Conte de Fee
Madame D'Aulnoy
Inventor of Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales gained literary form with the Conte de Fee by Madame D'Aulnoy or better known as Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy.

Goldilocks, Cinderella, the Yellow Dwarf: these immortal characters of fairy tales who we all know and love did not just spring out of the ground, fully formed.

The first person to treat a fairy tale as a literary device instead of a bedside story, and the first one to begin the shaping of fairy stories into what we recognize today, was Madame d'Aulnoy.

D'Aulnoy was born Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville into a French noble family in about 1651, and at the age of sixteen was married to the Baron d'Aulnoy, a man 30 years her senior.

It was an arranged marriage, and there is no evidence that either loved the other. Her new husband was a gambler and freethinker, and only three years later was accused of a treasonous plot in which Madame d'Aulnoy was implicated as well.

Though the plot was proven to be fabricated, it gave Madame d'Aulnoy a disgust of the French court, and she left Paris with her three children for the next twenty years.

It was during this time that she began writing: novels, biographies, histories. She traveled to Spain and England with her mother, and somewhere began collecting and retelling fairy tales, inventing the literary fairy tale, Les Conte de Fee.

Upon her return to Paris, she set up a salon, which became wildly popular, and she began publishing fairy tales. Her reputation spread, and she was nicknamed Clio, after the Greek muse of history.

Her tales of fairy tales as well as history were in conversational styles, as she would have told them in her own salon, and most of the history was not strictly factual. (This was due to literary convention at the time, not due to Madame d'Aulnoy's desire to bend the truth – some of her histories were very strictly fact-based.)

Madame d'Aulnoy died in 1705, leaving behind six children and a legacy of fairy tales that would delight children for centuries to come.

Her most famous works include an early version of Perrault's Cinderella, Cunning Cinders, and The Story of Pretty Goldilocks – not the one with the Three Bears, but rather the one that first introduces a character we all know and love, Prince Charming.

Though her tales have been around for over three hundred years, it was not until they were translated in 1892 and published as The Fairy Tales of Madame d'Aulnoy did they reach a wide audience in English.

D'Aulnoy's first fairy tale collection was named Contes de Fee, which translates as “fairy tales.” It was her name for the sort of story that she told that gave an entire genre its name.