This was a very busy time in Charles Perrault’s life, and in 1669 he helped Louis XIV design the gardens of Versailles. Perrault persuaded the King to include thirty-nine fountains, each representing one of the fables of Aesop in the labyrinth section of the Versailles gardens, and the work was carried out between 1672 and 1677. Water jets spurting from the animals mouths were conceived to give the impression of speech between the creatures. There was a plaque with a caption and a quatrain written by the poet Isaac de Benserade next to each fountain.

On being elected to the Académie française in 1671, Charles Perrault initiated the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’, which pitted supporters of the literature of antiquity (the ‘Ancients’) against supporters of the literature from the century of Louis XIV (the ‘Moderns’). Charles Perrault was on the side of the Moderns and wrote Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (‘The Century of Louis the Great’, 1687) and Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (‘Parallel between Ancients and Moderns’, 1688-1692) where he attempted to prove the superiority of the literature of his century. Le Siècle de Louis le Grand was written in celebration of Louis XIV’s recovery from a life-threatening operation. Perrault argued that because of Louis’s enlightened rule, the present age was superior in every respect to ancient times.

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Despite this pandering to the crown, in 1695, when he was sixty-seven years old, Perrault lost his post as secretary. It was at this point that he decided to dedicate himself to his children and began writing stories, inspired by the old oral traditions of French and European folklore. In 1697, Charles Perrault published Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (‘Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé’), subtitled Tales of Mother Goose (‘Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye’).

It was an enormous success, mostly inspired by earlier fairy tales written in the salons, notably by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, who coined the phrase ‘fairy tale.’ Barneville in fact, was writing such stories as early as 1690. Even so, many of the well-known tales that we hear today, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood are told as he wrote them. Perrault had actually published his collection under the name of his last son (born in 1678), Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt (‘Armancourt’ being the name of a property he bought for him), probably fearful of criticism from the ‘Ancients.’

In the tales, Perrault used images from around him, such as the Chateau Ussé for Sleeping Beauty, and in Puss in Boots the Marquis of the Château d’Oiron. Perrault contrasted his folktale subject matter with details, asides and subtext drawn from the world of contemporary fashion.

Charles Perrault died in Paris, the city of his birth - and adult life - in 1703, at the age of seventy-five.