Little Thumb: New translation by Laurent Paul Sueur
Charles Perrault, Laurent Sueur
language
(, March 5, 2015)
A poor fagot-maker and his wife are struggling to take care of their seven young boys. One night Little Thumb, the youngest and considered the most delicate, overhears his parents planning to abandon the boys in the woods because they are too poor to feed them. The next day, when the family goes out into the woods to work, their mom and dad run off, leaving them alone…Charles Perrault was a serious writer who understood, at the end of his life, that his duty, as a human being and an intellectual, was to increase the level of reason and humanity of people. Therefore, he gathered European folktales and transformed them in order to enhance their moral qualities. Barbarity, man’s temptation, was an individual disgrace he wanted to dilute in the fountain of knowledge. Children were to read his fairy tales and choose to follow, with the help of their maturing consciousness, the road to wisdom. More than three centuries later, a world on the verge of total self-destruction should listen, at last, to the echo of the fabulist’s intelligence.