The 20 stories collected in the present volume, all written during the
19th century, may not be real contes de fées, in the sense of the
classic works of the Comtesse de Murat and Madame d'Aulnoy, but they do
retain conscious echoes of the originals, and despite the interference
in the genre's subsequent history, they maintain residues of the same
spirit as well as fragments of imagery.
Some writers developed the more broadly comic aspect of the genre;
others created "authentic" folkloristic materials in a semi-reverent
manner, while maintaining a certain contemporary relevance. Finally, a
few managed to take the reborn genre of contes de fées to new extreme of
symbolist fantasies in the pages of newspapers.
Taken together, these stories are a belated testament to the enterprise
and creativity of their distinguished predecessors of the 1690s.