From "The Little Mermaid" to "The Snow Queen", Hans Christian Andersen has left behind a rich collection of stories tinged with magic, but also with tragedy, which have kept a place of honor, from generation to generation, in children's libraries and the collective imagination. At the antipodes of the Grimm brothers' optimistic folk tales, the melancholy of his stories, sometimes crowned with a desperate end, speaks true to children and their parents alike. His tales, whose contemporary popularity also owes much to Disney, earned him immense fame from his maturity, beyond the borders of his native Denmark, even if the rest of his work (he was also a playwright, poet, novelist and short story writer) was hardly successful.