Beauty and the Beast: Two French Tellers, 1740 and 1756

Which tellings are compared here?

Three tellings are compared, read in four named public-domain printings. The French is quoted from page scans of old printings, with this site’s English rendering beside it; the English of J. R. Planché and of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book is quoted from Project Gutenberg texts.

• Villeneuve 1740. “La Belle et la Bête,” first printed in La Jeune Amériquaine et les Contes marins (The Hague, 1740, by the record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France). That first printing has no readable scan for this page, so the French is read in the reprint in Le Cabinet des fées, volume 26 (Geneva and Paris, 1786), pages 33 to 238, and the English in J. R. Planché’s translation of 1858.
• Beaumont 1756. “La Belle & la Bête,” in the first volume of Magasin des enfans (London, 1756), pages 70 to 102, read in a microfilm scan of that printing.
• Lang 1889. “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang (London, 1889), read in Project Gutenberg’s text.

Each of these is what this site calls a one-evening text: a single printing that can be pinned to a place, a year and a page, not the story itself. None of them is offered here as an “original.” They are the earliest printings this page could read, and the dates below say exactly which ones. Villeneuve’s 1740 printing is the earliest known printing of the tale named on this page, and it is known here only from the BnF record and from Planché.

The three texts, their tellers and printings, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Villeneuve (1786 reprint), Planché 1858 (Project Gutenberg 52719), Beaumont 1756 and Lang 1889 (Project Gutenberg 503), retrieved 2026-11-04; BnF catalogue

The two French printings are 16 years apart; the Geneva reprint came 46 years after Villeneuve’s first printing, and Lang’s English 149 years after it. Both tellers are dated by the national authority file of German libraries: Villeneuve lived from 1695 to 1755 and Beaumont from 1711 to 1780.

In the international index of folktale types, a catalogue that gives a number to each plot found in many tellings, this tale is ATU 425C, as classified by D. L. Ashliman, whose list of folktexts under that number includes both Beaumont’s and Villeneuve’s versions. The number groups similar plots for comparison; it does not say that one text was copied from another, and this page uses it only as an identification.

Who were the two tellers?

Very little is known about Villeneuve, and Planché said so in 1858. His note gives her as Gabrielle Susanne Barbot, “daughter of a gentleman of Rochelle,” the widow of a lieutenant-colonel of infantry, Monsieur de Gallon, Seigneur de Villeneuve, and says she died in Paris in the house of the playwright Crébillon on 29 December 1755. “Such is the sum of the information afforded us by editors and biographers,” he adds. The German authority file gives the same day of death and a birth date of 28 November 1695.

Planché knew more about Beaumont. By his account she was born at Rouen in 1711, began writing in 1748, came to England, and lived for a long time in London as a governess, writing books both to teach and to amuse the young. She married twice, returned to France in 1762 and died in 1780, and her works, he says, filled seventy volumes. The one that sold best was Le Magazin des Enfans, “in which appeared her abridgment of Beauty and the Beast.”

So the two tellers wrote for different settings. Villeneuve’s tale came out in a book of tales in several parts, and Beaumont’s came out in a schoolbook, inside a lesson. Neither of the printings read here records a living teller who told either woman the tale, and the sources checked here name no collector or informant for either tale: both are presented as written works.

Who tells the tale in Beaumont’s 1756 book?

Magasin des enfans is a book of dialogues. Its title page calls them conversations between a wise governess and several of her pupils, and the tales come inside those conversations. On page 70 a pupil, Lady Charlotte, reminds the governess that she promised them a pretty tale, and Mlle Bonne gives way.

Quand vous êtes bonnes filles, je n’ai pas le courage de vous rien refuser: allons donc nous asseoir dans le jardin, & je vous dirai le conte que je vous ai promis la derniére fois.

written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont · Magasin des enfans, vol. 1, London, 1756, p. 70

In this site’s rendering: she has no heart to refuse good girls anything, so they will sit in the garden and she will tell the tale she promised last time. The heading “La Belle & la Bête. Conte.” follows on the same page, and the first words of the tale are “Il y avoit une fois un marchand” (there was once a merchant).

