‘Madame Coulanges, who is with me till to-morrow, was good enough to tell us some of the stories that they amuse the ladies with at Versailles. They call this mitonner, so she mitonned us, and spoke to us about a Green Island, where a Princess was brought up, as bright as the day! The Fairies were her companions, and the Prince of Pleasure was her lover, and they both came to the King's court, one day, in a ball of glass. The story lasted a good hour, and I spare you much of it, the rather as this Green Isle is in the midst of Ocean, not in the Mediterranean, where M. de Grignan might be pleased to hear of its discovery.’

So Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter, on the 6th of August, 1676.

The letter proves that fairy tales or contes had come to Court, and were in fashion, twenty years before Charles Perrault published his Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, our ‘Mother Goose's Tales.’ The apparition of the simple traditional stories at Versailles must have resembled the arrival of the Goose Girl, in her shabby raiment, at the King's Palace.* The stories came in their rustic weeds, they wandered out of the cabins of the charcoal burners, out of the farmers’ cottages, and, after many adventures, reached that enchanted castle of Versailles. There the courtiers welcomed them gladly, recognised the truant girls and boys of the Fairy world as princes and princesses, and arrayed them in the splendour of Cinderella's sisters, ‘mon habit de velours rouge, et ma garniture d'Angleterre; mon manteau à fleurs d'or et ma barrière de diamans qui n'est pas des plus indifférentes.’ The legends of the country folk, which had been as simple and rude as Peau d'Ane in her scullion's disguise, shone forth like Peau d'Ane herself, when she wore her fairy garments, embroidered with the sun and moon in thread of gold and silver. We can see, from Madame de Sévigné's letter, that the Märchen had been decked out in Court dress, in train and feathers, as early as 1676.