POPULAR TALES
This is a volume in the Arno Press
collection
INTERNATIONAL FOLKLORE
Advisory Editor

Richard M. Dorson
Editorial Board

Issachar Ben Ami

Vilmos Voigt
See last pages of this volume

for a complete list of titles
POPULAR TALES
[Charles Perrault]
Edited by

Andrew Lang



ARNO PRESS

A New York Times Company

New York / 1977
Editorial Supervision: LUCILLE MAIORCA

Reprint Edition 1977 by Arno Press Inc.
Reprinted from a copy in

    The Princeton University Library
INTERNATIONAL FOLKLORE

ISBN for complete set: 0-405-10077-9

See last pages of this volume for titles.
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Perrault, Charles, 1628-1703.

    Popular tales.
    (International folklore)

    Translation of selected tales from Contes.

    Reprint of the 1888 ed. published by the
Clarendon Press, Oxford.

    I. Lang, Andrew,
1844-1912.     II. Title.    
III. Series.

PQ1877.A25
1977    398.2    77-70607

ISBN 0-405-10118-X
PERRAULT'S POPULAR TALES
 LANG
London
HENRY FROWDE



Oxford University Press
Warehouse
Amen Corner, E.C.
PERRAULT'S
POPULAR TALES
EDITED
FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS, WITH

INTRODUCTION, &c.
BY
ANDREW LANG, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE



AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCLXXXVIII
[All rights reserved]
PREFACE.
This edition of the stories of Perrault is
intended partly as an introduction to the study of Popular Tales in
general. The text of the prose has been collated by M. Alfred Bauer
with that of the first edition (Paris, 1697), a book which probably
cannot be found in England. I have to thank M. Bauer for the kind
and minute care he has bestowed on his task. We have tried to restore
the original text of 1697, with its spelling, punctuation, use of
capital letters, and so forth. One might have compared the text of
Perrault's prose tales, as published in a book in 1697, with their
original form in Moetjens's Recueil or Magazine. Unluckily the
British Museum only possesses the earlier volumes of the Recueil, in
which the less important stories, those in verse, were first published.
The Text of the tales in Verse has been collated, by myself and Mrs.
Ogilby, with that of the Recueil. The Paris editions of 1694 and 1695
I have never seen. In his 'Contes en Prose de Charles Perrault'
(Jouaust, Paris, 1876), M. Paul Lacroix published the more
important readings in which the Recueil differed from the ultimate text.
The changes shew good taste on the part of Perrault: one or two
tedious gallantries, out of keeping with the stories, were removed by
him.
Two of the most useful books that have been read by me in
preparing this edition are M. André Lefèvre's edition of the
Contes, with his bibliographical and other notes, and the 'Contes de Ma
Mère L'Oye avant Charles Perrault,' by the late M. Charles Deulin.
I have also read, I think, most of the modern editions of the Contes
which offer any fresh criticism or information, and acknowledgments will
be found in the proper place.
The Introduction contains a brief sketch of Perrault, and
of the circumstances in which his tales were composed and published.
Each prose story has also been made the subject of a special comparative
research; its wanderings and changes of form have been observed, and it
is hoped that this part of the work may be serviceable to students of
Folklore and
Mythology.
In this little book, as in all researches into tradition, I have
received much aid from the writings and from the kind suggestions of
M. Henri Gaidoz, and from the knowledge and experience of Mr.
Alfred Nutt. It is almost superfluous to add that without the
industry of such students as Herr Reinhold Köhler, M. Paul Sébillot,
Mr. Ralston, M. Cosquin, and very many others, these studies of story
could never have been produced.
A. L.
INTRODUCTION.
CHARLES PERRAULT.
In Eisen's portrait of Charles Perrault, the medallion
which holds the good-natured face under the large perruque is
being wreathed with flowers by children. Though they do not, for the
most part, know the name of their benefactor, it is children who keep
green the memory of Perrault, of the author of Puss in Boots and
Bluebeard. He flies for ever vivu' per ora virum, borne on
the wings of the fabulous Goose, notre Mère L'Oye. He looked, no
doubt, for no such immortality, and, if he ever thought of posthumous
fame, relied on his elaborate Parallèle des Anciens et des
Modernes (4 vols. Paris, 1688-96). But fate decided differently, and
he who kept open the Tuileries gardens in the interests of children for
ever, owes the best of his renown to a book in the composition of which
he was aided by a child.
Though a man of unimpeached respectability of conduct, Charles
Perrault was a born Irregular. He was a truant from school, a deserter
of the Bar, an architect without professional training, a man of letters
by inclination, a rebel against the tyranny of the classics, and
immortal by a kind of accident.
He did many things well, above all the things that he had not been
taught to do, and he did best of all the thing which nobody expected him
to have done. A vivid, genial and indomitable character and humour made
him one of the best-liked men of his age, and better remembered than
people with far higher contemporary reputation than his own.
Charles Perrault, as he tells us in his Mémoires (1769, Patte,
Paris; 1 vol. in 12), was born at Paris, on January 12, 1628. At the age
of nine he was sent to the Collége de Beauvais, and was aided in his
studies by his father, at home. He was always at the head of his form,
after leaving the Sixth (the lowest) which he entered before he had
quite learned to read. He was not a prodigy of precocious instruction,
happily for himself. He preferred exercises in verse, and excelled in
these, though the gods had not made him poetical. In the class of
Philosophy he was deeply interested, wrangling with his teacher, and
maintaining, characteristically, that his arguments were better than the
stock themes, 'because they were new.' Thus the rebel against the
Ancients raised his banner at school, where one recruit flocked to it, a
boy called Beaurin. Young Perrault and his friend took a formal farewell
of their master, and solemnly seceded to the garden of the Luxembourg,
where they contrived a plan of study for themselves. For three or four
years they read together as chance or taste directed: this course had
not in it the making of a scholar.
Perrault's first literary effort was a burlesque of the Sixth book of
the Æneid, a thing rather too sacred for parody in Scarron's manner. His
brother the doctor took a hand in this labour, and Perrault says 'the
MS. is on the shelf where there are no books but those written by
members of the Family.' The funniest thing was held to be the couplet on
the charioteer Tydacus, in the shades,

Qui, tenant l'ombre d'une brosse,
Nettoyait l'ombre d'un carrosse.

Perrault, as a young man, was moderately interested in the
fashionable controversy about Grace, pouvoir prochain et pouvoir
éloigné, and the jargon of the quarrel between Port Royal and the
Jesuits. His brother, a doctor of the Sorbonne, explained the question,
'and we saw there was nothing in it to justify the noise it made.' He
persuaded himself, however, that this little conference was the occasion
of the Lettres Provinciales. The new Editor will doubtless deal
with this pretension when he comes to publish Pascal's Life in the
series of Grands Ecrivains de la France. Unlike Perrault, Pascal
thought 'que le sujet des disputes de Sorbonne étoit bien important et
d'une extrême conséquence pour la religion.'
The first of the Provincial Letters is dated January 23, 1656.
Charles Perrault was now twenty-eight. In 1651 he had taken his
licences at Orleans, where degrees were granted with scandalous
readiness. Perrault and his friends wakened the learned doctors in the
night, returned ridiculous answers to their questions, chinked their
money in their bags,—and passed. The same month they were all
admitted to the Bar. His legal reading was speculative, and he proposed
the idea of codifying the various customs; but the task waited for
Napoleon. Wearying of the Bar he accepted a place under his brother,
Receiver-General of Paris. In this occupation he remained from 1654 to
1664. He had plenty of leisure for study, his brother had bought an
excellent library, and Perrault speaks of 'le plaisir que j'eus de me
voir au milieu de tant de bons livres.' He made verses, which were
handed about and attributed to Quinault. That poet, getting a copy from
Perrault, permitted a young lady whom he was courting to think they were
his own. Perrault claimed them, and 'M. Quinault se trouvait un peu
embarrassé.' However, when Quinault said that a lady was in the case,
the plagiary was forgiven. Perrault afterwards wrote a defence of his
Alceste. A trifling piece which Perrault composed on this little
affair pleased Fouquet, who had it copied on vellum, with miniatures and
gilt capitals.
In 1657 Perrault directed the construction of a house for his
brother. The skill and taste he shewed induced Colbert to make him his
subaltern in the superintendence of the Royal buildings, in 1663. A
vision of a completed Louvre, and of 'obelisks, pyramids, triumphal
arches, and mausoleums,' floated before the mind of Colbert. Then there
would be fêtes and masquerades to describe, and as Chapelain
recommended Perrault, who was already the author of some loyal odes,
(such as the wise write about Jubilee times,) he finally received an
elegant appointment, with 500, later 1000 livres a year. This he
enjoyed till 1683. A little Academy of Medals and Inscriptions grew into
existence: Perrault edited panegyrics on the king, and made designs for
Gobelin tapestries.
Perrault's next feat was the suggestion of the peristyle of the
Louvre, introduced into the design of his brother Claude, the architect.
After the Chevalier Bernini had been summoned from Rome to finish the
Louvre, and had been treated with sumptuous hospitality, a variety of
disputes and difficulties arose, and, by merit or favour, the plan of
Perrault's brother, Claude, by profession a physician, was chosen and
executed. People said 'que l'architecture devoit être bien malade,
puisqu'on la mettait entre les mains des médecins.'
'M. Colbert asked me for news of the Academy, supposing that I was a
member. I told him that I could not satisfy him, as I had not the honour
of belonging to that company. He seemed surprised, and said I ought to
be admitted. "'Tis a set of men for whom the king has a great regard,
and as business prevents me from often attending their councils, I
should be glad to hear from you what passes. You should stand at the
next vacancy."' So writes Perrault, and he did become a candidate for
Immortality. But a lady had begged the next place for an Abbé, and next
time, a doctor had secured it for a curé. Finally, the Academy
elected Perrault, he says, without any canvass on his part. Perrault
introduced election for the Academy by ballot, and he himself invented
and provided a little balloting machine, which he does not describe. One
day when the King was being publicly rubbed down after a game at tennis,
an Academician prayed that the Academy might be allowed to read
addresses to his Majesty. The King, who had probably given some courtier
the side walls and a beating, graciously permitted the Academy to add
its voice to the chorus of flattery. Perrault now disported himself
among harangues, the new Versailles fountains, grottoes, arches of
triumph, and royal devices, his brother executing his designs. They were
sunny years, and Le Roi Soleil beamed upon the house of Perrault. But a
dispute between his brother, the receiver of taxes, and Colbert caused a
coolness between Charles Perrault and the Minister. M. Perrault also
married a young lady to please himself, not to please Colbert. But,
before leaving the service of the Minister, the good Perrault had
succeeded in saving the Tuileries gardens for the people of Paris, and
for the children, when it was proposed to reserve them to the Royal use.
'I am persuaded,' he said, 'that the gardens of Kings are made so great
and spacious that all their children may walk in them.' We owe Perrault
less gratitude for aiding Lulli, who obtained the monopoly of Opera, a
privilege adverse to the interests of Molière. If Perrault thought at
all of the interests of Molière, he probably remembered that his own
brother was a physician, and that physicians were Molière's favourite
butts. 'Il ne devait pas tourner en ridicule les bons Médecins, que
l'Ecriture nous enjoint d'honorer,' says Perrault in his Eloges des
Hommes Illustres (1696-1700). Molière's own influence with the king
corrected the influence of Lulli, and he obtained the right to give
musical pieces, in spite of Lulli's privilege, but he did not live long
to enjoy it[1].
Ten years afterwards Colbert became si difficile et si
chagrin, that Perrault withdrew quietly from his service. He had
been employed in public functions for twenty years (1663-1683), he was
over fifty, and he needed rest. Louvois excluded him on the death of
Colbert from the petite Académie. He devoted himself to the
education of his children, who were 'day-boarders' at the colleges, and
returned at night to the paternal house in the Faubourg St. Jacques.
'Les mœurs ne sont pas en si grande sûreté' at a public school,
Perrault thought. In 1686 he published his 'Saint Paulin Evesque de
Nole, avec une Epistre Chrestienne sur la Penitence, et une Ode aux
Nouveaux Convertis.' (Paris, J. R. Coignard.) It is dedicated to
Bossuet, in a letter, and Perrault trusts that great poets will follow
his example, and write on sacred subjects. Happily his example was not
followed, la raillerie et l'amour possessing stronger attractions
for minstrels, as Perrault complains. He throws his stone at Comedy,
which Bossuet notably disliked and condemned. But this did not prevent
Perrault, seven years later, from writing little comedies of his own.
Saint Paulin is prettily illustrated with vignettes on copper
after Sebastien le Clerc, vignettes much better than those which hardly
decorate Histoires ou Contes du Tems passé. An angel appearing to
Saint Paulin in gardens exactly like the parterres of Versailles is
particularly splendid and distinguished. As for the poem, 'qui eut assez
de succès malgré les critiques de quelques personnes d'esprit,' the
story is not badly told, for the legend of the Bishop has a good deal of
the air of a conte, reclaimed for sacred purposes. The Ode aux
Nouveaux Convertis is not a success. Perrault comparing Reason to
Faith, says that Reason makes the glories beheld by Faith disappear, as
the Sun scatters the stars. This was an injudicious admission. The
Saint Paulin may be bought for two or three francs, while the
Histoires ou Contes, when last sold by public auction in the
original edition (Nodier's copy, at the Hamilton Sale, May 1884),
fetched £85. It is a commercial but not inaccurate test of merit.
Perrault's Mémoires end just where they begin to be
interesting. He tells us how he read his poem Le Siècle de Louis
XIV, to the Academy, how angrily Boileau declared that the poem was
an insult to the great men of times past, how Huet took Perrault's side,
how Boileau wrote epigrams against him, how Racine pretended not to
think him in earnest, and how he defended himself in Le Parallèle des
Anciens et des Modernes. Here close the Memoirs, and the hero of the
great Battle of the Books leaves its tale untold.
The quarrel is too old and too futile to require a long history.
Perrault's remarks on Homer, the cause of the war, merely show that
Perrault was quite out of sympathy with the heroic age and with heroic
song. He avers that, if a favourable Heaven had permitted Homer to be
born under Louis XIV, Homer would have been a much better poet.

