The sleeping beauty: New translation by Laurent Paul Sueur

A Queen gives birth to a princess. An evil fairy set a curse that will make the princess prick her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and die. However, another fairy slightly modifies the curse and the princess, instead of dying, will sleep a hundred years until a prince comes and awakes her from her sleep…

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.