French Fairy Tales
Fairy Tales of Land and Sea. By Simonne Rate!, with illustrations by Philippe Jullian. (The Bodley Head. 6s.)
UNDER the title Contes de la Terre et de la Mer the nine romantic fairy stories in this book were first printed in Marseilles in 1943. There, but for the enterprise of an English publisher, they might have remained, and most English readers would have been precluded from the remarkable excitement of submitting themselves to the sea- changed, haunted atmosphere of Mademoiselle Ratel's tales. More- over, the publishers have had the taste to commission M. Philippe Jullian, a young French illustrator of great talent now becoming known in this country, to do drawings for the book. M. Jullian has performed this dangerous task with his usual delicacy, wafting elaborate spider's webs across the pages, and reproducing precisely the subaqueous, dream-like quality of ;he tales themselves. The English translator has done a nice clean job, a relief today when many of the translations now coming out in London are written in American.
The appearance of a new collection of really fine fairy tales (even so small a collection as this one) is a rare event. Why are there so very few supremely good books of fairy stories in any European language ? France, having provided Perrault, has since contributed little in this vein. England, until. the present generation well ahead of the rest of the world in children's books, has never achieved any classic fairy tales—for English fairy stories have been either as unmagical as The Water-Babies or as j).iiingenuous as The Happy Prince and the other Faberge constructions of Oscar Wilde. The great European collections of fairy stories have always been northern —the brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen, the tales collected in the pine .forests of South Norway in the middle of the last century by those benefactors of Nordic childhood, Asbjomsen and Moe. It is an essential of a good fairy tale that it should bear the stamp of a local origin—that it should seem related to the soil. In Mademoiselle Ratel's book it is difficult to know what is traditional and what imaginary, but each tale is carefully placed in some specific area of France—the cliffs above Dieppe, the.Boulogne coast, the Marquen-
terre district of the Somme ("Over the Marquenterre, lying between sea and plain, the wind blows day and night "), and it is this as well- as the sharp, nostalgic quality of the tales themselves that makes them so lovely and so moving,/ Most of Mademoiselle Ratel's stories cover the north of France, though one of them, incorporating that Provencal character, the Drac, is evidently set in the Midi. But chiefly she evokes, and peoples with malevolent and magic inhabitants, the pale coasts of the Cotentin on an autumn evening, the Breton rocks and the great sea- caves of the Channel shore. The Drac is not the only traditional personage to figure in these pages, for here too we find the " Fourolle," the lost soul that takes the form of a marsh flame driven onwards by the night wind, and the " Merlusine," an evil fairy with a serpent'S body. The mood of alinttt all these tales is sad, as that of such tales must be, and this mood reaches its climax in the story of the, fisher- girl Rose de la Berriere who loved, and died\ for, a Prince of the Sea. This is not in any restrictive sense a child's book. It is a book for everyone of sensibility and intelligence, a book in other words for everyone who loves France. JAMES POPE-HENNESSY.
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