'Cent défauts qu'on impute au siècle où tu naquis
   
Ne profaneroient pas tes ouvrages exquis[2].'
   

Men of letters who were men of sense would have smiled and let
Perrault perorate. But men of letters are rarely men of sense, and
dearly love a brawl. M. E. de Goncourt once complained that M. Paul de
St. Victor looked at him 'like a stuffed bird,' because M. de Goncourt
declared that Providence had created antiquity to prevent pedagogues
from starving. Boileau was not less indignant with Perrault, who, by the
way, in his poem had damned Molière with faint praise, and had not
praised La Fontaine, Racine, and Boileau at all. The quarrel 'thundered
in and out the shadowy skirts' of Literature for ten years. Boileau
turned and rent the architect-physician Claude Perrault in his Art
Poétique. But Boileau, stimulated by Conti, who wrote on his
fauteuil, 'tu dors, Brutus,' chiefly thundered in his
Réflexions Critiques on Longinus (1694). 'He makes four errors,
out of ignorance of Greek, and a fifth out of ignorance of Latin,' is an
example of Boileau's amenities. Why Boileau should have written at such
length and so angrily on un livre que personne ne lit, he does
not explain. Perrault kept his temper, Boileau displayed his learning.
Arnauld had the credit of making a personal peace between the foes.
Boileau suppressed some of his satirical lines (Satire X. line 459), and
we now read them only in the foot-notes. Boileau's letter to Arnauld, in
which he expresses his willingness even to read Saint Paulin for
the sake of a peaceful life, is not unamusing. 'Faut-il lire tout
Saint Paulin? Vous n'avez qu'à dire: rien ne me sera difficile'
(June 1694). Meanwhile Perrault, in his comedy L'Oublieux, was
mocking people who think it a fine thing 'to publish old books with a
great many notes[3].' But Perrault himself was
about to win his own fame by publishing versions of old traditional
Fairy Tales.
The following essay traces the history and bibliography of these
Tales. Perrault's last years were occupied with his large illustrated
book, Eloges des Hommes Illustres du Siècle de Louis XIV (2 vols.
in folio. 102 portraits.) He died on May 16, 1703. His fair enemy in the
bookish battle, Madame Dacier, says 'il étoit plein de piété, de
probité, de vertu, poli, modeste, officieux, fidèle à tous les devoirs
qu'exigent les liaisons naturelles et acquises; et, dans un poste
considérable auprès d'un des plus grands ministres que la France ait eus
et qui l'honoroit de sa confiance, il ne s'est jamais servi de sa faveur
pour sa fortune particulière, et il l'a toujours employée pour ses
amis.'
Charles Perrault was a good man, a good father, a good Christian, and
a good fellow. He was astonishingly clever and versatile in little
things, honest, courteous, and witty, and an undaunted amateur. The
little thing in which he excelled most was telling fairy tales. Every
generation listens in its turn to this old family friend of all the
world. No nation owes him so much as we of England, who, south of the
Scottish, and east of the Welsh marches, have scarce any popular tales
of our own save Jack the Giant Killer, and who have given the full fairy
citizenship to Perrault's Petit Poucet and La Barbe
Bleue.
[1] Registre de La
Grange, p. 11.
 
[2] 'Exquis' is
good.
 
[3] L'Oublieux
was written in 1691. It was printed from the MS. by M. Hippolyte Lucas.
Académie des Bibliophiles, Paris, 1868.

PERRAULT'S POPULAR TALES.
'Madame Coulanges, who is with me till to-morrow, was good
enough to tell us some of the stories that they amuse the ladies with at
Versailles. They call this mitonner, so she mitonned us,
and spoke to us about a Green Island, where a Princess was brought up,
as bright as the day! The Fairies were her companions, and the Prince of
Pleasure was her lover, and they both came to the King's court, one day,
in a ball of glass. The story lasted a good hour, and I spare you much
of it, the rather as this Green Isle is in the midst of Ocean, not in
the Mediterranean, where M. de Grignan might be pleased to hear of its
discovery.'
So Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter, on the 6th of August,
1676.
The letter proves that fairy tales or contes had come to
Court, and were in fashion, twenty years before Charles Perrault
published his Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, our 'Mother Goose's
Tales.' The apparition of the simple traditional stories at Versailles
must have resembled the arrival of the Goose Girl, in her shabby
raiment, at the King's Palace[4]. The stories came in their rustic
weeds, they wandered out of the cabins of the charcoal burners, out of
the farmers' cottages, and, after many adventures, reached that
enchanted castle of Versailles. There the courtiers welcomed them
gladly, recognised the truant girls and boys of the Fairy world as
princes and princesses, and arrayed them in the splendour of
Cinderella's sisters, 'mon habit de velours rouge, et ma garniture
d'Angleterre; mon manteau à fleurs d'or et ma barrière de diamans qui
n'est pas des plus indifférentes.' The legends of the country folk,
which had been as simple and rude as Peau d'Ane in her scullion's
disguise, shone forth like Peau d'Ane herself, when she wore her
fairy garments, embroidered with the sun and moon in thread of gold and
silver. We can see, from Madame de Sévigné's letter, that the
Märchen had been decked out in Court dress, in train and
feathers, as early as 1676. When the Princess of the Green Isle, and the
Prince of Pleasures alighted from their flying ball of crystal, in
Madame Coulanges' tale, every one cried, 'Cybele is descending among
us!' Cybele is remote enough from the world of fairy, and the whole story, like the stories
afterwards published by Madame d'Aulnoy, must have been a highly
decorated and scarcely recognisable variant of some old tradition.
How did the fairy
tales get presented at Court, and thence win their way, thanks to
Perrault, into the classical literature of France? Probably they were
welcomed partly in that spirit of sham simplicity, which moved Louis XIV
and his nobles and ladies to appear in Ballets as shepherds and
shepherdesses[5]. In later days the witty
maidens of Saint Cyr became aweary of sermons on la simplicité.
They used to say, by way of raillery, 'par simplicité je prends la
meilleure place,' 'par simplicité A Paris. Par Robert Ballard.
M.DC.LXIII.] je vais me louer,' 'par simplicité je veux ce qu'il y a de
plus loin de moi sur une table.' This, as Madame de Maintenon remarked,
was 'laughing at serious things,' at sweet simplicity, which first
brought Fairy Tales to the Œil de Bœuf[6].
Mlle. L'Heritier in Bigarrures Ingénieuses (p. 237) expressly
says, 'Les Romances modernes tâchent d'imiter la simplicité des Romances
antiques.' It is curious that Madame de Maintenon did not find this
simplicity simple enough for her pupils at St. Cyr. On the 4th of March,
1700, when the fashion for fairy tales was at its height, she wrote to
the Comte d'Ayen on the subject of harmless literature for
demoiselles, and asked him to procure something, 'mais non des
contes de fées ou de Peau d'Ane, car je n'en veux point[7].'
Indeed it is very probable that weariness of the long novels and
pompous plays of the age of Louis XIV made people find a real charm in
the stories of Cendrillon, and La Belle au Bois Dormant.
For some reason, however, the stories (as current in France) existed
only by word of mouth, and in oral narrative, till near the end of the
century. In 1691 Charles Perrault, now withdrawn from public life, and
busy fighting the Battle of the Books with Boileau, published
anonymously his earliest attempt at story telling, unless we reckon
L'Esprit Fort, a tale of light and frivolous character. The new
story was La Marquise de Salusses, ou la Patience de Griselidis,
nouvelle[8]. Griselidis is not
precisely a popular tale, as Perrault openly borrowed his matter from
Boccaccio, and his manner (as far as in him lay) from La Fontaine. He
has greatly softened the brutality of the narrative as Boccaccio tells
it, and there is much beauty in his description of the young Prince lost
in the forest, after one of those Royal hunts in Rambouillet or Marly
whose echoes now scarce reach us, faint and fabulous as the horns of
Roland or of Arthur[9]. Nay, there is a certain
simple poetry and sentiment of Nature, in Griselidis, which comes
strangely from a man of the Town and the Court. The place where the
wandering Prince encounters first his shepherdess

'Clair de ruisseaux et sombre de verdure
Saisissait les esprits d'une secrete horreur;
La simple et naive nature
 S'y faisoit voir si belle et si pure,
Que mille fois il benit son erreur.'

So the Prince rides on his way

'Rempli de douces reveries
Qu'inspirent les grands bois, les eaux et les
   prairies.'