The frame does not stop when the tale does. On page 102, after the prince has married Beauty and her sisters have been turned to stone, Lady Charlotte asks whether the sisters stayed statues for ever, and Mlle Bonne answers that they did, because their hearts stayed wicked. Another pupil, Lady Spirituelle, then says she loves Beauty madly but would not have married the Beast, “elle étoit trop horrible” (it was too horrible).

J’aime cette Belle à la folie; mais il me semble, si j’avois été à sa place, que je n’aurois pas voulu épouser la bête; elle étoit trop horrible.

written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont · Magasin des enfans, vol. 1, London, 1756, p. 102

Beaumont’s book gives the tale a teller, an audience and a reply. All three are invented, but the setting is specific: a governess, a group of pupils with English titles, and a garden after dinner. Beaumont herself, by Planché’s account, was a governess in London.

What did Villeneuve print in 1740?

Villeneuve’s first printing is known on this page only from two descriptions, and they do not agree on every detail. The catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France records La Jeune Amériquaine et les Contes marins, “par Mme de ***,” published at The Hague “aux dépens de la Compagnie” in 1740, two parts in one volume. The record adds that the library’s copy “ne contient que le texte de ‘La Belle et la Bête’, précédé d’une introduction” (contains only the text of Beauty and the Beast, preceded by an introduction).

Planché, writing in 1858, gives a different place and a frame. In a footnote he says the Contes marins were “So called from being supposed to be narrated on board a ship bound to St. Domingo. 4 vols. 12mo. Paris, 1740-41.” Neither the ship nor the introduction can be checked here, because the 1740 printing was not read.

The BnF record also notes that the work is by Madame de Villeneuve but has sometimes been attributed to Madame de Lintot; this page reports that note and does not take it further.

What can be read is the 1786 reprint in Le Cabinet des fées, a large collection of French fairy tales. There the tale has no frame at all. A half-title reads “Par Madame de Villeneuve,” and on page 33 the tale opens straight away in a far-off country with a rich merchant. The volume’s table of contents lists two items under her name, the history of Beauty and the Beast and the history of the Beast.

The second item is the reason the tale is so long. By page 153 the Beast has already turned back into a prince, and Beauty asks him by what misfortune he had been so cruelly changed into a beast. He answers at length.

In Planché’s English the prince “commenced his narrative in the following words,” under the heading “The Story of the Beast,” and after him a fairy gives an equally long account of Beauty’s own birth. The tale ends on page 238, with the story written into the archives of the kingdom and of the Happy Island.

How long is each telling?

Page counts mislead, because the two French books are printed on different page sizes. Words are a better measure, so each text was counted, and each French count was made two ways. The first way counts the word tokens in the text layer of the scan over the tale’s pages. The second multiplies the number of pages by the words on full pages copied from the page images (page 95 for Villeneuve; pages 71 and 90 for Beaumont).

Word counts with both methods, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Villeneuve (1786 reprint), Planché 1858 (Project Gutenberg 52719), Beaumont 1756 and Lang 1889 (Project Gutenberg 503), retrieved 2026-11-04

The two methods give 40,726 and 41,200 words for Villeneuve, and 5,532 and 5,462 for Beaumont. Method by method, that puts Beaumont’s French at 13.6 and 13.3 percent of Villeneuve’s, a little more than one word in eight. Planché’s English, which he says leaves out only a dozen lines, comes to 41,894 words, close to the French count. Lang’s English has 7,162 words, about 17 percent of Planché’s.

These counts describe the scans and texts named in the table, not every edition. The scan counts include stray marks and miss a few words, so the page shows rounded figures. In this site’s studio terms, the 1786 volume and Planché’s book are two pressings of Villeneuve’s long take, and Beaumont’s is a different take altogether.

Why does Beauty ask for a rose?

All three tellings send the merchant away on business, and all three let the youngest daughter ask for a single rose while her sisters ask for ornaments and dresses.

In Planché’s English of Villeneuve, Beauty first asks only to see her father come home safe. When he presses her, she says she loves the rose “passionately” and has not seen one since the family moved to the country, and the narrator explains that she asked “to obey her father, and at the same time to avoid putting him to any expense for her.”

