In practice, for French readers, French literature begins in the 17th century. Two works, really, that are not exactly children’s books but that are perfectly adaptable for children, the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1668-94) and the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), or Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye – Stories from My Mother Goose.
Early on, when my French reading level was that of a little child, I went to a Paris bookstore specializing in children’s books, Chantelivre, where I asked for the poetry section. It was only a shelf or two, even in this store, and it was mostly illustrated selections of La Fontaine’s Fables, dozens of different editions of La Fontaine, a few poems, many poems, simplified poems, the real thing. Luckily there was also a lonely copy of Les Plus Beaux Poèmes pour les enfants (The Most Beautiful Poems for Children), featuring a surprising number of poems about dead and dying mothers, which is more what I was looking for. Still, I learned something about the place of the Fables in French culture just by looking at that shelf.
In a sense, we have them in American culture, too, and in a sense not. The Fables are poetic versions of (mostly) Aesop’s Fables, beginning with “The Grasshopper and the Ant”:
La cigale, ayant chanté
Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue:
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
The grasshopper, having sung
All summer long,
Found himself much deprived
When the North Wind arrived:
Not a lone little bite
Of worm or of fly.
Look at the rhymes and sounds I was able to keep. But why am I translating this myself, when I have Marianne Moore:
Until fall, a grasshopper
Chose to chirr;
With starvation as foe
When northeasters would blow,
And not even a gnat’s residue
Or caterpillar’s to chew…
I had wondered, reading Moore’s 1954 translation of the Fables long ago, how much of what I was reading was La Fontaine, and now that I have read (about half of) La Fontaine in French, I can see that the answer is that Moore includes a lot of herself and a lot of the original. She keeps form, even line lengths, rhymes, plus the stories and characters and morals, some of which go on longer than the fable itself.
What a perfect match of translator to text. But how many children find Aesop in Moore’s, or any, poetic form? You likely remember that a big chunk of La Fontaine is on the reading list for next year’s Bac. For many students, these will be poems and stories familiar from their earliest experience with books.
We have the Charles Perrault Contes, too, although I believe now we call them Disney stories. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard. No Disney version of that, surely. Retelling fairy tales was a popular activity in intellectual salons of the time, and I do not believe anyone knows whether the Contes were written for children or for an adult salon audience. Both, I assume. They are pretty sophisticated, rhetorically and linguistically, more so than the Grimm Brothers equivalent. They are longer than the Grimm texts. They are more composed. But they lend themselves to simplification and illustration. They lend themselves to rewriting. There are a number of later periods in French literary history when writers become excited about the idea of the “conte” as opposed to the modern short story. It is still a live form.
I had never, myself, read Perrault in English. Just versions of the stories.
Is there an equivalent in English literature, where children encounter the 17th century early on, and keep returning to it, even unto a painful exam to graduate from high school? Maybe in the days of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tales from Shakespeare, but that was before my time. How much youthful Bible reading is of the King James Version?
In France, they start young.