The sentiment is like Madame de Sévigné's love of her woods at Les
Rochers, the woods where she says goodbye to the Autumn colours, and
longs for the fairy feuille qui chante, and praises 'the
crystal October days.' Of all this there is nothing in Boccaccio.
Perrault, of course, does not repeat the brutalities of the Italian
tyrant, in which Boccaccio takes a kind of pleasure, while Chaucer veils
them in his kindly courtesy.
To Griselidis Perrault added an amusing little essay on the
vanity of Criticism, and the varying verdicts of critics. In this Essay,
Perrault apparently shews us the source from which he directly drew his
matter, namely Boccaccio in the popular form of the chap-books called
La Bibliothèque Bleue. 'If I had taken out everything that every
critic found fault with,' he says, 'I had done better to leave the story
in its blue paper cover, where it has been for so many years.' Thus
Perrault borrowed from the Bibliothèque Bleue, not the Bibliothèque
Bleue, as M. Maury fancied, from Perrault[10].
In 1694 Moetjens, the bookseller at The Hague, began to publish a
little Miscellany, or Magazine, in the form of the small Elzevir
collection, called Recueil de pièces curieuses et nouvelles, tant en
prose qu'en vers. Perrault had already published Les Souhaits
Ridicules, in a Society paper, Le Mercure Galant (Nov. 1693). He now
reprinted this piece, with Griselidis and Peau d'Ane, in
Moetjens' Recueil[11]. These versified tales
caused some discussion, and were rather severely handled by anonymous
writers in the Recueil. In 1694, Perrault put forth the three,
with the introductions and essay, in a small volume. Probably each tale
had appeared separately, but these treasures of the book-hunter are
lost. Another edition came out, with a new preface, in 1695[12].
This is the early bibliographical history, as far as it has been
traced by M. André Lefèvre, of the stories in verse. They received a
good deal of unfriendly criticism, and Perrault was said, in Peau
d'Ane, to have presented the public with his own natural covering.
This witticism, rather lacking in finish, is attributed to Boileau in an
epigram published in Moetjens' Recueil. Boileau was still
irritated with Perrault for his conduct in the great Battle of the Books
between the Ancients and Moderns. By a curious revenge Perrault, who had
blamed Homer for telling, in the Odyssey, old wives' fables, has found,
in old wives' fables, his own immortality. In the Parallèle, iii.
p. 117, the Abbé quotes Longinus, and his admiration of certain
hyperboles in Homer. The Chevalier, another speaker in the dialogue,
replies, 'this sort of Homeric hyperbole is only imitated by people who
tell stories like Peau d'Ane, and introduce Ogres in
seven-leagued boots (bottes à sept lieues).' The 'seven-leagued
boots' are in the Chevalier's fancy an apt parallel to the prodigious
bounds made by the horses of Discord, in the Iliad. Thus, even before
Perrault began to write fairy
tales, he and Boileau had a very pretty quarrel about Peau
d'Ane. Boileau happened to remember that Zoilus of old had reviled
Homer for his contes de Vieilles, and thus he could
conscientiously treat Perrault as a new Zoilus. In the fifth volume of
his works (Paris, 1772), in which these amenities are republished, there
is a Vignette by Van der Meer representing Homer, very old and timid,
cowering behind a shield which Boileau, like Ajax, holds up for his
protection, while Perrault, in a sword and cocked hat, throws arrows at
the blind bard of Chios. The strange thing is that they were all in the
right. The Odyssey, as Fénelon's Achilles tells Homer in Hades, and as
Perrault knew, is a mass of popular tales, but then these are moulded by
the poet's art into an epic which Boileau could not over-praise[13].
In the edition of his stories in verse, published in 1695, Perrault
replied to the criticisms that reached him, 'I have to do,' he said,
'with people who can only be moved by Authority, and the example of the
Ancients;' meaning Boileau and the survivors of the great literary feud.
Perrault therefore adduces old instances of classical contes, the
Milesian Tales, and Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. 'The
Moral of Cupid and Psyche,' he says, 'I shall compare to that of
Peau d'Ane, when once I know what it is.' Then he declares that
his Contes have abundance of moral, which is true, but there are morals
even in Cupid and Psyche. He sketches, very pleasantly, the
enjoyment of children in those old wives' fables; 'on les voit dans la
tristesse et dans l'abattement tant que le héros ou l'héroïne du conte
sont dans le malheur, et s'écrier de joie quand le temps de leur bonheur
arrive.' Indeed this was and is the best apology for M. Perrault of the
French Academy, when he stooped his great perruque to listen to his
little boy's repetition of his nurse's stories, and recorded them in the
chronicles of Mother Goose.
Had Perrault only written contes in verse, it is probable that
he would now be known chiefly as an imitator of La Fontaine. Happily he
went further, and printed seven stories in prose. It is by these that he
really lives, now that his architectural exploits, his sacred poems, his
Defence of the Moderns, are all forgotten save by the learned. His
Fairies have saved him from oblivion, and the countless editions and
translations of his Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, have won him
immortality[14].
The tales in prose appeared in Moetjens' Recueil in the
following order: In 1696, in the second part of Volume V, came La
Belle au Bois Dormant (our 'Sleeping Beauty'); and in 1697 (Vol. V.
part 4), came Le Petit Chaperon Rouge ('Red Riding Hood'), La
Barbe Bleue ('Blue-beard'), Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botté
('Puss in Boots,' or 'The Master Cat'), Les Fées ('The Fairy'),
Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre ('Cinderilla,' in the
older English versions, now 'Cinderella'), Riquet à la Houppe
('Riquet of the Tuft'), and Le Petit Poucet ('Hop o' My Thumb,
Little Thumb').
While Moetjens was producing these in his Miscellany, there was
published in Paris, at Perrault's bookseller's (Guignard), a little
volume called Bigarrures Ingénieuses, ou Recueil de diverses Pièces
galantes en prose et en vers. The author was Mlle. L'Heritier de
Villaudon, a relation of Perrault's. It is to his daughter, a
Mademoiselle Perrault, that she addresses her first piece, Marmoisan
ou l'Innocente Tromperie. The author says she was lately in a
company where people began to praise M. Perrault's Griselidis,
Peau d'Ane and Les Souhaits. They spoke also of 'the
excellent education which M. Perrault gives his children, of their
ingenuity, and finally of the Contes naifs which one of his young
pupils has lately written with so much charm. A few of these stories
were narrated and led on to others.' Marmoisan is one of the
others, and Mlle. L'Heritier says she told it, 'avec quelque broderie
qui me vint sur le champ dans l'esprit.' The tale is, indeed, all
embroidery, beneath which the original stuff is practically lost[15]. But the listener asked the narrator to offer
it 'à ce jeune Conteur, qui occupe si spirituellement les amusemens de
son enfance.'
In a later page she wonders that the Contes should have been 'handed
to us from age to age, without any one taking the trouble to write them
out.' Then she herself takes the trouble to write the story of Diamonds
and Toads, a story known in a rough way to the Kaffirs—and
hopelessly spoils it by her broderie, and by the introduction of
a lay figure called Eloquentia Nativa (Les Enchantemens de
l'Eloquence, ou Les Effets de la Douceur). One has only to
compare Mlle. L'Heritier's literary and embroidered Eloquentia
with Perrault's Les Fées (the original of our Diamonds and
Toads), to see the vast difference between his manner, and that of
contemporary conteurs. Perrault would never have brought in a
Fairy named Eloquentia Nativa. Mlle. L'Heritier's
Eloquentia (1696) was in the field before Perrault's unembroidered version, Les
Fées, which appeared in Moetjens' Recueil in 1697. The Lady
writes:

'Cent et Cent fois ma Gouvernante
Au lieu de Fables d'animaux[16]
M'a raconté les traits moraux
De cette Histoire surprenante.'

Here, then, is Mlle. L'Heritier speaking of one of Perrault's
children who has written the fairy tales, 'with so much charm.' At this
very time (1696-1697), fairy
tales, 'written with much charm,' in prose, and without the
author's name, were appearing in Moetjens' Recueil. In 1697 these
prose contes were collected, published, and declared to be by P.
Darmancour, Perrault's little boy, to whom the Privilége du Roy
is granted[17].
Critics have often declared that Perrault merely used the boy's name
as a cover for his own, because it did not become an Academician to
publish fairy tales,
above all in prose. It may be noted that Perrault did not employ his
usual publisher, Coignard, but went to Barbin. There might also have
been a hope that little Perrault Darmancour, while shielding his father,
'fit parfaitement bien sa Cour en même tems,' like Le Petit
Poucet. Considering how Perrault's other works are forgotten, and
how his Tales survive, and regarding his boy as partly their author, we
may even apply to him the Moral of Le Petit Poucet.

'Quelquefois, cependant, c'est ce petit Marmot
Qui fera le bonheur de toute la famille!'

The dedication, signed P. Darmancour, is addressed to Mademoiselle,
and contains very agreeable flattery of the sister of the future
Regent[18]. These motives would, indeed, account for
Perrault's use of his boy's name. But it had occurred to me, before
discovering the similar opinion of M. Paul Lacroix, that P. Darmancour
really was the author of the Contes, or at least a
collaborateur[19]. The naïveté, and popular
traditional manner of their telling, recognised by all critics, and the
cause of their popularity, was probably given by the little lad who, as
Mlle. L'Heritier said, a year before the tales were published, 'a mis
depuis peu les Contes sur le papier avec tant d'agrément.' The child,
according to this theory, wrote out, by way of exercise, the stories as
he heard them, not from brodeuses in Society, but from his Nurse,
or from old women on his father's estates. The evidence of Madame de
Sévigné and of Mlle. L'Heritier, as well as the testimony of the
contes which ladies of rank instantly took to printing, shews how
the stories were told in Society. Allegorical and other names were given
to the characters, usually nameless in Märchen. Historical
circumstances were introduced, and references to actual events in the
past. Esprit raged assiduously through the narratives. Moreover
the traditional tales were so confounded that Madame d'Aulnoy, in
Finette Cendron, actually mixes Cinderella with Hop o'
My Thumb[20].
Contrast with these refinements, these superfluities, and
incoherences, the brevity, directness, and simplicity of Histoires et
Contes du Tems passé. They have the touch of an intelligent child,
writing down what he has heard told in plain language by plain people.
They exactly correspond, in this respect, to the Hindoo folk tales collected from
the lips of Ayahs by Miss Maive Stokes, who was a child when her
collection was published.
But, if the little boy thus furnished the sketch, it is indubitable
that the elderly Academician and beau esprit touched it up, here
toning down an incident too amazing for French sobriety and logic, there
adding a detail of contemporary court manners, or a hit at some foible
or vanity of men. 'Livre unique entre tous les livres,' cries M. Paul de
St. Victor, 'mêlé de la sagesse du vieillard et de la candeur de
l'enfant!' This delightful blending of age and youth (which here
can 'live together') is probably due to the collaboration we
describe.
Were it a pious thing to dissect Perrault's Contes, as
Professors of all nations mangle the sacred body of Homer, we might
actually publish a text in which the work of the original Darmancour and
of the paternal Diaskeuast should be printed in different
characters. Without carrying mere guess-work to this absurd extent,
cannot one detect the older hand in places like this,—the Ogre's
wife finds that her husband has killed his own children by misadventure:
'Elle commenca par s'évanouir (car c'est le premier expédient que
trouvent presque toutes les femmes en pareilles rencontres)'? One can
almost see the Academician writing in that sentence on the margin of the
boy's copy. Again, at the end of Le Petit Poucet, we read that he
made a fortune by carrying letters from ladies to their lovers, 'ce fut
là son plus large gain. Il se trouvoit quelques femmes qui le
chargeoient de lettres pour leurs maris, mais elles le payoient si mal,
et cela alloit à si peu de chose, qu'il ne daignoit mettre en ligne de
conte ce qu'il gagnoit de ce côté-là.' That is the Academician's jibe,
and it is he who makes Petit Poucet buy Offices 'de la nouvelle création
pour sa famille.' 'You never did that of your own wit,' as the Giant
says to the Laddie in the Scotch story, Nicht, Nought,
Nothing. But 'Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?'
'Je ne vois rien que le Soleil qui poudroye et l'herbe qui verdoye!' or
'Tire la chevillette,
le bobinette cherra,' or 'Elle alla donc bien loin, bien loin, encore
plus loin'; there the child is listening to the old and broken
voice of tradition, mumbling her ancient burden while the cradle rocks,
and the spinning-wheel turns and hums.
It is to this union of old age and childhood, then, of peasant
memories, and memories of Versailles, to this kindly handling of
venerable legends, that Perrault's Contes owe their perennial
charm. The nursery tale is apt to lose itself in its wanderings, like
the children in the haunted forest; Perrault supplies it with the clue
that guides it home. A little grain of French common sense ballasts
these light minions of the Moon, the elves; with a little toss of Court
powder on the locks, pulveris exigui jactu, he tames the wild
fée into the Fairy Godmother, a grande dame de par le monde, with
an agate crutch-handle on her magic wand. 'His young Princesses, so
gentle and so maidenly, have just left the convent of Saint Cyr. The
King's sons have the proud courtesy of Dauphins of France: the Maids of
Honour, the Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber, the red-nosed Swiss guards,
sleep through the slumber of the Belle au Bois Dormant[21].'
They are all departed now, Dukes and Vicomtes and Princes, the Swiss
Guards have gone, that made the best end of any, the hunting horn is
still, and silent is the spinning wheel. The great golden coaches have
turned into pumpkins again, the coachman has jumped down from his box,
and hidden in his rat-hole, the Dragoon and the Hussar have clattered
off for ever, the Duchesses dance no more in the minuet, nor the fairies
on the haunted green. But in Perrault's enchanted book they are all with
us, figures out of every age, the cannibal ogre that little Zulu and
Ojibbeway children fear not unreasonably; the starving wood-cutter in
the famines Racine deplored; the Princess, so like Mademoiselle; the
Fairy Godmother you might mistake for Madame d'Epernon; the talking
animals escaped from the fables of days when man and beast were all on
one level with gods, and winds, and stars. In Perrault's fairy-land is
room for all of them, and room for children too, who wander hither out
of their own world of fancy, and half hope that the Sleeping Beauty
dwells behind the hedge of yew, or think to find the dangerous distaff
in some dismantled chamber.
The Histoires et Contes du Tems Passé must clearly have been
successful, though scant trace of their success remains in the criticism
of the time[22]. We may measure it by the
fleet of other books of fairy tales which 'pursue the triumph and
partake the gale.' The Contes de Fées of Mad. La Comtesse de
M—— (Murat) were published by Barbin in 1698. How little the
manner resembles Perrault's 'fairy-way of writing,' how much it deserves
the censure of the Abbé de Villiers, may be learned from the opening
sentence of Le Parfait Amour. 'Dans un de ces agréables pais qui
sont dependans de l'Empire des Fées, regnoit la redoutable Danamo, elle
estoit scavante dans son art, cruelle dans ses actions, et glorieuse de
l'honneur d'estre descendue de la célèbre Calipso, dont les charmes
eurent la gloire et le pouvoir en arrestant le fameux Ulisse, de
triompher de la prudence des vainqueurs de Troye.'
The second story, Anguillette, is so far natural, that it
contains a friendly Eel (as in the Mangaian legend of the Eel-lover of
Ina); but this Eel is a fairy, condemned to wear the form of a fish, for
certain days in each month. These narratives are almost unreadable, and
scarcely keep a trace of the popular tradition. The tales of Madame
d'Aulnoy, on the other hand, introduced the White Cat, the
Yellow Dwarf, Finette Cendron, and Le Mouton to
literature and the stage, where they survive in pantomime and
féerie. Beauty and the Beast first appears, at the
immoderate length of three hundred and sixty-two pages, in Les Contes
Marins (La Haye, 1740) by Madame de Villeneuve.
Literary Fairy Tales flourished all through the eighteenth century in
the endless Cabinet de Fées. As for Perrault's Tales, they were
republished at the Hague, in 1742, with illustrations by Fokke. In 1745,
they appeared, with Fokke's vignettes, and with an English translation.
An English version, translated by Mr. Samber, printed for J. Pote, was
advertised, Mr. Austin Dobson tells me, in the Monthly Chronicle,
March 1729. There have been innumerable editions, often splendidly
equipped and illustrated, down to the present date. This little book
alone, of all Charles Perrault's labours, has won 'the land of matters
unforgot.' Odysseus, Figaro, and Othello are not more certain to be
immortal than Hop o' my Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard, the heroes
whom Charles Nodier so pleasantly called 'the Ulysses, the Figaro, and
the Othello of children.'
[4] Grimm, Kinder-
und Hausmärchen. No. 89.
 