Beaumont’s Beauty first asks for nothing at all, because she thinks the whole cargo would not buy what her sisters want. When her father presses her, she asks for a rose because none grows where they live.

The narrator then says, on page 76, that Beauty did not really care about a rose; she asked so that her sisters could not say she refused a present to make herself look better than them. Lang follows Villeneuve here: his Beauty asks only to see her father home safely, and names a rose when he insists.

The scene in the garden then runs much the same way in all three. The merchant has lost his way in a forest, finds an empty palace that feeds and shelters him, and picks a rose on his way out. In Villeneuve’s English the Beast roars, “Who gave thee permission to gather my roses?”; Lang’s Beast asks, “Who told you that you might gather my roses?” Beaumont’s Beast accuses him of stealing his roses a few pages later, after the merchant has eaten and slept in the empty palace.

What fills the Beast’s palace?

The palace is where the long and short tellings differ most in texture. Villeneuve fills it with things to do. Beauty finds a room of mirrors, a library, an aviary of talking parrots and a troop of monkeys who serve as her courtiers and act tragedies with the parrots supplying the voices. One room has windows that show, by a trick of reflection, the stage of the finest city in the world.

renvoyoit de dessus le théâtre de la plus belle ville du monde. C’est le chef-d’œuvre de l’optique de faire reverbérer de si loin.

written by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve · Le Cabinet des fées, vol. 26, Genève and Paris, 1786, p. 94

In this site’s rendering, the glass sent back the image from the theatre of the most beautiful city in the world, a masterpiece of optics to reflect from so far. Lang keeps a version of this: eight windows in an empty room, each showing a new entertainment, and parrots and cockatoos that greet Beauty by name, but no monkeys.

Beaumont keeps a shorter list. Her Beauty finds a door marked as her own apartment, a large library, music, a book in gold letters telling her to wish and command, and a mirror in which she sees her father arriving home, on pages 87 to 89.

What does the Beast ask each evening?

Both French Beasts ask Beauty the same question night after night, and her refusals give each tale its rhythm. But the two Beasts are not asking the same thing. Put the two French printings next to Planché’s English and the difference is plain.

In this site’s rendering, the French of page 94 says that what spoiled her good humour was the usual question, whether he might sleep with her, and that she got off by answering no. On the next page Beauty repeats it to herself: “La demande qu’il me fait à chaque fois, si je veux coucher avec lui” (the request he makes each time, whether she will sleep with him, in this site’s rendering of her words).

Planché tells his readers that he changed very little. His note says: “I have omitted a dozen lines, and softened one objectionable expression.” He does not say which expression he softened. The Beast’s question is one place where his English and the 1786 French differ in exactly this way, but the note alone cannot show that it is the place he meant.

Beaumont’s Beast asks a plainer question in plainer words, and her Beauty answers it differently too. On pages 90 and 91 she nearly dies of fright and then says no, but she has already told him she likes him, as he looks, better than men who hide a false heart behind a human face. The two French tellings agree that the question returns each evening; they disagree about what is being asked.

Was Beaumont’s text a cut of Villeneuve’s?

Nothing in Beaumont’s own pages says where her tale came from. On pages 70 to 102 she names no other writer, and the frame presents the story simply as one the governess promised. The claim that she shortened Villeneuve comes from Planché, who made it in the note to his 1858 translation.

It is only those who have read the original story by Madame de Villeneuve, either in the Contes Marins, or in the Cabinet des Fées, who will not be surprised to find that Madame de Beaumont has merely the merit of having cut this admirable work down to the smallest comprehensible dimensions, and made a pretty little nursery tale of one of the most ingeniously constructed stories in the whole catalogue of fairy chronicles.

written by J. R. Planché · Four and Twenty Fairy Tales, London, 1858, note on The Beauty and the Beast

Planché’s “original story” is his phrase for Villeneuve’s printing; this page keeps the dates instead. He goes on to say what was lost: “The story of the Beast is but alluded to in a few words, and that of the real parents of Beauty altogether omitted.” He asks that Beaumont’s text never be printed without saying it is “simply an abridgment of her composition, adapted to the use of juvenile readers, by Madame de Beaumont.”

