Aurore and Aimée

Aurore and Aimée is a French literary fairy tale written by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. Like her better known tale Beauty and the Beast, it is among the first fairy tales deliberately written for children.

It draws on traditional fairy tale motifs from the Aarne-Thompson tale type 480, the kind and the unkind girls; as is common in those tales, the abused daughter finds herself in a new place, where, after a test, a kindly woman rewards her. Folk tales of this type include Diamonds and Toads, Shita-kiri Suzume, Mother Hulda, The Three Heads in the Well, Father Frost, The Three Little Men in the Wood, The Enchanted Wreath, The Old Witch, and The Two Caskets. Another literary variant is The Three Fairies.

A lady had two daughters. Both were beautiful; Aurore, the older, had a good character, but Aimée, the younger, was malevolent. When Aurore was sixteen and Aimée was twelve, the lady began to lose her looks. Not wanting anyone to know that she was old enough to have children of those ages, she moved to another city, sent Aurore to the country, and claimed that Aimée was only ten and that she had been fifteen when she had given birth to her. Fearing that someone would discover the deception, she sent Aurore to another country, but the person she sent with her abandoned Aurore in the forest. Aurore hunted for a way out and finally found a shepherdess's cottage. She lamented her fate and blamed God; the shepherdess urged that God permitted misfortune only for the benefit of the unfortunate person, and offered to act the part of her mother. After some discussion of the fashionable but often dull life Aurore had been living, the shepherdess pointed out that age would make it less pleasant, and that she herself could teach Aurore how to live without boredom. Aurore agreed, and the shepherdess set her to a life divided into prayer, work, reading, and walks; Aurore found this life very agreeable because it was not dull.

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