[5] Ballet des
Arts, dansé par sa Majesté; le 8 Janvier, 1663.
 
[6] Madame de
Maintenon d'après sa Correspondance. Geffroy, ii. 211. Paris,
1887.
 
[7] Madame de
Maintenon d'après sa Correspondance. Geffroy, i. 322.
 
[8] Paris: de
l'imprimerie de Jean Baptiste Coignard, imprimeur du Roy et de
l'Académie Françoise, rue Saint Jacques, la Bible d'or, 1691. The
Bibliothèque Nationale and the Arsenal possess copies of this duodecimo
of 58 pages. One of the copies is inscribed Donné par Lautheur
1691. (Lefèvre. Contes de Charles Perrault, p. 167. Paris, s.
a.)
 
 
[9] Paul de Saint
Victor, Les Contes des Fées, in Hommes et Dieux, p. 475.
Paris, 1883.
 
 
[10] Les Fées du
Moyen Age, p. 101. Paris, 1843.
 
 
[11] Recueil, 1694.
Peau d'Ane, p. 50. Les Souhaits Ridicules, p. 93.
Griselidis, p. 233.
 
 
[12] Coignard Veuve.
Paris.
 
[13] Dialogues des
Morts par feu Messire François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon, vol.
i. p. 23. Paris, 1718. 'L'autre n'est qu'un amas de contes de vieilles.'
Achilles thus anticipates Gerland's Altgriechische Märchen in der
Odyssee.
 
 
[14] Contes de Ma
Mère L'Oye is the title on the frontispiece. The term occurs in Loret,
La Muse Historique. (Lettre V. 11 Juin, 1650.)

'Mais le cher motif de leur joye,
Comme un conte de la Mère Oye,
Se trouvant fabuleux et faux,
Ils deviendront tous bien pénauts.'


 
[15] In her
Moralité, Mlle. L'Heritier says,—

'Cent fois ma nourrice ou ma mie
M'ont fait ce beau recit le soir pres des tisons,
   
Je n'y fais qu'ajouter un peu de broderie.'



[16] The Fables
d'animaux are probably even older than contes Diamonds and
Toads. A Mouse and a Frog, as well as the Old Woman who survives as
La Fée, take part in the tale as the Kaffirs tell it in The
Story of Five Heads, in Theal's Kaffir Folk Lore, pp. 48, 49.
The Kaffir story slides into a form of Beauty and the Beast. By
some unexplained accident a story of Mlle. L'Heritier's L'Adroite
Princesse slipped into editions of Perrault's Contes, in
1721, if not earlier, and holds its place even now.


[17] Histoires ou
Contes du Tems Passé, avec des Moralités. A Paris. Chez Claude
Barbin, sur le second peron de la Sainte-Chapelle; au Palais. Avec
Privilége de sa Majesté, 1697. In 12o. 230 pp. Bibliothèque
de M. Cousin, 9677. The frontispiece, by Clouzier, represents an old
woman spinning, and telling tales to a man, a girl, a little boy, and a
cat which, from its broad and intelligent grin, naturalists believe to
be of the Cheshire breed. On a placard is written
CONTES
DEMA
MERE
LOYE.
A copy, modified, of the engraving is printed on the cover of M.
Charles Deulin's Les Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye avant Perrault.
(Paris, Dentu, 1879.) The design holds its own, with various slight
alterations, in the English chap-books of Mother Goose's Tales,
even in the present century. There is a vastly 'embroidered'
reminiscence of Clouzier in the edition edited by M. Ch. Giraud, for
Perrin of Lyon, 1865.


[18] Mademoiselle was
Elizabeth Charlotte d'Orleans, born 1676, sister of Philippe, Duc de
Chartres, later Duc d'Orleans, and Regent. See Paul Lacroix in Contes
de Perrault, Paris, s. d. (1826.)


[19] In the
introduction to the Jouaust edition of 1876 M. Paul Lacroix has probably
gone too far in attributing to Perrault's son the complete authorship of
the Tales. It is true that the title of the Dutch reprint of 1697
describes the book as 'par le fils de Monsieur Perrault.' The Abbé de
Villiers, however, in his Entretiens sur les Contes des Fées (à
Paris chez Jacques Collombat, 1699), makes one of his persons praise the
stories 'que l'on attribue au fils d'un célèbre Académicien,' for their
freshness and imitation of the style of nurses. Another speaker in the
dialogue, The Parisian, replies, 'quelque estime que j'aie pour le fils
de l'Académicien, j'ai peine à croire que le père n'ait pas mis la main
à son ouvrage,' p. 109. This opinion is probably correct. It seems that
Perrault was not troubled by attacks on his Contes, and, in
biographical works the tales were long attributed to his son. But M.
Paul Lacroix declares that this son was nineteen years of age when the
stories appeared. This looks incredible on the face of it. Mlle.
L'Heritier could hardly have said about a young man of nineteen, that he
'occupe si spirituellement les amusemens de son enfance' in writing out
Contes naifs. Nor would a man of that age, in a century too, when
the young took on them manly duties so early, describe himself in his
dedicatory letter as 'un enfant.' M. Charles Giraud gives the boy's age
as ten, without citing his authority. (Lyons Edition of 1865, p. lxxiv.)
Moreover the idea of educating a young man of that age by making him
write out fairy tales
would have seemed, and would justly have seemed, ridiculous. We must
believe that P. Darmancour was a child when the stories were published,
and we may agree with the Abbé Villiers that the Academician 'put a hand
to them.' M. Lacroix's authority is the discovery by M. Jal of the birth
of Pierre Perrault, a son of Charles, who would have been nineteen in
1697. (Jal's Dictionnaire Critique, p. 1321.) But Jal did not
find the register of baptism of Mademoiselle Perrault. It follows that
he may have also failed to find that of other young Perraults, including
'P. Darmancour.' Each of Perrault's first sons (May 25, 1675; Oct. 20,
1676), was called Charles, the second had a Samuel added to the name.
Perrault may also have had two or more Pierres; in any case, unless P.
Darmancour were an idiot, his education could not have been conducted by
making him write out nursery tales at nineteen.


 [20] Even in the
popular mouth almost any formula may glide into almost any other, and
there is actually a female Hop o' My Thumb in Aberdeenshire folklore. But Madame
d'Aulnoy's seems a wanton confusion. The Aberdeen female Hop o' My
Thumb is Malty Whuppy, Folk Lore Journal, p. 68, 1884. For
Finette Cendron, see Nouveaux Contes des Fées, par Madame
D——, Amsterdam, Roger, 1708.


 [21] Paul de Saint
Victor, Hommes et Dieux, p. 474.


 [22] L'Histoire de
Mélusine (Barbin, Paris, 1698) is dedicated like Histoires et
Contes du Tems Passé to Mademoiselle. The author says, 'Si
tost que la plus célèbre des Fées a sceu que votre Altesse Royale avoit
eu la bonté de donner de favourables audiences aux Fées du bas ordre, et
qu'elle avoit pris quelque plaisir au recit de leurs avanteures,' she
came forward and asked Mademoiselle to patronise her own. A burlesque
'Privilége en faveur des Fées dans ce temps où l'on a tant d'engouement
pour les Contes des Fées' ends the volume.

Fairies and
Ogres.
The stories of Perrault are usually called 'Fairy Tales,'
and they deserve the name more than most contes, except the
artificial contemporary tales, because in them Fairies or Fées do play a
considerable part. Thus there were seven Fairies, and an old one
'supposed dead or enchanted,' in the Sleeping Beauty. There is a
Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, and, as will be shown in the study
on Cinderella, she takes the part usually given, in traditional
versions, to a cow, a sheep, or a dead mother who has some mystic
connection with the beast. The same remarks apply to the Fairy Godmother
in Peau d'Ane. She, too, does for the heroine what beasts do in
purely popular European variants, and in analogous tales from South
Africa.
The fairies in Riquet of the Tuft are of little importance, as
the narrative is not really traditional, but of literary invention for
the most part. The fairy in The Two Wishes is not a fairy in the
South African variants where divers magical or animal characters appear,
nor can Mother Holle in Grimm (24) be properly styled a fairy.
Thus, of all Perrault's Fairies only the Fairies of the Sleeping
Beauty (repeated in Riquet of the Tuft) answer to Fairies as
they appear in genuine popular traditions, under such names as Moirai,
or Hathors, in ancient Greek, and Egyptian versions. These beings attend
women in child-bed, as they attended Althea when she bore Meleager, and
they predict the fortunes of the infant.
Perrault's fairy godmothers (unlike the fairies of real legend) are
machinery of his own, and even he dispenses with Fairies altogether in
Blue Beard, Hop o' my Thumb, and Puss in Boots;
while in Les Trois Souhaits the mythological machinery of the
classics is employed, and Jupiter does what a fairy might have done. It
is true that the key of the forbidden door, in Blue Beard, is
said to be Fée; but this only means that, like the seven-leagued
Boots in Hop o' my Thumb ('elles estoient Fées'), the key has
magical qualities. The part of Fairies, then, is very restricted, even
in Perrault, while, in traditional Märchen all over the world,
Fairies or beings analogous to the Fairies appear comparatively
seldom.
In spite of this the Fairies have so successfully asserted their
title over popular tales, that a few words on their character and origin
seem not out of place. Fairies are doubtless much older than their name;
as old as the belief in spirits of woods, hills, lonely places, and the
nether world. The familiar names, fées, fades, are
apparently connected with Fatum, the thing spoken, and with
Fata, the Fates who speak it, and the God Fatuus, or
Faunus, and his sister or wife Fatua[23].
Preller quotes the Fatuae as spiritual maidens of the forests and
elements, adding the other names of Sagae and Sciae, to
Fatuae, and Fata[24]. He compares the Slavonic
Wilis: and, to be brief, the Apsaras of India, the Nereids of ancient
and modern Greece, and the Good Ladies and Fairies of Scotland, with
many of the Melanesian Vuis, forest-haunting spirits, are all of the
same class, are fairy beings informing the streams and wilds. To these
good folk were ascribed gifts of prophecy, commonly exercised beside the
cradle of infancy, deabus illis quae fata nascentibus canunt, et
dicuntur Carmentes[25]. As Maury shows[26], the local Fairies of Roman Gaul were
propitiated with altars:
FATIS

DERVONIBUS

V. S. L. M. M. RVFNVS

SEVERVS.
Just as the Scotch Fairies are euphemistically styled 'The Good
Folks,' 'The People of Peace,' the 'Good Ladies,' so it befell the
daughter of Faunus. She was styled 'The Good Goddess,' and her real name
was tabooed[27].
It was natural that when Christianity reached Gaul, where the native
spirits of woods and wells had acquired the name of Fata, these
minor goddesses should survive the official heathen religion. The
temples of the high gods were overthrown, or turned into churches, but
who could destroy all the woodland fanes of the Fata, who could uproot
the dread of them from the hearts of peasants? Saints and Councils
denounced the rural offerings to fountains and the roots of trees, but
the secret shame-faced worship lasted deep into the middle ages[28]. It is conjectured by Maury, as by Walckenaer
(Lettres sur les Contes de Fées; Paris, 1826), that the functions
of prophetic Gaulish Maidens and Druidesses were confused with those of
the Fairies. Certainly superstitious ideas of many kinds came under the
general head of belief in Fata, Faes, Fadae, and
the Fées of the forest of Broceliande. The Fées answered,
as in the Sleeping Beauty, to Greek Moirai or Egyptian
Hathors[29]. They nursed women in
labour: they foretold the fate of children. It is said that when a
Breton lady was giving birth to a child, a banquet for the Fées
was set in the neighbouring chamber[30]. But, in popular superstition, if
not in Perrault's tales, the Fées had many other attributes. They
certainly inherited much from the pre-Christian idea of Hades. In the
old MS. Prophesia Thomae de Erseldoun[31]
the subterranean fairy-world is the under-world of pagan belief. In the
mediæval form of Orpheus and Eurydice (Orfeo and Heurodis), it is
not the King of the Dead, but the king of Fairy that carries off the
minstrel's bride. Fairyland, when Orpheus visits it, is like Homer's
Hades.

'And sum thurch the bodi hadde wounde
Wives ther lay on childe bedde
Sum dede and sum awedde.'

