harles Perrault, now withdrawn from public life, and busy fighting
the Battle of the Books with Boileau, published anonymously his earliest
attempt at story telling, unless we reckon _L'Esprit Fort_, a tale of
light and frivolous character. The new story was _La Marquise de
Salusses, ou la Patience de Griselidis, nouvelle_[8]. _Griselidis_ is
not precisely a popular tale, as Perrault openly borrowed his matter
from Boccaccio, and his manner (as far as in him lay) from La Fontaine.
He has greatly softened the brutality of the narrative as Boccaccio
tells it, and there is much beauty in his description of the young
Prince lost in the forest, after one of those Royal hunts in Rambouillet
or Marly whose echoes now scarce reach us, faint and fabulous as the
horns of Roland or of Arthur[9]. Nay, there is a certain simple poetry
and sentiment of Nature, in _Griselidis_, which comes strangely from a
man of the Town and the Court. The place where the wandering Prince
encounters first his shepherdess

'Clair de ruisseaux et sombre de verdure
Saisissait les esprits d'une secrete horreur;
La simple et naive nature
S'y faisoit voir si belle et si pure,
Que mille fois il benit son erreur.'

So the Prince rides on his way

'Rempli de douces reveries
Qu'inspirent les grands bois, les eaux et les prairies.'

The sentiment is like Madame de Sevigne's love of her woods at Les
Rochers, the woods where she says goodbye to the Autumn colours, and
longs for the fairy _feuille qui chante_, and praises 'the crystal
October days.' Of all this there is nothing in Boccaccio. Perrault, of
course, does not repeat the brutalities of the Italian tyrant, in which
Boccaccio takes a kind of pleasure, while Chaucer veils them in his
kindly courtesy.

To _Griselidis_ Perrault added an amusing little essay on the vanity of
Criticism, and the varying verdicts of critics. In this Essay, Perrault
apparently shews us the source from which he directly drew his matter,
namely Boccaccio in the popular form of the chap-books called _La
Bibliotheque Bleue_. 'If I had taken out everything that every critic
found fault with,' he says, 'I had done better to leave the story in its
blue paper cover, where it has been for so many years.' Thus Perrault
borrowed from the Bibliotheque Bleue, not the Bibliotheque Bleue, as M.
Maury fancied, from Perrault[10].

In 1694 Moetjens, the bookseller at The Hague, began to publish a little
Miscell