"Once upon a time there was a Queen who had a son so ugly and so misshapen that it was long disputed whether he had human form. A fairy who was at his birth said, however, that he would be very amiable for all that, since he would have uncommon good sense"
About this Quote
Perrault opens like a bedtime story and immediately slips a knife under the pillow. The fairy-tale “Once upon a time” promises comfort; the next clause delivers a blunt inventory of deformity so extreme it threatens the category of “human.” That shock is the point. In a court culture obsessed with surfaces - lineage, beauty, manners - Perrault stages a social panic: if appearance confers status, what do you do with a body that refuses to perform “nobility” on sight?
The fairy’s pronouncement is a sly rerouting of value. “Amiable for all that” is doing heavy work: it concedes the ugliness as social fact, then tries to bargain with it. Good sense becomes a compensatory currency, an alternative aristocracy of mind. Yet the phrasing also exposes the cruelty of the arrangement. The child isn’t granted dignity; he’s granted usefulness. He may be accepted because he can entertain, advise, or govern - because his intellect can launder the discomfort others feel when looking at him.
Context sharpens the edge. Perrault helped crystallize the literary fairy tale for an elite readership in late 17th-century France, where salons traded in wit and the monarchy traded in spectacle. His stories often act like moral machines: they convert private prejudice into public lesson without pretending prejudice isn’t there. Here, the “long disputed” line reads like a miniature court tribunal, reminding us that society loves to debate someone’s humanity right up until it can profit from them. The fairy’s gift is both mercy and indictment: an imaginative attempt to rescue the misfit, and a clear-eyed portrait of how conditional that rescue remains.
The fairy’s pronouncement is a sly rerouting of value. “Amiable for all that” is doing heavy work: it concedes the ugliness as social fact, then tries to bargain with it. Good sense becomes a compensatory currency, an alternative aristocracy of mind. Yet the phrasing also exposes the cruelty of the arrangement. The child isn’t granted dignity; he’s granted usefulness. He may be accepted because he can entertain, advise, or govern - because his intellect can launder the discomfort others feel when looking at him.
Context sharpens the edge. Perrault helped crystallize the literary fairy tale for an elite readership in late 17th-century France, where salons traded in wit and the monarchy traded in spectacle. His stories often act like moral machines: they convert private prejudice into public lesson without pretending prejudice isn’t there. Here, the “long disputed” line reads like a miniature court tribunal, reminding us that society loves to debate someone’s humanity right up until it can profit from them. The fairy’s gift is both mercy and indictment: an imaginative attempt to rescue the misfit, and a clear-eyed portrait of how conditional that rescue remains.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Charles Perrault, "The Fairy" (Les Fées), in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, 1697 — opening paragraph; English translations render the queen-with-ugly-son line. |
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