e" ("Puss in Boots"), "Les Fees" ("The Fairy"),
"Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre" ("Cinderella"), "Riquet
a la Houppe" ("Riquet of the Tuft"), and "Le Petit Poucet" ("Tom
Thumb")._

_Perrault was not so shy in admitting the authorship of his three
verse stories--"Griselidis," "Les Souhaits Ridicules," and "Peau
d'Asne." The first appeared, anonymously it is true, in 1961; but,
when it came to be reprinted with "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and "Peau
d'Asne" in 1695, they were entrusted to the firm of Coignard and
described as being by "Mr Perrault, de l'Academie Francoise." La
Fontaine had made a fashion of this sort of exercise._

_It would not be fair to assume that P. Darmancour had no connection
whatever with the composition of the stories which bore his name. The
best of Perrault's critics, Paul de St Victor and Andrew Lang among
others, see in the book a marvellous collaboration of crabbed age and
youth. The boy, probably, gathered the stories from his nurse and
brought them to his father, who touched them up, and toned them down,
and wrote them out. Paul Lacroix, in his fine edition of 1886, goes as
far as to attribute the entire authorship of the prose tales to
Perrault's son. He deferred, however, to universal usage when he
entitled his volume "Les Contes en prose de Charles Perrault."_

_"Les Contes du Temps Passe" had an immediate success. Imitators
sprung up at once by the dozen, and still persist; but none of them
has ever rivalled, much less surpassed, the inimitable originals.
Every few years a new and sumptuous edition appears in France. The
best are probably those by Paul Lacroix and Andre le Fevre._

_The stories soon crossed the Channel; and a translation "by Mr
Samber, printed for J. Pote" was advertised in the "Monthly Chronicle"
of 1729. "Mr Samber" was presumably one Robert Samber of New Inn, who
translated other tales from the French, for Edmond Curl the
bookseller, about this time. No copy of the first edition of his
Perrault is known to exist. Yet it won a wide popularity, as is shown
by the fact that there was a seventh edition published in 1795, for J.
Rivington, a bookseller, of Pearl Street, New York._

_No English translation of Perrault's fairy tales has attained
unquestioned literary pre-eminence. So the publishers of the present
book have thought it best to use Samber's translation, which has a
special interest of its own in being almost contemporary with the
original. The