In the same way Chaucer calls Pluto 'King of Fayrie,' and speaks of
'Proserpine and all her fayrie,' in the Merchant's Tale. Moreover
Alison Pearson, when she visited Elfland, found there many of the dead,
among them Maitland of Lethington, and one of the Buccleughs. For all
this dealing with fairies and the dead was Alison burned (Scott,
Border Minstrelsy, ii. 137-152).
Because the mediæval Fairies had fallen heir to much of the
pre-Christian theory of Hades, it does not follow, of course, that the
Fairies were originally ancestral ghosts. This origin has been claimed
for them, however, and it is pointed out that the stone arrow-heads of
an earlier race are, when found by peasants, called 'elf-shots,' and
attributed to the Fairies. Now the real owners and makers were certainly
a race dead and gone, as far as a race can die. But probably the
ownership of the arrows by elves is only the first explanation that
occurs to the rural fancy. On the other hand, it is candid to note that
the Zulu Amatongo, certainly 'ancestral ghosts,' have much in common
with Scotch and Irish fairies. 'It appears to be supposed,' says Dr.
Callaway, 'that the dead become "good people," as the dead among the
Amazulu become Amatongo, and, in the funeral processions of the "good
people" which some profess to see, are recognised the forms of those who
have lately died, as Umkatshana saw his relatives among the Abapansi,'
and as Alison saw Maitland of Lethington and Buccleuch in Elfland. This
Umkatshana followed a deer into a hole in the ground, where he found
dead men whom he knew[32]. Compare Campbell,
Tales from the West Highlands, ii. 56, 65, 66, 106, where it is
written, 'the Red Book of Clanranald is said not to have been dug up,
but found on the moss. It seemed as if the ancestors sent
it.'
Those rather gloomy fairies of the nether-world have little but the
name in common with the fairies of Herrick, of the Midsummer Night's
Dream, and of Drayton's Nymphidia. The gay and dancing elves
have a way, in Greece, of making girls 'dance with the Nereids' till
they dance themselves to death. In the same way it is told of Anne
Jefferies, of St. Teath in Cornwall (born 1626), that one had seen her
'dancing in the orchard, among the trees, and that she informed him she
was then dancing with the Fairies.' She lived to be seventy, in spite of
the Fairies and the local magistrates who tried her case (Scott,
B.M. ii. 156).
Perrault's fairies do not wed mortal men, in this differing from the
Indian Apsaras, and the fairies of New Zealand and of Wales. (Taylor's
New Zealand, p. 143. Compare story of Urvasi and Pururavas, Max
Müller, Selected Essays, i. 408. A number of other examples of
Fairy loves, including one from America, is given in Custom and
Myth, pp. 68-86.)
On a general view of the evidence, it appears as if the fashion for
fairy tales, in Perrault's
time, had made rather free with the old Fata or Fées.
Perrault sins much less than the Comtesse d'Aulnoy, or the Comtesse de
Murat, but even he brings in a Fatua ex machina where popular
tradition used other expedients.
As to the Ogres in Perrault, a very few words may suffice. They are
simply the survival, in civilised folklore, of the cannibals, Rakshasas,
Weendigoes, and man-eating monsters who are the dread of savage
life in Africa, India, and America. Concerning them, their ferocity, and
their stupidity, enough will be said in the study of Le Petit
Poucet. As to the name of Ogre, Walckenaer derives it from
Oigour, a term for the Hungarian invaders of the ninth century, a
Tartar tribe[33]. Hence he concludes that
the Ogre-stories are later than the others, though, even if 'Ogre' meant
'Tartar,' only the name is recent, and the Cannibal tales are of extreme
antiquity. Littré, on the other hand, derives ogre from
Orcus, cum Orco rationem habere meaning to risk one's
life. Hop o' my Thumb certainly risked his, when he had to do 'cum
Orco,' if Orcus be Ogre (Lettres sur les Contes de Fées,
p. 169-172).

 [23] Fauno fuit uxor
nomine Fatua. Justin, xliii. I. Preller, R. M. I. 385.


 [24] Römische
Mythologie, i. 100. Berlin, 1881.


 [25] Preller, op.
cit. ii. 194, quoting Tertullian, De An. 39, and Augustine,
Civitas Dei, iv. 11.


 [26] Les Fées du
Moyen Age, p. 13. Paris, 1843.


 [27] Quam quidam,
quod nomine dici prohibitum fuerat, Bonam Deam appellatam volunt.
Servius, Æneid, viii. 315.


 [28] Maury, Les
Fées du Moyen Age, pp. 15, 16, and his authorities in the
Capitulaires and Life of Saint Eloi.


 [29] Amyot, in his
Plutarch, actually renders Moirai by Fées (1567).


 [30] Maury, p.
31.


 [31] Scott, Border
Minstrelsy, iii. 381.


 [32] Nursery Tales
of the Zulus, p. 317; Amatongo, p. 227.


 [33] In popular
French versions the Ogre is often called Le Sarrasin to this day
(Sébillot in Mélusine, May 5, 1887).

NOTES ON THE
SEVERAL TALES BY PERRAULT,
AND THEIR VARIANTS.

Les Trois Souhaits.
The Three Wishes.
The story of The Three Wishes is very valuable as
an illustration of the difficulties which baffle, and perhaps will never
cease to baffle, the student of popular Tales and their diffusion. The
fundamental idea is that a supernatural being of one sort or another can
grant to a mortal the fulfilment of a wish, or wishes, and that the
mortal can waste the boon. Now probably this idea might occur to any
human mind which entertained the belief in communication between men,
and powerful persons of any sort, Gods, Saints, Tree-spirits, fairies,
follets or the like. The mere habit of prayer, universally human
as it is, contains the germs of the conception. But the notion, as we
find it in story, branches out into a vast variety of shapes, and the
problem is to determine which of these, or whether any one of these is
the original type, and whether the others have been adapted or
burlesqued from that first form, and whether these processes have been
the result of literary transmission, and literary handling, or of oral
traditions and popular fancy. Perhaps a compact statement of some (by no
means all) of the shapes of The Three Wishes may here be
serviceable.
1. The granters of the Wishes are gods. The gift is accepted in a
pious spirit, and the desires are noble, and worthy of the donors.
This tale occurs in Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii. 610-724. Baucis
and Philemon entertain the gods, who convert their hut into a Temple.
They wish (the man is the speaker) to serve the gods in this
fane, and that neither may outlive the other:

Nec conjugis umquam
Busta meae videam: neu sim tumulandus ab illa.

Their wishes are fulfilled.
2. In German popular tales, this idea appears, with additions, in
Rich and Poor (Grimm 87). Here the virtue of the good is
contrasted with the folly of the bad. The Poor man hospitably receives
our Lord, and, for his three wishes, chooses eternal happiness, health
and daily bread, and a new house. The Rich man rejects our Lord, but
getting a second chance, loses his temper, wishes his horse dead, the
saddle on his wife's back, and—the saddle off again!
Now popular fancy has been better pleased with the burlesque ideas in
the second part of this fable, than with the serious moral; and most of
the tales turn on burlesque wishes, leaving the virtuous wishers out of
the story. The narrative also shews a Protean power of altering details,
the wishes vary, the power who grants the wish is different in different
Märchen, the person whose folly wastes the wish may be the
husband, or may be the wife.
A very old form of the Wasted Wish, originally no doubt a popular
form, won its way into literature in the Pantschatantra. The tale
has also been annexed by Buddhism, as Buddhism annexed most tales, by
the simple process of making Sakya Muni the hero or narrator of the
adventures.
The Pantschatantra is a collection of fables in Sanskrit. In
its original form, according to Mr. Max Müller, its date can be fixed,
by aid of an ancient Persian translation, as previous to 550 A.D. 'At that time a collection somewhat like the
Pankatantra, though much more extensive, must have existed[34].' By various channels the stories of the
Pantschatantra reached Persia, Arabia, Greece, and thence were
rendered into Latin, and again, were paraphrased in different vernacular
languages, by literary people. But when we find, as we do, a story in
the Pantschatantra and a similar or analogous story in the Arabic
Book of Sindibad (earlier than the tenth century), and again in
the Greek Syntipas (eleventh and twelfth century), and again in
Latin, or Spanish, or French literature, we cannot, perhaps, always be
sure that the tale is derived from India through literary channels.
Whoever will compare the Wish story of the Double-headed
Weaver in the Pantschatantra[35]
with The Three Wishes in the Book of Sindibad (Comparetti.
Folk Lore Society, 1882, p. 147), and again, with Marie de
France's twenty-fourth Fable (Dou Vilain qui prist un folet), and
yet again with Perrault's Trois Souhaits, and, lastly, with the
popular tales among Grimm's variants, will find many perplexing problems
before him[36]. The differences in the
details and in the conduct of the story are immense. Did the various
authors borrow little but the main conception—the wasted wishes?
Are the variations the result of literary caprice and choice? Has the
story travelled from India by two channels,—(1) literary, in
Pantschatantra, and Syntipas with the translations; (2)
oral, by word of mouth from people to people? Are the popular
versions derived from literature, or from oral tradition? Is the oldest
literary version, that of the Pantschatantra, more akin to the
original version than some of the others which meet us later?
Finally, might not the idea of wasted wishes occur independently to
minds in different ages and countries, and may not some of the versions
be of independent origin, and in no way borrowed from India? Is there,
indeed, any reason at all for supposing that so simple a notion was
invented, once for all, in India?
It is easy to ask these questions, it is desirable to bear them in
mind, so that we may never lose sight of the complexity and difficulty
of the topic. But it is practically impossible to answer them once for
all.
The nature of the problem may now be illustrated by a few examples.
In the story of the Pantschatantra, the granter of the wish
(there is but one wish) is a tree-dwelling spirit. A very stupid weaver
one day broke part of his loom. He went out to cut down a tree near the
shore, meaning to fashion it for his purpose, when a spirit, who dwelt
in the timber, cried, 'Spare this tree.' The weaver said he must starve
if he did not get the wood, when the spirit replied, 'Ask anything else
you please.' The barber, being consulted, advised the weaver to wish to
be king. The weaver's wife cried, 'No, stay as you are, but ask for two
heads, and four hands, to do double work.' He got his wish, but was
killed by the villagers, who very naturally supposed him to be a
Rakshasa, or ogre. The moral is enunciated by the barber, 'Let no man
take woman's counsel.' The poor woman's lack of immoderate ambition
might seem laudable to some moralists.
Here the peculiarities are: A tree-ghost grants the wish.
There is only one wish.
It is made on a woman's advice.
It causes the death of the wisher[37].
The story is next found in the various forms of the Book of
Sindibad, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and old Spanish, a book
mentioned by all Arabic authors of the tenth century, and of Indian and
Buddhistic origin[38]. As told in the various
forms of Sindibad, the tale of The Three Wishes takes this
shape. A man has a friendly spirit (a she-devil in the Spanish Libro
de los Engannos), who is obliged to desert his company, but leaves
him certain formulæ, by dint of repeating which he will have Three
Wishes granted to him. The tree-spirit has disappeared, the one wish has
become three. The man consults with his wife, who suggests that he
should desire, not two heads and four hands, but an obscene and
disgusting bodily transformation of another sort. He wishes the wish, is
horrified by the result, and, on the woman's hint, asks to have all that
embarrasses him removed. The granting of the wish leaves him with 'a
frightful minus quantity,' and he expends the third wish in
getting restored to his pristine and natural condition. The woman
explains that she had not counselled him to desire wealth, lest he
should weary of her and desert her. This, at least, is the conclusion in
the Hebrew version, in the Parables of Sandabas (Deulin,
Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, p. 71).
How are we to account for this metamorphosis of the story in the
Pantschatantra? Is the alteration a piece of Arabian humour? Was
there another Indian version corresponding to the shape of the tale in
the Book of Sindibad? The questions cannot be answered with our
present knowledge.
Another change, and a very remarkable one, occurs in the
Fables of Marie de France. Of Marie not much is known. In the
Conclusion of her Fables, she says—


'Au finement de cest escrit
K'én Romanz ai turné et dit,
Me numerai par remembraunce
Marie ai num, si sui de Fraunce.


*     *     *     *     *


Pur amur le cumte Willaume
Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume,
M'entremis de cest livre feire
E de l'Angleiz en Roman treire,
Ysopet apeluns ce livre
Qu'il traveilla et fist escrire;
De Griu en Latin le turna.
Li Rois Henris qui moult l'ama
Le translata puis en Engleiz
E jeo l'ai rimé en Franceiz.'


