Jeanne-Marie+Leprince+De+Beaumont

= Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont =

Walt Disney was arguably the wealthiest, most famous, and most influential storyteller of our modern world. This is seen through the success of many of the films that were and still are being produced under his brand: Mickey Mouse, //Beauty and the Beast//, //The Lion King//, and many others; however, not all of Disney’s movies were originals thought of by Disney himself or by his co-workers. //Beauty and the Beast// - a tale of fantasy and French love, was not written by one of America’s best storytellers, but by one from France: Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont.

Who is She?
Beaumont was born in Rouen, France April 26, 1710 to Jean Baptiste Nicolas Leprince and Barbe Plantart; the oldest of her middle class family, she enrolled with her sister at age fourteen at the convent school in Ernement after losing her mother. She lived at the convent learning to become a nun and teach younger girls until 1735, when she moved back to her remarried father’s new home in Metz. She came to the court of Lunéville to take care of Elisabeth-Therese, the oldest daughter of Duke Leopold, who was married to Charles-Emmanuel III, King of Sardinia two years after De Beaumont came to the court.

However, soon after Elisabeth-Therese was married, the whole family moved away, and De Beaumont was soon jobless, having not moved with them. However, being in court introduced her to François-Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire, and Abbé Gabriel François Coyer, or their works, at the least. She married in 1743. History records that the marriage with her husband ended after two years, however different sources suggest different reasons for the separation, including divorce, annulment, or the death of her late husband in battle. She published her first book, The Triumph of Truth or Memoirs of M.de La Villette in 1748. She moved to London in 1750, where she then married again and had children while continuing to write books. She moved back to France in 1762, where she died on April 26, 1780.

What's her Importance?
As well as The Triumph of Truth or Memoirs of M. de La Villette, she also wrote Le Prince Chéri (Prince Darling), a story of a prince who learns the hard way that good behavior is always the key to happiness, Le Prince Désir (Prince Desire),A story about a prince who learns to accept his and other’s faults because of his stubborn refusal to admit and accept that he has a huge nose, and, probably her greatest work, La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast), in which a beautiful girl with a kind heart and good natured soul soon is forced to move to a farm house due to her father’s loss of fortune with her other siblings. The father soon is given an opportunity to regain his riches, but is then caught up in a financial disagreement and is just as poor as he was before he was given the opportunity. As he travels home, he finds a beautiful palace and stays there for the night, but as he is leaving, remembers his daughter’s request for a rose. When he attempts to take one, a beast confronts him, and the father agrees to give up one of his daughters to the beast. He returns to the palace soon after bringing his daughter, Beauty, and she lives with him for a while before asking to see her father again. The beast allows her to stay for a week, but when she doesn’t come back, he starves himself. Two days later, she comes back to find him basically dead, and finally agrees to marry him because she doesn’t want him to die. How and why that would save his life is unknown to all, but it does save his life and he is transformed again into a handsome, smart, and kind prince and they live happily ever after.

Impact
This story is one of the most well known stories of this modern generation. Of course, credit is due to Walt Disney for creating the film and distributing it to the people of America, Canada, and farther across the globe, however, the Disney version clearly misses some key elements of the story that made it what it was, for example, in the De Beaumont version, Beauty’s sisters are turned to statues for being envious and malicious to her sister, while her sister is rewarded with a kind, smart, and handsome prince, because she was kind to him and accepted his faults. Its easy to see why this story is more famous than Le Prince Chéri or Le Prince Désir. This is because La Belle et la Bête effectively combines messages from all of Mme De Beaumont’s stories. Not only do they all promote kindness and good behavior, which is good to put into a child’s bedtime stories, but they also tell of how cruelty, dishonesty, envy, and other “bad” attributes lead to punishment and ultimately, unhappiness. As these are messages parents try to teach, the stories easily become “go to's” for parents to tell their kids without having to only punish them when ever they do wrong, because if one only punishes their kids, wouldn’t it make sense that they would grow to fear and hate their parents? These stories allowed parents to be good to their kids while at the same time teach them the things that they could otherwise teach with punishment. Not only do they allow parents to teach their children, but it gives children a sense of security. For them, they need not despair when things go wrong, because in the fairy tale things went wrong but everything ended up okay in the tale. De Beaumont’s success came not from the quality of her writing, but from the messages she incorporated into her stories that were loved by both children and parents.