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The five Histoires ou Contes du temps passé read here through the prism of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, turn out to be as many allegories celebrating, under the sweet voice of Mother Goose, the ideas of the Moderns: praise of the French language, intended to dethrone by its natural grace the Latin and Greek languages (“Cendrillon”), promotion of a new figure of reader, called to collaborate with the author (“Le Chat botté”) rather than to be his dupe (“Le petit Chaperon rouge”), critique of the sublime and its supporters (“La Belle au bois dormant”; “Le petit Poucet”). If the polemic with Boileau thus pervades the whole collection, the satire unfolds “without venom and without malignancy,” through a play on the proverbial language where a new argument in favor of the French language can be spotted.