Motherhood Quote by Charles Perrault

A fairy tale can flatter while it sharpens its knife, and Perrault’s compliment here is doing more work than it admits. The sentence opens like a moral inventory: “rare goodness,” “sweetness of temper.” Not beauty, not cleverness, not power. In Perrault’s world, virtue is the currency that buys a girl safety, marriage, narrative protection. “Rare” is the tell: goodness is framed as an exception, a prized scarcity, which immediately turns the daughter into a specimen for judgment.

Then comes the sly mechanism of inheritance. Her sweetness is something she “took from her mother,” as if character were a dowry passed down the female line. That move sanctifies the mother (and doubles the daughter’s credibility) while quietly narrowing what women are allowed to transmit: not ambition, not authority, but agreeableness. The phrase “sweetness of temper” is loaded with period expectations about domestic harmony; it’s praise that also functions as instruction.

The final clause, “the best creature in the world,” is where Perrault’s voice peeks through. “Creature” is tender and faintly diminutive: affectionate, yes, but also positioning the mother as an idealized being rather than a fully social actor. The superlative is fairy-tale hyperbole, a wink at the genre’s appetite for absolutes (best, worst, wickedest). It pre-loads the story’s moral circuitry: goodness is hereditary, legible, and rewarded.

Context matters: Perrault helped codify salon tales into didactic print fables for polite society. This line is less character description than a moral pedigree, establishing who deserves the tale’s favors before the plot even starts.