The two French printings bear out the parts of his account that can be counted. Beaumont gives the curse a single sentence on page 100, where the prince says a wicked fairy had condemned him to stay in that shape until a beautiful girl agreed to marry him.

Une méchante fée m’avoit condamné à rester sous cette figure, jusqu’à ce qu’une belle fille consentît à m’épouser

written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont · Magasin des enfans, vol. 1, London, 1756, p. 100

Villeneuve gives the same matter the prince’s long history, and Beauty’s parentage the fairy’s. Beaumont’s family is also smaller. Her merchant has six children, “trois garçons & trois filles” (three boys and three girls), on pages 70 and 71; Villeneuve’s has twelve, “six boys and six girls” in Planché’s English.

The children, the evening question and the frames, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Villeneuve (1786 reprint), Planché 1858 (Project Gutenberg 52719), Beaumont 1756 and Lang 1889 (Project Gutenberg 503), retrieved 2026-11-04

Planché also explains, in his preface, why he translated the long text at all. He says that, apart from Beaumont’s tales, few if any of the stories in his volume had “ever been placed in their integrity before the English reader.” By his account, then, English readers already had Beaumont’s short tale in 1858, and his book set out to give them Villeneuve’s whole one.

What the page cannot settle is how Beaumont worked. Planché was writing a century later and gives no source for his judgment beyond the two texts themselves. A shorter telling with the same opening and the same rose is similar to the longer one, and Planché read the similarity as abridgment; this page reports that reading as his.

Lang’s English, 1889

Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book of 1889 printed a third telling, in English and for children, and it follows Villeneuve rather than Beaumont. Its merchant has “six sons and six daughters,” its Beauty dreams of a prince, and the note printed after it reads “La Belle et la Bete. Par Madame de Villeneuve.” The preface of the book does not name who made this English version; the survey of Lang’s Fairy Books and the retellers his prefaces credit sets out what those prefaces do say.

The same editor reprinted other writers’ tales under their names in later volumes, among them Southey’s Three Bears, which the Green Fairy Book prints under Southey’s name.

Lang’s Beast is Villeneuve’s, as the note says, minus the histories. He asks “Beauty, will you marry me?” each evening. When Beauty finally says yes, the Beast changes, a fairy and a queen arrive in a chariot, and the queen thanks Beauty for “having restored my dear son to his natural form.” No one explains the enchantment or reveals that Beauty was born a princess.

At 7,162 words, Lang’s English is longer than Beaumont’s French but shorter than either Villeneuve text by more than 33,000 words. It has details that Beaumont’s text lacks, such as the twelve children and the dreams, and, like Beaumont’s, neither of the two histories.

Lang’s own books do not agree. In the preface to The Olive Fairy Book of 1907 he wrote of Madame d’Aulnoy: “To her we owe Beauty and the Beast and The Yellow Dwarf.” The 1889 note and the 1907 preface are both his books, and they name different authors for the same tale.

The five statements, with their wording, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Le Cabinet des fées (1786), Planché 1858, Lang 1889 and 1907 (Project Gutenberg), retrieved 2026-11-04

Planché had already seen the credit move. He wrote that “La Belle et la Bête, par Madame Leprince de Beaumont,” was then circulating, without a word of explanation, as part of the French Railway Library. This page has not seen that edition and reports it as Planché’s statement. Of the five statements, three name Villeneuve, one Beaumont and one d’Aulnoy; this page does not choose among them.

Motif grid: what three tellings keep

Each motif was defined before any cell was filled, with what counts as present and which specific changes count as transformed. A cell marked absent means only that the checked text does not contain the motif. The Villeneuve column is read in the 1786 reprint and in Planché’s English; where the two differ, the cell says so.

The 27 cells, with coordinates and quotations, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Villeneuve (1786 reprint), Planché 1858 (Project Gutenberg 52719), Beaumont 1756 and Lang 1889 (Project Gutenberg 503), retrieved 2026-11-04

n = 3 texts checked: Villeneuve, “La Belle et la Bête,” Le Cabinet des fées, vol. 26 (1786), pages 33 to 238, with Planché’s English of 1858; Beaumont, Magasin des enfans, vol. 1 (1756), pages 70 to 102; Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (1889).

