[Illustration: And there, on a bed the curtains of which were drawn wide, he beheld the loveliest vision he had ever seen.] The Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales FROM THE OLD FRENCH retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch illustrated by Edmund Dulac NEW YORK HODDER and STOUGHTON PREFACE Once upon a time I found myself halting between two projects, both magnificent. For the first, indeed--which was to discover, digest and edit all the fairy tales in the world--I was equipped neither with learning, nor with command of languages, nor with leisure, nor with length of years. It is a task for many men, clubbing their lifetimes together. But the second would have cost me quite a respectable amount of toil; for it was to translate and annotate the whole collection of stories in the _Cabinet des Fées._ Now the _Cabinet des Fées_, in the copy on my shelves, extends to forty-one volumes, printed, as their title-pages tell, at Geneva between the years 1785 and 1789, and published in Paris by M. Cuchet, Rue et Hôtel Serpente. The dates may set us moralising. While the Rue Serpente unfolded, as though _Tranquilla per alta,_ its playful voluminous coils, the throne of France with the Ancien Régime rocked closer and closer to catastrophe. In 1789 (July), just as M. Cuchet (good man and leisurable to the end) wound up his series with a last volume of the _Suite des Mille et Un Nuits_, they toppled over with the fall of the Bastille. Even so in England--we may remind ourselves--in 1653, when the gods made Oliver Cromwell Protector, Izaak Walton chose to publish a book about little fishes. But the reminder is not quite apposite: for angling, the contemplative man's recreation, was no favourite or characteristic or symbolical pursuit of the Order which Cromwell overthrew (and, besides, he did not overthrow it); whereas, M. Cuchet's forty-one volumes most pertinently as well as amply illustrated some real qualities, and those the most amiable of the Ancien Régime. When we think of the French upper classes from the days of Louis XIV. to the Revolution, we associate them with a certain elegance, a taste fastidious and polite, if artificial, in the arts of living and the furniture of life; and in this we do them justice. But, if I mistake not, we seldom credit them with the quality which more than any other struck the contemporary foreign observer who visited France with a candid mind--I mean their good temper. We allow the Bastille or the guillotine to cast their shadows backward over this period, or we see it distorted in the glare of Burke's rhetoric or of Carlyle's lurid and fuliginous history. But if we go to an eyewitness, Arthur Young, who simply reported what he saw, having no rhetorical axe to grind or guillotine to sharpen, we get a totally different impression. The last of Young's _Travels in France_ (1787-1789) actually coincided with the close of M. Cuchet's pleasant enterprise in publishing; and