Donkeyskin: New translation by Laurent Paul Sueur

A queen died after making his husband promise not to marry, except to a woman whose beauty and qualities would surpass hers. The king grieved, but was, in time, persuaded to seek another wife. Unfortunately, he rapidly found a suitable bride in the person of his own daughter… Charles Perrault was a serious writer who understood, at the end of his life, that his duty, as a human being and an intellectual, was to increase the level of reason and humanity of people. Therefore, he gathered European folktales and transformed them in order to enhance their moral qualities. Barbarity, man’s temptation, was an individual disgrace he wanted to dilute in the fountain of knowledge. Children were to read his fairy tales and choose to follow, with the help of their maturing consciousness, the road to wisdom. More than three centuries later, a world on the verge of total self-destruction should listen, at last, to the echo of the fabulist’s intelligence.