The Enchanted Forest by La Comtesse de Segur, translated by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, 1856, 1974.

This is an English translation and retelling of one of La Comtesse’s stories.  I can’t read French, and I’ve never read the original version of the story, but the translator, Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, had a note in the book that she altered the story slightly from its original version.

King Goodheart has a lovely little daughter named Goldenhair, who he loves very much.  Unfortunately, his wife dies, and his people urge him to remarry.  His new wife, Queen Meanette, is as mean as her name sounds, and she does not like Goldenhair at all.  The King, realizing this, does his best to keep her away from his daughter and puts his daughter in the care of some trusted servants. 

Meanette, still jealous of the love and attention the King gives Goldenhair, plots to get rid of her.  One of the princess’s attendants is a boy who takes her out in her little carriage in the garden every day.  The boy is greedy for sweets, and the queen bribes him into tricking the princess into going into the enchanted forest.  People who go into the forest have been known to disappear forever.  When the princess becomes lost in the forest, she is befriended by a cat who takes her to a palace where he lives with a doe.  They are very kind to her, but Goldenhair still longs for a way to return home.

One day, while Goldenhair is living with the cat and the doe in their palace, a parrot comes and claims that he knows a way that the princess can return home.  He insists that she leave the palace, against the doe’s wishes, and pick a single rose that grows in the forest.  What the girl doesn’t know is that the parrot is an evil wizard in disguise.  When the girl picks the rose, the doe’s palace is destroyed, and the evil wizard reveals himself. 

Thinking that she has killed her friends, Goldenhair wanders, lonely and miserable, through the forest.  Then, a large tortoise comes and tells her that her friends are still alive and that she can find out what happened to them if she’s willing to take a long journey on the tortoise’s back without saying a single word the whole time.  Goldenhair does so and arrives at a fine palace where she learns that the doe was really Fairy Kindheart and the cat was really her son, Prince Charming.  They had been turned into animals by the evil wizard, and they had been freed when the princess picked the rose.  However, the princess had then fallen under the spell of the evil wizard, and the other trials were necessary to free her.  Fairy Kindheart takes the princess home to her father, who is overjoyed to see her.  The King marries Fairy Kindheart, and Goldenhair marries Prince Charming, and they all live happily ever after.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Further Information

The life of La Comtesse de Segur, the original author of this story, is almost like a fairy tale itself. Her first name was Sophie, and she was born in 1799 in Russia.  Her father was a Russian Count, and she grew up with her seven siblings on his vast estate.  However, even though her family was wealthy, her mother believed that children shouldn’t have life easy.  Sophie and her brothers and sisters had to sleep on small, hard beds and were never given much food to eat or any sweets.  When she was 18, Sophie went to live in France, and she married a French Count named Eugene de Segur.  It was not a particularly happy marriage, but she had four daughters and four sons and many grandchildren.  She wrote stories for them and became the most popular children’s writer of her time in France.  She died in 1874, but her stories are still popular with children in France.

I found the story of La Comtess’s life even more interesting than the story in the book, although the story in the book isn’t bad. It seems like a pretty obvious variation on the story of Snow White, but it is a charming story.