Beauty and the Beast
"Beauty and the Beast" is a fairy tale written by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published anonymously in 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins.
Villeneuve's original story was abridged, revised, and published by French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 in Magasin des enfants which became the most commonly retold version. Later, Andrew Lang retold the story in Blue Fairy Book, a part of the Fairy Book series, in 1889. The fairy-tale was influenced by the story of Petrus Gonsalvus as well as Ancient Latin stories such as "Cupid and Psyche" from The Golden Ass, written by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis in the second century AD, and "The Pig King", an Italian fairy-tale published by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in The Facetious Nights of Straparola around 1550.
Variants of the tale are known across Europe. In France, for example, Zémire and Azor is an operatic version of the story, written by Jean-François Marmontel and composed by André Grétry in 1771, which had enormous success into the 19th century. Zémire and Azor is based on the second version of the tale. Amour pour amour by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée is a 1742 play based on de Villeneuve's version. According to researchers at a university in Lisbon, the story originated about 4,000 years ago.
Plot
Villeneuve's original version
A widowed merchant lives in a mansion in a city with his twelve children: six sons and six daughters. All his daughters are very beautiful, but the youngest, Beauty, is the loveliest. Beauty is also kind and pure of heart; her elder sisters, in contrast, are cruel, selfish, and jealous of Beauty.The merchant and his children become poor when their house burns down, and his ships are lost. The family of thirteen is forced to move to a small cottage in the countryside and work for a living. While Beauty makes a firm resolution to adjust to rural life with a cheerful disposition, her sisters do not and mistake her determination for stupidity.
Two years later, the merchant hears that one of his trade ships has returned. Before leaving to retrieve it, and possibly their fortune, he asks his children if they wish for him to bring any gifts back for them. His oldest daughters ask for clothing, jewels, and the finest dresses possible as they think that his wealth has returned. Beauty asks for nothing but her father to return home safely, but when he insists on buying her a present, she is satisfied with the promise of a rose.
When he arrives to the port to see his ship the merchant is dismayed to learn that his colleagues have already sold the cargo, thus leaving him penniless and unable to buy his daughters' presents. During his trip back home the merchant becomes lost in a vicious snowstorm. Seeking shelter, he comes upon a castle surrounded by lifelike statues. Seeing that no one is home, the merchant sneaks in and finds tables inside laden with food and drink, which seem to have been left for him by the castle's invisible owner. The merchant accepts this gift and spends the night there.
The next morning, he is about to leave when he sees a rose garden and recalls that Beauty had desired a rose. The merchant quickly plucks the loveliest rose he can find. He is then confronted by a hideous "Beast" who tries to kill him for stealing his most precious possession even after accepting his hospitality. The merchant begs to be let go, revealing that he had only picked the rose as a gift for his youngest daughter. The Beast agrees to let him go, but only if he brings one of his daughters back to live with the Beast instead. He makes it clear that she must agree while under no illusions about her predicament.
The merchant is upset, but accepts this condition for the sake of his own life. The Beast sends him on his way with wealth, jewels, and fine clothes for his sons and daughters, and stresses that he must not lie to his daughters.
Upon arriving home, the merchant hands Beauty the rose she requested and informs her that it had a terrible price, before relaying what had happened during his absence. Her brothers say that they will go to the castle and fight the Beast, while his older daughters refuse to leave and place blame on Beauty, urging her to right her own wrong. The merchant dissuades them, forbidding his children from ever going near the Beast. Beauty willingly decides to go to the Beast's castle, moving her father who remembers a Romani fortune-teller's prophecy about his youngest daughter making his household lucky.
Once they arrive at the castle, the Beast receives Beauty with great ceremony. The merchant is sent home with a reward. The Beast gives Beauty lavish clothing, food and entertainment along with animal servants. He visits her each evening to ask her how she is doing. Although they converse at length, he seems unable to express himself well, leading her to assume he is not intelligent.
Every night he asks Beauty to let him sleep with her: and she refuses. After each proposal Beauty dreams of a handsome stranger who is imprisoned in the castle, along with an apparition of a fairy who tells her not to be deceived by appearances.
For several months Beauty lives a life of luxury at the Beast's castle. Her feelings for the man in her dreams and her gratitude toward the Beast come into conflict. When the Beast asks her what is wrong, she pleads homesickness and he sadly allows her to leave, warning her that if she does not return within two months he will die of a broken heart.
Beauty agrees to this and is presented with an enchanted ring, which allows her to wake up in her family's new home in an instant. Her older sisters are surprised to find her well-fed and dressed in finery, and their old jealousy quickly flares when their suitors' gazes turn to Beauty, even though she bestows lavish gifts on them. Her brothers do all they can to prevent her from going back to his castle, and she reluctantly agrees to stay longer.