What counts as each motif, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-04

Of the 27 cells, 17 are present, 7 absent, 2 transformed and 1 undetermined. Three motifs are present in all three texts: the rose the father picks for his youngest daughter, the ring that carries Beauty back to the palace, and the water she uses to revive the dying Beast. Villeneuve and Beaumont each have six motifs present, and Lang five.

The two transformed cells follow forms listed in advance. Villeneuve’s Beast asks for something other than marriage, as the side-by-side shows, and Beaumont’s prince explains his curse in one sentence instead of a history. The single undetermined cell is Villeneuve’s frame: the 1786 reprint has none, but the 1740 printing had an introduction by the BnF record, and that printing was not read. It stays undetermined rather than absent.

What do the versions not share?

The three tellings part ways most clearly at the end. In Villeneuve, Beauty turns out to be the Princess of the Happy Island, and her sisters, far from being punished, marry and live at her court; Planché’s English says she went on calling them by “the tender names of father, brothers, and even sisters.” In Beaumont the fairy turns the two sisters into statues at the palace gate. In Lang the fairy offers to send for all of Beauty’s brothers and sisters “to dance at your wedding.”

Illustration

The dreams divide them too. Villeneuve’s Beauty meets an unknown young man in her sleep from her first night at the palace; on page 95 of the reprint, “Son inconnu, qui n’attendoit que ce moment pour paroître” (her unknown one, who waited only for that moment to appear) comes to her as soon as she lies down. Lang keeps him. Beaumont has a lady in Beauty’s dream instead, who turns out at the end to be a fairy, and no young man appears until the Beast changes on page 99.

Planché himself compared the tale with others, and his comparisons show how far likeness can be stretched. He rejected a claim that Villeneuve expanded Perrault’s Riquet à la houppe, and found more points of resemblance in Madame d’Aulnoy’s Le Mouton, where a king turned into a ram lets a girl visit her family. He also noticed that a Cinderella of Basile’s and a German one begin, like this tale, with a father asking his daughters what to bring home.

Planché went further than likeness. From those openings he inferred that the Italian and German writers had mixed two old stories, and that Villeneuve’s tale was founded on one of them. This page reports that inference as his and does not adopt it, because similar openings, on their own, are not a line of descent.

Another reader set the tale beside a much older one. Lang’s long essay on Cupid and Psyche in 1887 calls Le Loup Blanc, one of M. Cosquin’s Lorraine tales, a story “of the type of Beauty and the Beast” (p. l), and the old woman’s Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius shows who tells that tale and how it differs. The same question of who counts as the first teller runs through Sleeping Beauty, another tale with several named tellers from Basile to the Grimms, where no printing is the single original either.

How does each ending close?

Each telling closes on a different note. Beaumont’s fairy tells Beauty, on page 100, that she has been rewarded for her choice: “vous avez préféré la vertu à la beauté & à l’esprit” (you preferred virtue to beauty and to wit). The tale’s last sentence, on page 102, says Beauty lived with the prince a long time in perfect happiness, “parce qu’il étoit fondé sur la vertu” (because it was founded on virtue). That closing line belongs to a schoolbook, and the pupils’ questions follow it at once.

Villeneuve’s close is about memory, not virtue. On page 238 of the reprint the prince’s mother has the story written down “dans les archives de cet empire, & dans celui de l’isle heureuse, pour la transmettre à la postérité” (in the archives of that empire and of the Happy Island, to hand it down to posterity), and accounts of it are sent through the whole world. Lang’s English ends in the plainest way of the three, with a wedding the next day and the words “lived happily ever after.”

What the versions do share is a merchant, a rose and a Beast who asks his question again every night. Everything else depends on who is telling, and in 1756 that was a governess named Mlle Bonne, sitting in a garden with pupils she called good girls. When she finished, her pupils argued with the ending, and one of them said she would never have married the Beast.