Two Sides of a Coin: Why Perrault Keeps Giving Us Paired Morals

Readers often find it puzzling—if not irritating—that Charles Perrault sometimes ends his fairy tales with two morals instead of one, and morals that seem ill matched to the story in some cases. Sometimes they even contradict each other. But from a seventeenth-century perspective, they may be doing something deliberate.

Perrault spent much of his career designing medals and coins—objects that had two sides: on one side, a profile or public face, on the other, a symbolic image accompanied by a motto. Meaning does not reside on either side alone. It emerges through the act of turning the object over and holding both sides together in the mind. It was a kind of mobile reading.

1670. Jeton. Musée de Carnavalet. Device designed by Charles Perrault

Now consider the fairy tales.

Each tale is made up of three modes: an illustration, a prose tale, and one or two morals written in verse. What happens when we assume the reader needs to do some work finding meaning in the relationship of the parts to the whole? What happens when we relate one moral to the other to come up with a common third idea, as if the morals are two clues to a riddle? When La Barbe Bleue ends with two morals—one condemning female curiosity, the other calmly dismissing tyrannical husbands as relics of the past—perhaps the reader is not being asked to choose the “correct” one. The pairing itself is the mechanism. The friction between them creates a third idea that is not spelled out.

If we choose to read the tales in this way, the paired morals could behave less like conclusions and more like devices. They present two sides of a problem and ask the reader to supply the synthesis. They do not moralize in a single voice; they stage a comparison.

This has important consequences. It means the fairy tales are not simply instructing children or warning women. They are training readers—of any age—to find meaning in relationships between things and to understand visual and spatial arguments.

In this light, Perrault’s morals are not evasive. They are exacting. They refuse to collapse complexity into a single takeaway.

A coin, after all, is not ambiguous because it has two sides. It is functional because it does.