When the two months have passed, she envisions the Beast dying alone on the castle grounds and hastens to return despite her brothers' resolve to prevent her from doing so.
Once she is back in the castle, Beauty's fears are confirmed as she finds the Beast near death in a cave on the grounds. Seeing this, Beauty is distraught, realizing that she loves him. She fetches water from a nearby spring, which she uses to resuscitate him.
The next night when the Beast proposes, Beauty agrees to marry him. The sky is lit up by a magical fireworks show. That night he goes to bed with her, falling into an enchanted sleep as soon as he lies down.
When Beauty wakes up next to him the next morning she finds that the Beast has transformed into the unknown man from her dreams. Beauty learns that the Beast is a prince. Just then, the Fairy who has been appearing to Beauty in her dreams arrives with the Prince's mother, the Queen. The Queen's joy falters when she learns that Beauty is a lowly merchant's daughter. The Fairy then chastises the Queen and reveals that Beauty is actually a princess and that they are each her aunts. Beauty's birth father was the Queen's brother, the King of Fortunate Island. He believed that Beauty died as a baby. Beauty's birth mother was the Fairy's sister.
When the matter of Beauty's background is resolved, she requests that the Prince tell his tale.
The Prince informs Beauty that his father died before he was born, and his mother had to fight an enemy to defend the kingdom. The Queen left the Prince in the care of his Evil Fairy Godmother, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult and helped his mother win the war.
When the war ended, the Evil Fairy accompanied the Queen and the Prince back to the castle and asked him to marry her. But the Prince refused. The Evil Fairy, in a rage, transformed him into an ugly Beast in front of his shocked mother. Before leaving mother and son, the Evil Fairy warned them that only a maiden's act of true love could break the spell and that if anyone else beside the Queen knew about it, the Prince would be a Beast forever.
After the Prince's godmother left, the Good Fairy arrived to help him by turning the castle's servants to stone to prevent them from revealing the curse to outsiders, and promising to protect his mother from the Evil Fairy. The Good Fairy also summoned her genie servants to keep the Prince company while he waited for Beauty's arrival.
At the end of his story, the Prince revealed to Beauty that the animals in the castle were those same servants, and that the Good Fairy had caused her to see the Prince's true self in dreams.
The Good Fairy then summons the King Of Fortunate Island to meet Beauty, and having reunited the family, brings the petrified servants back to life.
She tells them all how years ago the Evil Fairy, the Prince's godmother, had been plotting to marry the King of Fortunate Island but Beauty's mother had married him instead. As revenge the Evil Fairy revealed her crime of having a mortal husband and child to the Fairy Queen, thus causing her imprisonment in Fairyland shortly after Beauty's birth. She also convinced the other fairies to curse the infant Princess to marry a Beast as a further punishment.
Meanwhile, on Fortunate Island, the people had faked their imprisoned Queen's death after they were unable to find her. The Evil Fairy hired a greedy couple to kill the Princess. When the King of the Fortunate Island believed both his wife and daughter to be dead, he banished the Evil Fairy.
But the Good Fairy had secretly rescued her young niece. She had turned into a bear and killed the would-be murderers. The Good Fairy then brought the Princess to a cottage with three sleeping nursesmaids and a little girl the same age as her who was very ill and had been sent to the countryside by her father, the merchant, in hopes that the fresh air would cure her, but she died instead. The Good Fairy swapped the two children.
Unaware she was not their master's child, the three nursemaids soon returned to the city with the Princess. The Good Fairy followed the nurses to the merchant's mansion, disguised herself as a Romani fortune-teller and told the merchant the prophecy of "his" youngest child bringing luck to his household. She also decreed that the baby be named "Beauty."
She arranged for Beauty and the Prince to meet, the young couple's love both breaking the Evil Fairy's spell and fulfilling the Princess's destiny to marry a Beast. She also testified against the Evil Fairy in Fairyland, who was now imprisoned there.
After the Good Fairy finishes her story, her sister arrives at the castle, having been freed by the Fairy Queen. With the entire Royal Family reunited, Beauty's aunt summons the merchant and his family. Beauty's surrogate family members are told the whole truth and are made members of her court.
Beauty marries the Prince and although they want to honeymoon indefinitely, the Fairy reminds them it is their destiny and duty to govern. They live happily for hundreds of years thanks to the powers of Beauty's fairy mother and aunt. The Prince's mother commands that their tale be recorded in the imperial archives so everyone might know their story.