What Is a Device—and Why Would a Fairy Tale Need One?

Device for Louis XIV. Courses de testes et de bagues. 1670.

In seventeenth-century France, a device was not a gadget. It was a way of thinking.

A device was a compact symbolic construction made of three parts:a symbolic image, a short inscription or motto, and an idea formed in the mind by the relationship between the two. Devices appeared everywhere in elite visual culture—on medals, coins, tapestries, buildings, carriages, and even clothing. They were worn or displayed by princes and nobles as symbolic portraits of their character, values, or aspirations.

Unlike coats of arms, devices were not inherited. They were chosen. They expressed an interior truth.

What makes devices especially interesting is how little they explain themselves. The motto does not name the image. The image does not illustrate the motto. Meaning happens only when the viewer brings them together and completes the thought. In this sense, a device is closer to a riddle than to an argument. It teaches by provoking recognition rather than delivering instruction.

By the mid-seventeenth century, devices had become a refined art form in France, shaped by strict conventions but also by playful ingenuity. They could be highly personal or overtly political. They could commemorate events, model virtues, or quietly advertise power. And crucially, they did not always require an illustration. Many devices circulated in books as descriptions alone, relying on the reader’s imagination to supply the image.

Device for a chavalier. Courses de testes et de bagues. 1670.

This matters because Charles Perrault—the man best known today for fairy tales—was deeply immersed in this culture. Long before he published Cendrillon or La Barbe Bleue, he spent decades designing devices for royal projects, medals, tapestries, and architectural programs. He even wrote a treatise explaining his own method for composing them.

In that treatise, Perrault offers a deceptively simple definition: a device is a comparison of two things, one shown and one implied, joined by a short phrase that applies equally to both. Once you grasp this, he says, you no longer need rules.

So what happens if we take this seriously?

What if Perrault’s fairy tales—especially their strange, compact moral verses—are doing something device-like? What if they are not simply morals about the story, but mechanisms designed to provoke an interior response in the reader? What if the moral is not a conclusion, but an instrument?

Device for Élizabeth-Charlotte D'Orléans. Contes de ma mère l'oye. Charles Perrault. 1695.

Seen this way, the fairy tale becomes a different kind of object. Not a lesson handed down, but a structure that assumes an active, intelligent reader—one capable of forming the image that is not shown.

This question sits at the heart of my upcoming talk, Designing Women: The Unillustrated Moralities of Perrault’s Fairy Tales, at the Stirling Maxwell Centre in February. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring how Perrault’s studio imagination works—Perrault doesn't tell us what to think, but designs forms that ask us to think.

Sometimes, what’s missing is the point.