That is to say, King Henry had translated into English a collection
of fables and contes attributed to Æsop, and Marie rendered the
English into French. Now Æsop certainly did not write the story of
The Three Wishes. The text before Marie was probably a mere
congeries of tales and fables, some of the set usually attributed to
Æsop, some from various other sources. The Latin version, the model of
the English version, was that assigned to a certain, or uncertain
Romulus, whom Marie, in her preface, calls an emperor. Probably he
borrowed from Phædrus, though he boasts that he rendered his fables out
of the Greek. M. de Roquefort thinks he did not flourish before the
eleventh or twelfth century[39]. Who was li rois
Henris who turned the fables into Marie's English text? She lived
under our Henry III. Perhaps conjecture may prefer Henry Beauclerk, our
Henry I.
In any case Marie manifestly did render the fables, or some of the
fables, in Le dit d'Ysopet out of English. The presence of
English words in her French seems to raise a strong presumption in
favour of the truth of the assertion. One of these English words occurs
in her form of The Three Wishes (Fable xxiv), called Dou
Vilain qui prist un Folet, also Des Troiz Oremens, or Du
Vileins et de sa Fame. A Vilein captured a Folet (fairy or brownie?)
who granted him Three Wishes. The Folet resembles the tree-bogle
of the Pantschatantra. The vilein gave two wishes to his wife.
Long they lived without using the wishes. One day, when they had a
marrow bone for dinner, and found it difficult to extract the marrow,
the wife wished that her husband had—

'tel bec came li plereit
E cum li Huite cox aveit.'

The Huite cox is an English word, woodcock, in disguise. The husband,
in a rage, wished his wife a woodcock's beak also, and there they sat,
each with a very long bill, and two wishes wasted. There Marie leaves
them—

'Deus Oremanz unt ja perduz
Que nus n'en est a bien venuz,'

'with two wishes lost, and no good gained thereby.' Manifestly the
third wish was expended in a restoration of human noses to each of them.
The moral is that ill befalls them—

'qui trop creient autrui parole.'

We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or
other shape of Syntipas. If it was, did the change come in the
Latin handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the
version worked on by Marie had a popular origin, whether derived
by oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which
had filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit?
There seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no
mediæval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale
in Syntipas and its derivatives, though Marie would not have
rhymed that offensive conte if she had met with it in the English
collection. Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of The
Three Wishes among backward and remote races, American or African.
If such a version were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might
argue that the tale was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as
told in Pantschatantra, to make it seem essentially and
peculiarly Indian, and incapable of having been invented elsewhere.
A fourteenth-century version (quoted by M. Deulin from Fabliaux et
Contes published by St. Méon, vol. iv. p. 386) amplifies all that is
least refined in Sendabar and in Sindibad. St. Martin
grants the wishes, there are four of them, and nobody is one penny the
better. With Philippe de Vigneules (1505-1514, the seventy-eighth of his
hundred Nouvelles), God grants three wishes to a wedded pair. The
woman wishes a new leg for her pot, the man wishes her le pied au
ventre, and then wishes it back again. M. Deulin found this form in
living popular tradition, at Leuze in Hainaut.
The Souhaits of La Fontaine (Fables, vii. 6) has this
peculiarity, that the giver of the wishes, as in Marie de France and in
Sindibad, is a Follet or brownie, or familiar spirit, obliged to
leave his friends. He offers them three wishes; first, they ask for
wealth and are embarrassed by their riches, then for a restoration of
their mediocrity, then for wisdom.

'C'est un trésor qui n'embarrasse point.'

La Fontaine's source is obscure; had he known Syntipas, he
might (or might not) have introduced the story among his Contes.
Perhaps it was too rude even for that unabashed collection.
As for Perrault, he probably drew from a popular tradition his
Aune de Boudin. Collin de Plancy (Œuvres Choisies de Ch.
Perrault, Paris, 1826, 240) gives a curious rustic version. Three
brothers dance with the Fairies, who offer them a wish apiece. The
eldest, as heir of the paternal property, wants no more, but, as wish he
must, asks that their calf may cure the colic of every invalid who
seizes it by the tail. (How manifestly Indian in origin is this
introduction of the sacred beast whose tail is grasped by the pious
Hindoo in his latest hours!) The youngest brother wishes the horns of
cow and calf on his brother's head, the second wishes a bull's head on
his brother's shoulders, and the Fairies make these wild wishes of none
avail.
Manifestly the fundamental idea is capable of infinite
transformations, literary or popular: a good example is the play of
Le Bucheron, by Guichard and Philidor, acted in 1763.
The story has no connection with the three successful wishes by aid
of which the devil is defeated in a number of popular tales belonging to
a different cycle. All these are inspired, however, by the great god
Wunsch, who presides over Wishing Gates.

'Would I could wish my wishes all to rest,
And know to wish the wish that should be best,

says Clough, better inspired than Perrault's Bucheron.

[34] Selected
Essays, i. 504.


[35] Benfey, ii.
341.


[36] See Poésies
de Marie de France, Poète Anglo-Normande du xiiie Siècle,
vol. ii. p. 140. Paris, 1820.


[37] Benfey,
Pantschatantra, ii. 341.


[38] Comparetti,
Book of Sindibad, p. 3. Benfey, Pantschatantra, i. 38.


[39] Poésies de
Marie de France, vol. ii. p. 53.

La Belle au Bois
Dormant.
The Sleeping Beauty.
The idea of a life which passes ages in a secular sleep is
as old as the myth of Endymion. But it would be difficult to name any
classical legend which closely corresponds with the story of the
Sleeping Beauty. The first incident of importance is connected with the
very widely spread belief in the Fates, or Moirai, or Hathors (in
Ancient Egypt), or fairies, who come to the bedside of Althæa, or of the
Egyptian Queen, or to the christening of the child in La Belle au
Bois Dormant, and predict the fortunes of the newly born. In an
Egyptian papyrus of the Twentieth Dynasty there is a tale, beginning,
just like Perrault's, with the grief of a king and queen, who have no
child, or at least no son. Instead of going à toutes les Eaux du
monde, they appeal to the gods, who hear their prayers, and the
queen gives birth to a little boy. Beside his cradle the Hathors
announce that he shall perish by a crocodile, a serpent, or a dog. The
story, in Egyptian, now turns into one of the common myths as to the
impossibility of evading Destiny[40].
In Perrault's Conte, of course, fairies take the place of the
Fates from whom perhaps Fée is derived. When the fairies have met
comes in another old incident—one of them, like Discord at the
wedding of Peleus, has not been invited, and she prophesies the death of
the Princess. This is commuted, by a friendly fay, into a sleep of a
hundred years: the sleep to be caused, as the death was to have been, by
a prick from a spindle. The efforts of the royal family to evade the
doom by proscribing spindles are as futile as usual in these cases. The
Princess and all her people fall asleep, and the story enters the cycle
of which Brynhild's wooing, in the Volsung's Saga, is the heroic
type. Brynhild is thus described by the singing wood-peckers,—

'Soft on the fell
A shield-may sleepeth,
The lime-trees' red plague
Playing about her.
The sleep-thorn set Odin
Into that maiden
For her choosing in war
The one he willed not.'

Sigurd is bidden to awaken her, and this he does, rending her mail
with his magic sword. But the rest of the tragic story does not
correspond with La Belle au Bois Dormant. Perrault's tale has its
closest companion in Grimm's Little Briar Rose (90), which lacks
the conclusion about the wicked mother-in-law. Her conduct, again,
recurs in various tales quite unlike La Belle in general plot.
The incident of the sleep-thorn, or something analogous, occurs in
Surya Bai (Old Deccan Days), where a prick from the
poisoned nail of a demon acts as the soporific. To carry poison under
the nail is one of the devices of the Voudou or Obi man in Hayti. Surya
Bai, when wakened and married by a Rajah, is the victim of the jealousy,
not of an ogress mother-in-law, but of another wife, and that
story glides into a form of the Egyptian tale The Two Brothers
(Maspero, i.). The sleep-thorn, or poisoned nail, takes again in Germany
the shape of the poisoned comb. Snow-white is wounded therewith
by the jealousy of a beautiful step-mother, with a yet fairer
step-daughter (Grimm, 53). In mediæval romances, as in
Perceforest, an incident is introduced whereby the sleeping maid
becomes a mother. Lucina, Themis, and Venus take the part of the
Fairies, Fates, or Hathors. In the Neapolitan Pentamerone the
incident of the girl becoming a mother in her sleep is repeated. The
father (as in Surya Bai) is a married man, and the girl, Thalia,
suffers from the jealousy of the first wife, as Surya Bai does. The
first wife wants to eat Thalia's children, à diverses sauces,
which greatly resembles Perrault's sauce Robert. The children of
Thalia are named Sun and Moon, while those of the Sleeping Beauty are
L'Aurore et Le Jour. The jealous wife is punished, like the Ogre
mother-in-law[41].
While the idea of a long sleep may possibly have been derived from
the repose of Nature in winter, it seems useless to try to interpret
La Belle au Bois Dormant as a Nature myth throughout. The story,
like all contes, is a patchwork of incidents, which recur
elsewhere in different combinations. Even the names Le Jour and L'Aurore
only appear in such late and literary forms as the Pentamerone,
where they are mixed up with Thalia, clearly a fanciful name for the
mother, as fanciful as that of the sleeping Zellandine, who marries the
god Mars in Perceforest. As an example of the length to which
some mythologists will go, may be mentioned M. André Lefèvre's discovery
that Poufle, the dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in
search of the Dawn.

[40] Maspero,
Contes Egyptiens, p. 33.


[41] Contes de Ma
Mère L'Oye, p. 157.

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.[42]
Little Red Riding Hood.
Perrault has not concealed the moral which he thought
obvious in this brief narrative. There are wolves—

'Qui suivent les jeunes Demoiselles
Jusques dans les maisons, jusques dans les
   Ruelles!'

Racine, in an early letter, admits that he himself has been one of
these wolves.
'Il faut être régulier avec les Réguliers, comme
j'ai été loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos compères.[43]'
But the nurses from whom Perrault or his little boy heard Le petit
Chaperon Rouge had probably no such moral ideas as these. They
may have hinted at the undesirable practice of loitering when one
is sent on an errand, but the punishment is out of all proportion to the
offence. As it stands, the tale is merely meant to waken a child's
terror and pity, and probably the narrator ends it by making a pounce,
in the character of Wolf, c'est pour te manger, at the little
listener. This was the correct 'business' in our old Scotch nurseries,
when we were told The Cattie sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning.

'By cam' a cattie and ate it a' up my loesome,
Loesome Lady!
And sae will I you—worrie, worrie, gnash,
   gnash,
Said she, said she!'

'The old nurse's imitation of the gnash, gnash, which
she played off upon the youngest urchin lying in her lap, was electric'
(Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1842, p. 54).
If Little Red Riding Hood ended, in all variants, where it
ends in Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the
machinery of the story is derived from 'the times when beasts
spoke,' or were believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known
that in the German form, Little Red Cap (Grimm 26), the tale by
no means ends with the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her
grandmother are resuscitated, 'the wolf it was that died.' This may
either have been the original end, omitted by Perrault because it was
too wildly impossible for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or
children may have insisted on having the story 'turn out well.' In
either case the German Märchen preserves one of the most widely
spread mythical incidents in the world,—the reappearance of living
people out of the monster that has devoured them.
In literature, this incident first meets us in the myth of Cronus
(Hesiod, Theog. 497; Pausanias, x. 24), where Cronus disgorges
his swallowed children alive, after gulping up the stone in swaddling
bands which he had taken for Zeus, his youngest infant. He had
previously dined on a young foal that he was assured his wife had just
borne, when, in reality, the child was Poseidon. In this adventure
Cronus united the mistake of the ogress mother-in-law, in La Belle au
Bois Dormant, who ate the kid in place of the Sleeping Beauty's boy,
the adventure of the king who hears his wife has borne a beast-child,
and the adventure of the Wolf who disgorges his prey alive. The local
fancy of Arne in Arcadia had combined all these ideas of Märchen
into one divine myth (Pausan. viii. 8, 2). It would be superfluous to
enumerate here all the savage and civilised stories of beings first
swallowed and then disgorged alive. A fabulous monster Kwai Hemm is the
swallower in Bushman story. The Iqong qongqo takes the rôle among
the Kaffirs. There are some five examples in Callaway's Zulu Nursery
Tales. Night is the swallower in Melanesia (Codrington,
Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881), while the Sun swallows the
stars in a Piute myth. It is quite possible that a savage theory of
Night swallowing and restoring Light, or of the Sun swallowing the
stars, is the origin of the conception[44].
The Australians tell it in a shape not unlike Grimm's. The Eagle met the
Moon and offered him some Kangaroo meat. The Moon ate up the Kangaroo,
and then swallowed the Eagle. The wives of the Eagle met the Moon, who
asked them the way to a spring. As he stooped to drink, they cut him
open with a stone tomahawk, and extracted the Eagle, who came alive
again[45]. In Germany it was with a pair of scissors
that the Wolf was cut up, and he was then stuffed with stones (as in
Grimm 5, The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids). The stones kill him
in Little Red Cap; in the German tale, their weight drags him
into the well, where he, like the Australian Moon, wants to drink after
his banquet. In Pomerania a ghost takes the Wolf's rôle, the
stones are felt to be rather 'heavy' by the ghost, and the child
escapes[46].
The whole story has been compared by M. Husson to the adventure of
Vartika, whom the Asvins rescue from the throat of a wolf. Little Red
Riding Hood thus becomes the Dawn. Vartika is a bird, the Quail, 'i.e.
the returning bird. But as a being delivered by the Asvins, the
representatives of Day and Night, Vartika can only be the returning
Dawn, delivered from the mouth of the wolf, i. e. the dark night[47].'
It is hard to see why the Night, as one of the Asvins, should deliver
the Dawn from the Night, as the Wolf. On the identification of the
Asvins with this or that aspect of Light and Darkness, Muir may be
consulted. 'This allegorical interpretation seems unlikely to be
correct, as it is difficult to suppose that the phenomena in question
should have been alluded to under such a variety of names and
circumstances.' (Sanskrit Texts, v. 248. Prof. Goldstücker thinks
the Asvins are themselves the crepuscular mingling of light and dark,
which, in the other theory, is the struggle of quail and wolf, op.
cit. v. 257. M. Bergaigne supposes that the Asvins are deities of
dawn, La Religion Védique, ii. 431.)
These considerations lead us far enough from Perrault into 'worlds
not realised.' Vartika (who, in these theories, answers to Le Petit
Chaperon Rouge) has been compared by Mr. Max Müller, not only to the
returning Dawn, but to the returning year, Vertumnus. He notes
that the Greek word for quail is ortyx, that Apollo and Artemis
were born in Ortygia, an old name of Delos, and that 'here is a real
traditional chain.' But 'it would be a bold assertion to say that the
story of Red Riding Hood was really a metamorphosis of an ancient
story of the rosy-fingered Eos, or the Vedic Eos with her red horses,
and that the two ends, Ushas and Rothkäppchen, are really held together
by an unbroken traditional chain.'
We shall leave the courage of this opinion to M. Husson, merely
observing that, as a matter of fact, Dawn is not swallowed by
Night. Sunset (which is red) is so swallowed, but then sunset is not 'a
young maiden carrying messages,' like Red Riding Hood and Ushas. To be
sure, the convenient Wolf is regarded by mythologists as 'a
representative of the sun or of the night,' at will. He 'doubles the
part,' and 'is the useful Wolf,' as the veteran Blenkinsopp, in
Pendennis, was called 'The useful Blenkinsopp.'

