the century. In 1691 Charles Perrault, now withdrawn from public life, and busy fighting the Battle of the Books with Boileau, published anonymously his earliest attempt at story telling, unless we reckon _L'Esprit Fort_, a tale of light and frivolous character. The new story was _La Marquise de Salusses, ou la Patience de Griselidis, nouvelle_[8]. _Griselidis_ is not precisely a popular tale, as Perrault openly borrowed his matter from Boccaccio, and his manner (as far as in him lay) from La Fontaine. He has greatly softened the brutality of the narrative as Boccaccio tells it, and there is much beauty in his description of the young Prince lost in the forest, after one of those Royal hunts in Rambouillet or Marly whose echoes now scarce reach us, faint and fabulous as the horns of Roland or of Arthur[9]. Nay, there is a certain simple poetry and sentiment of Nature, in _Griselidis_, which comes strangely from a man of the Town and the Court. The place where the wandering Prince encounters first his shepherdess 'Clair de ruisseaux et sombre de verdure Saisissait les esprits d'une secrete horreur; La simple et naive nature S'y faisoit voir si belle et si pure, Que mille fois il benit son erreur.' So the Prince rides on his way 'Rempli de douces reveries Qu'inspirent les grands bois, les eaux et les prairies.' The sentiment is like Madame de Sevigne's love of her woods at Les Rochers, the woods where she says goodbye to the Autumn colours, and longs for the fairy _feuille qui chante_, and praises 'the crystal October days.' Of all this there is nothing in Boccaccio. Perrault, of course, does not repeat the brutalities of the Italian tyrant, in which Boccaccio takes a kind of pleasure, while Chaucer veils them in his kindly courtesy. To _Griselidis_ Perrault added an amusing little essay on the vanity of Criticism, and the varying verdicts of critics. In this Essay, Perrault apparently shews us the source from which he directly drew his matter, namely Boccaccio in the popular form of the chap-books called _La Bibliotheque Bleue_. 'If I had taken out everything that every critic found fault with,' he says, 'I had done better to leave the story in its blue paper cover, where it has been for so many years.' Thus Perrault borrowed from the Bibliotheque Bleue, not the Bibliotheque Bleue, as M. Maury fancied, from Perrault[10].