Tonight, we’ll read a fairy tale called The White Cat, credited to Madame Comtesse d’Aulnoy. Madame d’Aulnoy’s tales were designed to entertain literary salon attendees for hours so they tended to be long, complicated and political. She could not openly criticize the regime of Louis the Fourteenth, or the way aristocratic women were entrapped within it, but she could tell her fairy tales, as in this one.