Charles Perrault was a 17th-century French author and leading member of the Académie Française. He’s best known for his fairy tales, published under an assumed name as Tales of Mother Goose in 1697. Although they were written to amuse his own children, Perrault’s retellings of traditional folk stories laid the foundations for a new literary genre. This extract from The Sleeping Beauty picks up the tale after the princess has already been asleep for a hundred years.
The throne has passed to another family, and the king’s son is fired up by tales of a beautiful princess, asleep in a castle hidden deep in the woods, waiting for her prince…

‘The prince had barely taken a step towards the wood when all the tall trees, brambles and thorns moved apart to let him pass. He walked along a long avenue towards the castle, surprised to see that none of his men had been able to follow him, because the trees had drawn back together again. He continued on his way, entering a large courtyard where everything he saw chilled his heart. There was a terrible silence, and all around him, the stretched-out bodies of men and animals who all seemed to be dead.
…
Entering the guardroom, he found the guards lined up on either side with their carbines resting on their shoulders and snoring hard. He went on through several rooms full of noblemen and ladies, some seated, some standing, but all asleep. At last he came to an entirely gilded bedchamber. Upon a bed, its curtains open on every side, was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen: a princess, aged 15 or 16, whose radiant splendour had an almost divine glow.

At that moment, the enchantment ended and the princess awoke, looking at him rather more tenderly than a first glance might seem to warrant.

"Is it you, my prince?" she said. "You have certainly taken your time!"
…
The whole palace had awoken with the princess. Everyone went about his business, and, since they were not all in love, they were starving. The prince helped the princess to get up. She was already fully dressed, and most magnificently, though the prince refrained from telling her that she was dressed like my grandmother, with her high collar.

They passed into a mirrored salon where they were served supper, accompanied by stringed and wind instruments, playing music that was old but excellent. After supper, without wasting any more time, the chaplain married them in the castle chapel, and the lady-in-waiting drew the curtains around them.’

Extract from ‘La belle au bois dormant’ (‘The Sleeping Beauty’), by Charles Perrault (1696)

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, was a Parisian nobleman. On his birth, in 1675, King Louis XIV himself, and his queen, Marie-Thérèse, stood as godparents. But he later incurred the king’s displeasure and retired from court. His memoirs, written in the 1740s, long after the events described, provide one of the most complete – and overtly critical – accounts of life at the court of Louis XIV.

‘As for the King, nobody approached his magnificence. His buildings, who could number them? At the same time, who did not deplore their pride, their caprice and their bad taste? He abandoned Saint-Germain, and built nothing useful or attractive in Paris, except the Pont Royal, and that only because of necessity; so that in spite of its unrivalled size, Paris is inferior to many cities across Europe. He delighted in tyrannising nature, taming it with art and treasures. He built on and on at Versailles, without any general design, tacking together the beautiful and the ugly, the vast and the cramped. The magnificence of the gardens is astonishing, but using them provokes disgust: they are in similar bad taste.

But to return to the year 1709. Not even the troops were being paid any more, despite the fact that no one could imagine what became of all the millions that came into the king’s coffers.

The Duchesse de Grammont proposed to her husband the idea of offering her silver to the King. This made a great hubbub at Court. Nobody dared not to offer his own silver, but everyone offered it with a great deal of regret. Within a week, all the great people turned to earthenware and exhausted the supplies of all the shops where it was sold, while people of modest sort continued to eat off their silver dishes.

The high cost of everything, and of bread in particular, continued to cause disturbances all over the realm. To amuse the people, the idle and the poor were employed to level a rather large hillock which was left upon the Boulevard, and it was ordered that as a salary, these workers should receive small quantities of bad bread. It happened that on the morning of Tuesday the 20th of August, there wasn’t enough bread to go around. One woman amongst others cried out at this, which excited the rest to do the same. One by one the shops closed. The disorder grew and spilled into the neighbouring streets; no one was hurt, but everywhere the cry was "Bread! Bread!" and everywhere bread was seized.’

Extract from ‘Memoires sur le règne de Louis XIV’ (‘Memoirs of the reign of Louis XIV’), by Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1740s)