[42] Contes de
Charles Perrault, Paris, s. a. p. lxiv. Perrault's love of
refining is not idle in Le Chaperon Rouge. In the popular
versions, in Brittany and the Nièvre, the wolf puts the grandmother in
the pot, and her blood in bottles, and makes the unconscious child eat
and drink her ancestress! The cock or the robin redbreast warns her in
vain, and she is swallowed. (Mélusine, May 5, 1887.)


[43] A. M. de la
Fontaine, à Usez, le ii. Nov. 1661.


[44] Tylor, Prim.
Cult. i. 338.


[45] Brough Smyth,
Natives of Victoria, i. p. 432.


[46] Grimm, Note on
5.


[47] Max Müller's
Selected Essays, i. 565.

La Barbe Bleue.
Blue Beard.
The story of Blue Beard, as told by Perrault, is, of all
his collection, the most apt to move pity and terror. It has also least
of the supernatural. Here are no talking beasts, no fairies, nor ogres.
Only the enchanted key is fée, or wakan as the Algonkins
say, that is, possesses magical properties. In all else the story is a
drama of daily and even of contemporary life, for Blue Beard has the
gilded coaches and embroidered furniture of the seventeenth century, and
his wife's brothers hold commissions in the dragoons and musketeers. The
story relies for its interest on the curiosity of the wife (the moral
motive), on the vision of the slain women, and on the suspense of
waiting while Sister Anne watches from the tower. These simple
materials, admirably handled, make up the terrible story of Blue
Beard.
Attempts have been made to find for Blue Beard an historical
foundation. M. Collin de Plancy mentions a theory that the hero was a
seigneur of the house of Beaumanoir (Œuvres Choisies de Ch.
Perrault, p. 40, Paris, 1826). Others have fancied that Blue Beard
was a popular version of the deeds of Gilles de Retz, the too celebrated
monster of mediæval history, or of a more or less mythical Breton prince
of the sixth century, Cormorus or Comorre, who married Sainte Trophime
or Triphime, and killed her, as he had killed his other wives, when she
was about to become a mother. She was restored to life by St. Gildas[48]. If there is a trace of the Blue Beard
story in the legend of the Saint, it does not follow that the legend is
the source of the story. The Märchen of Peau d'Ane has
been absorbed into the legend of Sainte Dipne or Dympne, and the names
of saints, like the names of gods and heroes in older faiths, had the
power of attracting Märchen into their cycle.
Blue Beard is essentially popular and traditional. The
elements are found in countries where Gilles de Retz and Comorre and
Sainte Triphime were never known. The leading idea, of curiosity
punished, of the box or door which may not be opened, and of the
prohibition infringed with evil results, is of world-wide distribution.
In many countries this notion inspires the myths of the origin of
Death[49]. In German Märchen there are several
parallels, more or less close, to Blue Beard (Grimm 3, 40, 46).
In Our Lady's Child (3) the Virgin entrusts a little girl with
keys of thirteen doors, of which she may only open twelve. Behind each
door she found an apostle, behind the thirteenth the Trinity, in a glory
of flame, like Zeus when he consumed Semele. The girl's finger became
golden with the light, as Blue Beard's key was dyed with the blood. The
child was banished from heaven, and her later adventures are on the
lines of the falsely accused wife, like those of the Belle au Bois
Dormant, with the Virgin for mother-in-law and with a repentance for
a moral conclusion. In the Robber Bridegroom there is a girl
betrothed to a woman-slayer; she detects and denounces him, pretending,
as in the old English tale, she is describing a dream. 'Like the old
tale, my Lord, it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but indeed God forbid
that it should be so[50].' Except for the 'larder'
of the Robber, and of Mr. Fox in the English variant, these stories do
not closely resemble Blue Beard. In Grimm's Fitcher's Bird
(46) the resemblance is closer. A man, apparently a beggar, carries off
the eldest of three sisters to a magnificent house, and leaves her with
the keys, an egg, and the prohibition to open a certain door. She opens
it, finds a block, an axe, a basin of blood, and the egg falling into
the blood refuses to be cleansed. The man slays her, her second sister
shares her fate, the third leaves the egg behind when she visits the
secret room, and miraculously restores her sisters to life by reuniting
their limbs. The same idea occurs in the Kaffir tale of the Ox
(Callaway, Nursery Tales of the Zulus, p. 230). The rest of the
story, with the escape from the monster, has no connection with Blue
Beard, except that the wretch is put to death. Indeed, it would have
been highly inconvenient for Blue Beard's surviving bride if the dead
ladies had been resuscitated. Her legal position would have been
ambiguous, and she could not have inherited the gold coaches and
embroidered furniture. Grimm originally published another German form of
Blue Beard (62 in first edition), but withdrew it, being of
opinion that it might have been derived from Perrault. The story of the
Third Calender in the Arabian Nights (Night 66) has nothing in
common with Blue Beard but the prohibition to open a door.
In Italy[51] the Devil is the wooer,
the closed door opens on hell: the rest, the adventures of three
sisters, resembles Grimm's Fitcher's Bird, with a touch of
humour. The Devil, seeing the resuscitated girls, is daunted by the idea
of facing three wives, and decamps. He had no scruple, it will be seen,
about marrying his deceased wife's sister. The Russian like the Oriental
stories generally make a man indulge the fatal curiosity, and open the
forbidden door. Mr. Ralston quotes from Löwe's Esthnische Märchen
(No. 20) a tale almost too closely like Perrault's. There is a sister,
and the goose boy takes the rôle of rescuer. M. de Gubernatis
thinks that the key 'is perhaps the Moon!' (Zoological Mythology,
1. 168). In the Gaelic version the heroine is cleansed of blood by a
grateful Cat, whose services her sisters had neglected (Campbell,
Tales of West Highlands, No. 41). In the Katha Sarit
Sagara (iii. p. 223) a hero, Saktideva, is forbidden to approach a
certain palace terrace. He breaks the taboo, and finds three dead
maidens in three pavilions. A horse then kicks him into a lake, and,
whereas he had been in the Golden City, hard to win, he finds himself at
home in Vardhamana. The affair is but an incident in the medley of
incidents, some resembling passages in the Odyssey, which make up the
story (compare Ralston's note, Russian Fairy Tales, p. 99).
From these brief analyses it will be plain that, in point of art,
Perrault's tale has a great advantage over its popular rivals. It is at
once more sober and more terrible, and (especially when compared with
the confusion of incidents in the Katha Sarit Sagara) possesses
an epical unity of idea and action.
In spite of this artistic character, Perrault's tale is clearly of
popular origin, as the existence of variants in the folklore of other countries demonstrates.
But the details are so fluctuating, that we need not hope to find in
them memories of ancient myth, nor is it safe to follow M. André
Lefèvre, when he thinks that, in the two avenging brothers, he
recognises the Vedic Asvins.

[48] The passages in
the legend of Sainte Triphime are quoted by M. Deulin, Contes de Ma
Mère l'Oye, p. 178. See also Annuaire Hist. et Arch. de
Bretagne, Année 1862. The Saint has a warning vision of the dead
wives, but not in consequence of opening a forbidden door.


[49] A partial
collection of these will be found in La Mythologie, Lang. Paris
1886. Australians, Ningphos, Greeks (Pandora's box), the Montaguais of
Labrador (Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1634), the Odahwah
Indians (Hind's Explorations in Labrador, i. 61, note 2), are
examples of races which believe death to have come into the world as the
punishment of an infringed prohibition of this sort. The deathly swoon
of Psyche, in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, when she has opened the
pyx of Proserpine, is another instance.


[50] Compare Mrs.
Hunt's note to Grimm, i. 389.


[51] Crane, p.
78.

Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat
Botté.
Puss in Boots.
Everybody knows Puss in Boots. He is, as Nodier says, the
Figaro of the nursery, as Hop o' My Thumb is the Ulysses, and Blue Beard
the Othello; and thus he is of interest to all children, and to all men
who remember their childhood. Ulysses himself did not travel farther
than the story of the patron of the Marquis de Carabas has wandered, and
few things can be more curious than to follow the Master-Cat in his
migrations. For many reasons the history of Puss in Boots, though
it has been rather neglected, throws a good deal of light on that very
dark question, the diffusion of popular tales. As soon as we read it in
Perrault, we find that Monsieur Perrault was at a loss for a moral to
his narrative. In fact, as he tells it, there is no moral to the
Master-Cat. Puss is a perfectly unscrupulous adventurer who, for no
reason but the fun of the thing, dubs the miller's son marquis, makes a
royal marriage for him, by a series of amusing frauds, and finally
enriches him with the spoils of a murdered ogre. In the absence of any
moral Perrault has to invent one—which does not apply.

'Aux jeunes gens pour l'ordinaire,
L'industrie et le savoir-faire
Valent mieux que des biens acquis.'

