Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Perrault

Cruelty gets domesticated here, presented not as a crime but as a household routine: the “poor child” is a “drudge,” “always in the wrong,” a scapegoat position so familiar it barely needs justification. Perrault’s sentence does the sly work of a fairy tale moralist: it makes injustice feel legible, even inevitable, so the eventual reversal (the underestimated child emerging as the true agent) lands as both satisfying and socially corrective.

The subtext sits in the pivot word “however.” Perrault isn’t just offering consolation; he’s laying a trap for the reader’s assumptions. The family’s verdict is wrong, and the narrative quietly recruits us to see how power misreads people. “Bright and discreet” is an interesting pairing: intelligence alone can be punished in a hierarchy, but discretion is intelligence taught to survive. In a house where speaking invites blame, silence becomes strategy. The line “if he spoke little, he heard and thought the more” sanctifies enforced quiet as a kind of hidden education - the child is denied a voice, so he develops perception.

Context matters: Perrault is writing from a courtly, status-obsessed France where rank and favor govern outcomes, and where “merit” is a delicate, often ironic concept. This isn’t a democratic fable about fairness; it’s a manual for navigating asymmetry. Listen, watch, wait, learn the room. The tale flatters patience not as passive virtue, but as a calculated response to a world that punishes the powerless for taking up space.