With a nicely judged show of bravura, Rabinovitch starts each of the chapters in this impressive monograph by citing one of Claude Perrault’s famous fairytales. He neatly demonstrates that these episodes from “Puss in Boots,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and the rest revolve as much around issues in family relationships as did the life of their author and his brothers. The history of this distinguished family may well have been told as an assemblage of fascinating and divergent life-courses. Rabinovitch argues that their lives and careers make better sense if seen as playing out the family strategy for social advancement initiated by their father, Pierre Senior (?–1652), the son of a royal embroiderer from Tours who arrived in Paris in the early seventeenth century.
Pierre Senior advanced two of his sons—Pierre and Charles—through legal training. Claude moved into medicine and Nicholas into the church. Nicholas was less involved in the family strategy,...