Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Perrault

A hundred years pass in a single clause, and Perrault makes that compression feel natural, even cozy. The fairy tale’s most radical move is right there: time isn’t a force to be endured; it’s a stagehand wheeling scenery into place. By the time “the son of the King then reigning” rides in, history has been scrubbed clean. The previous court, the original “family” of the sleeping Princess, the messy politics of inheritance and memory - all vanish under the soft tyranny of “after.” What matters is not continuity but replacement.

Perrault’s courtly precision (“then reigning”) gives the fantasy a bureaucratic stamp, as if royal timekeeping can domesticate the supernatural. It’s an almost sly reassurance to a 17th-century audience trained on dynastic logic: don’t worry, the line of kings is intact, the state is stable, even if a girl has been asleep for a century. Yet the sentence also plants a quiet anxiety: the prince is “of another family.” Inheritance is never only romance; it’s property, alliance, legitimacy. The tale’s love story is also a merger.

The image of “towers... in the middle of a great thick wood” turns desire into curiosity before it becomes destiny. The prince doesn’t arrive summoned by prophecy; he arrives because he sees a structure and asks a question. That’s Perrault’s real seduction tactic: wonder as a socially acceptable form of trespass. The forest hides the past, the towers advertise it, and aristocratic entitlement - hunting “on that side of the country” - supplies the excuse to enter and claim what’s been waiting.