Now the 'young person,' the cat's master, had shown no 'industry'
whatever, except in so far as he was a chevalier d'industrie,
thanks to his cat. These obvious truths pained Mr. George Cruikshank
when he tried to illustrate Puss in Boots, and found that the
romance was quite unfit for the young. 'When I came to look carefully at
that story, I felt compelled to rewrite it, and alter the
character of it to a certain extent, for, as it stood, the tale was a
succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in
lying, a system of imposture rewarded by the greatest worldly
advantages. A useful lesson, truly, to be impressed upon the
minds of children.' So Mr. Cruikshank made the tale didactic, showing
how the Marquis de Carabas was the real heir, 'kep' out of his own' by
the landgrabbing ogre, and how puss was a gamekeeper metamorphosed into
a cat as a punishment for his repining disposition. This performance of
Mr. Cruikshank was denounced by Mr. Dickens in Household Words as
a 'fraud on the fairies,' and 'the intrusion of a whole hog of unwieldy
dimensions into the fairy flower-garden[52].'
The Master-Cat probably never made any child a rogue, but no doubt
his conduct was flagrantly immoral. And this brings us to one of the
problems of the science of nursery tales. When we find a story told by
some peoples with a moral, and by other peoples without a
moral, are we to suppose that the tale was originally narrated for the
moral's sake, and that the forms in which there is no moral are
degenerate and altered versions? For example, the Zulus, the Germans,
the French, and the Hindoos have all a nursery tale in which someone, by
a series of lucky accidents and exchanges, goes on making good bargains,
and rising from poverty to wealth. In French Flanders this is the tale
of Jean Gogué; in Grimm it is The Golden Goose; in Zulu it
is part of the adventures of the Hermes of Zulu myth, Uhlakanyana. In
two of these the hero possesses some trifling article which is injured,
and people give him something better in exchange, till, like Jean Gogué,
for example, he marries the king's daughter[53].
Now these tales have no moral. The hero is thought neither better nor
worse of because of his series of exchanges. But in modern Hindostan the
story has a moral. The rat, whose series of exchanges at last win
him a king's daughter, is held up to contempt as a warning to
bargain-hunters. He is not happy with his bride, but escapes, leaving
his tail, half his hair, and a large piece of his skin behind him,
howling with pain, and vowing that 'never, never, never again would he
make a bargain[54].' Here then is a tale told
with a moral, and for the moral in India, but with no moral in
Zululand and France. Are we to suppose that India was the original
source of the narrative, that it was a parable invented for the moral's
sake, and that it spread, losing its moral (as the rat lost his tail),
to Europe and South Africa? Or are we to suppose that originally the
narrative was a mere Schwank, or popular piece of humour, and
that the mild, reflective Hindoo moralised it into a parable or fable?
The question may be argued either way; but the school of Benfey and M.
Cosquin, holding that almost all our stories were invented in India,
should prefer the former alternative.
Now Puss in Boots has this peculiarity, that out of France, or
rather out of the region influenced by Perrault's version of the
history, a moral usually does inform the legend of the Master-Cat, or
master-fox, or master-gazelle, or master-jackal, or master-dog, for each
of these animals is the hero in different countries. Possibly, then, the
story had originally what it sadly lacks in its best-known shape, a
moral; and possibly Puss in Boots was in its primitive shape
(like Toads and Diamonds) a novel with a purpose. But where was
the novel first invented?
We are not likely to discover for certain the cradle of the race of
the Master-Cat—the 'cat's cradle' of Puss in Boots. But the
record of his achievements is so well worth studying, because the
possible area from which it may have arisen is comparatively
limited.
There are many stories known all the world over, such as the major
part of the adventures of Hop o' My Thumb, which might have been
invented anywhere, and might have been invented by men in a low state of
savagery. The central idea in Hop o' My Thumb, for example, is
the conception of a hero who falls into the hands of cannibals, and by a
trick makes the cannibal slay, and sometimes eat, his own kinsfolk,
mother, or wife, or child, while the hero escapes. This legend is well
known in South Africa, in South Siberia, and in Aberdeenshire; and in
Greece it made part of the Minyan legend of Athamas and Ino, murder
being substituted for cannibalism. Namaquas, in Southern Africa; Eskimo,
in Northern America, and Athenians (as Aeschylus shows in the
Eumenides, 244), are as familiar as Maoris, or any of us, with
the ogre's favourite remark, 'I smell the smell of a mortal man.'
Now it is obvious that these ideas—the trick played by the hero
on the cannibal, and the turning of the tables—might occur to the
human mind wherever cannibalism was a customary peril: that is, among
any low savages. It does not matter whether the cannibal is called a
rakshása in India, or an ogre in France, or a
weendigo in Labrador, the notion is the same, and the trick
played by the hero is simple and obvious[55].
Therefore Hop o' My Thumb may have been invented anywhere, by any
people on a low level of civilisation. But Puss in Boots cannot
have been invented by savages of a very backward race or in a really
'primitive' age. The very essence of Puss in Boots is the sudden
rise of a man, by aid of a cunning animal, from the depths of poverty to
the summit of wealth and rank. Undeniably this rise could only occur
where there were great differences of social status, where rank was a
recognised institution, and where property had been amassed in
considerable quantities by some, while others went bare as lackalls.
These things have been of the very essence of civilisation (the
more's the pity), therefore Puss in Boots must have been invented
by a more or less civilised mind; it could not have been invented by a
man in the condition of the Fuegians or the Digger Indians. Nay, when we
consider the stress always and everywhere laid in the story on snobbish
pride and on magnificence of attire and equipment, and on retinue, we
may conclude that Puss in Boots could hardly have been imagined
by men in the middle barbarism; in the state, for example, of Iroquois,
or Zulus, or Maoris. Nor are we aware that Puss in Boots, in any
shape, is found among any of these peoples. Thus the area in which the
origin of Puss in Boots has to be looked for is comparatively
narrow.
Puss in Boots, again, is a story which, in all its wonderfully
varying forms, can only, we may assume, have sprung from one single
mind. It is extremely difficult to assert with confidence that any plot
can only have been invented once for all. Every new successful plot,
from Dr. Jekyl to She, from Vice Versa to Dean
Maitland, is at once claimed for half a dozen authors who,
unluckily, did not happen to write She or Dr. Jekyl. But
if there can be any assurance in these matters, we may feel certain that
the idea of a story, wherein a young man is brought from poverty to the
throne by aid of a match-making and ingenious beast, could only have
been invented once for all. In that case Puss in Boots is a story
which spread from one centre, and was invented by one man in a fairly
civilised society. True, he used certain hereditary and established
formulæ; the notion of a beast that can talk, and surprises
nobody (except in the Zanzibar version) by this accomplishment, is a
notion derived from the old savage condition of the intellect, in which
beasts are on a level with, or superior to, humanity. But we can all use
these formulæ now that we possess them. Could memory of past
literature be wholly wiped out, while civilisation still endured, there
would be no talking and friendly beasts in the children's tales of the
next generation, unless the children wrote them for themselves. As
Sainte-Beuve says, 'On n'inventerait plus aujourd'hui de ces choses, si
elles n'avaient été imaginées dès longtemps[56].'
If we are to get any light on the first home of the tale—and we
cannot get very much—it will be necessary to examine its different
versions. There is an extraordinary amount of variety in the incidents
subordinate to the main idea, and occasionally we find a heroine instead
of a hero, a Marquise de Carabas, not a marquis. Perhaps the best plan
will be to start with the stories near home, and to pursue puss, if
possible, to his distant original tree. First, we all know him in
English translations, made as early as 1745, if not earlier, of
Perrault's Maître Chat, ou Chat botté, published in 1696-7. Here
his motives are simple fun and friendliness. His master, who owns no
other property, thinks of killing and skinning puss, but the cat prefers
first to make acquaintance with the king, by aid of presents of game
from an imaginary Marquis de Carabas; then to pretend his master is
drowning and has had his clothes stolen (thereby introducing him to the
king in a court suit, borrowed from the monarch himself); next to
frighten people into saying that the Marquis is their seigneur;
and, finally, to secure a property for the Marquis by swallowing an
ogre, whom he has induced to assume the disguise of a mouse. This last
trick is as old as Hesiod[57], where Zeus persuades his
wife to become a fly, and swallows her.
The next neighbour of the French Puss in Boots in the north is
found in Sweden[58] and in Norway[59]. In the Swedish, a girl owns the cat. They
wander to a castle gate, where the cat bids the girl strip and hide in a
tree; he then goes to the castle and says that his royal mistress has
been attacked by robbers. The people of the palace attire the girl
splendidly, the prince loses his heart to her, the queen-mother lays
traps for her in vain. Nothing is so fine in the castle as in the girl's
château of Cattenburg. The prince insists on seeing that palace, the cat
frightens the peasants into saying that all the land they pass is the
girl's; finally, the cat reaches a troll's house, with pillars of gold.
The cat turns himself into a loaf of bread and holds the troll in talk
till the sun rises on him and he bursts, as trolls always do if they see
the sun. The girl succeeds to the troll's palace, and nothing is said as
to what became of the cat.
Here is even less moral than in Puss in Boots, for the Marquis
of Carabas, as M. Deulin says, merely lets the cat do all the tricks,
whereas the Swedish girl is his active accomplice. The change of the cat
into bread (which can talk), and the bursting of the ogre at dawn, are
very ancient ideas, whether they have been tacked later on to the
conte or not. In Lord Peter the heroine gives place to a
hero, while the cat drives deer to the palace, saying that they come
from Lord Peter. The cat, we are not told how, dresses Lord Peter in
splendid attire, kills a troll for him, and then, as in Madame
d'Aulnoy's White Cat, has its head cut off and becomes a
princess. Behold how fancies jump! All the ogre's wealth had been the
princess's, before the ogre changed her into a cat, and took her lands.
Thus George Cruikshank's moral conclusion is anticipated, while puss
acts as a match-maker indeed, but acts for herself. This form of the
legend, if not immoral, has no moral, and has been mixed up either with
Madame d'Aulnoy's Chatte Blanche, or with the popular traditions
from which she borrowed.
Moving south, but still keeping near France, we find Puss in
Boots in Italy. The tale is told by Straparola[60]. A
youngest son owns nothing but a cat which, by presents of game, wins the
favour of a king of Bohemia. The drowning trick is then played, and the
king gives the cat's master his daughter, with plenty of money. On the
bride's journey to her new home, the cat frightens the peasants into
saying all the land belongs to his master, for whom he secures the
castle of a knight dead without heirs.
Here, once more, there is no moral.
In a popular version from Sicily[61], a
fox takes the cat's place, from motives of gratitude, because the
man found it robbing and did not kill it. The fox then plays the usual
trick with the game, and another familiar trick, that of leaving a few
coins in a borrowed bushel measure to give the impression that his
master does not count, but measures out his money. The trick of
frightening the peasants follows, and finally, an ogress who owns a
castle is thrown down a well by the fox. Then comes in the new feature:
the man is ungrateful and kills the fox; nevertheless he lives
happy ever after.
Now, at last, we have reached the moral. A beggar on horseback will
forget his first friend: a man will be less grateful than a
beast.
This moral declares itself, with a difference (for the ingrate is
coerced into decent behaviour), in a popular French version, taken down
from oral recitation[62].
Here, then, even among the peasantry of Perrault's own country, and
as near France as Sicily, too, we have Puss in Boots with a
moral: that of human ingratitude contrasted with the gratitude of a
beast. May we conclude, then, that Puss in Boots was originally
invented as a kind of parable by which this moral might be inculcated?
And, if we may draw that conclusion, where is this particular moral most
likely to have been invented, and enforced in an apologue?
As to the first of these two questions, it may be observed that the
story with the moral, and with a fox in place of a cat, is found among
the Avars, a Mongolian people of Mussulman faith, on the northern slopes
of the Caucasus. Here the man is ungrateful, but the fox, as in Sicily,
coerces him, in this case by threatening to let out the story of his
rise in life[63]. In Russia, too, a fox
takes the cat's rôle, and the part of the ogre is entrusted to
the Serpent Uhlan, a supernatural snake, who is burned to ashes[64].
It is now plain that the tale with the moral, whether that was the
original motive or not, is more common than the tale without the moral.
We find the moral among French, Italians, Avars, Russians; among people
of Mahommedan, Greek, and Catholic religion. Now M. Emmanuel Cosquin is
inclined to believe that the moral—the ingratitude of man
contrasted with the gratitude of beasts,—is Buddhistic. If that be
so, then India is undeniably the original cradle of Puss in
Boots. But M. Cosquin has been unable to find any Puss in
Boots in India; at least he knew none in 1876, when he wrote on the
subject in Le Français (June 29, 1876). Nor did the learned
Benfey, with all his prodigious erudition, know an Indian Puss in
Boots[65]. Therefore the proof of
this theory, that Buddhistic India may be the real cat's cradle, is
incomplete; nor does it become more probable when we actually do
discover Puss in Boots in India. For in the Indian Puss in
Boots, just as in Perrault's, there is no moral at all, and
the notion of gratitude, on either the man's side or the beast's, is not
even suggested.
There could scarcely be a more disappointing discovery than this for
the school of Benfey which derives our fairy tales from Buddhism and India. First, the tale
which we are discussing certainly did not find a place in the
Pantschatantra, the Hitopadesa, or any other of the early
Indian literary collections of Märchen which were translated into
so many Western languages. Next, the story does not present itself, for
long, to European students of living Indian folklore. Finally, when puss is found in
India, where the moral element (if it was the original element, and if
its origin was in Buddhist fancy) should be particularly well preserved,
there is not any moral whatever.
The Indian Puss in Boots is called The Match-making
Jackal, and was published, seven years after M. Cosquin had failed
to find it, in the Rev. Lal Behari Day's Folk Tales of Bengal
(Macmillan). Mr. Day, of the Hooghly College, is a native gentleman well
acquainted with European folklore. Some of the stories in his collection were
told by a Bengali Christian woman, two by an old Brahman, three by an
old barber, two by a servant of Mr. Day's, and the rest by another old
Brahman. Unluckily, the editor does not say which tales he got from each
contributor. It might therefore be argued that The Match-making
Jackal was perhaps told by the Christian woman, and that she adapted
it from Puss in Boots, which she might have heard told by
Christians. Mr. Day will be able to settle this question; but it must be
plain to any reader of The Match-making Jackal that the story, as
reported, is too essentially Hindoo to have been 'adapted' in one
generation. It is not impossible that a literary Scandinavian might have
introduced the typically Norse touches into the Norse Puss in
Boots, but no illiterate woman of Bengal could have made Perrault's
puss such a thoroughly Oriental jackal as the beast in the story we are
about to relate.
There was once a poor weaver whose ancestors had been wealthy men.
The weaver was all alone in the world, but a neighbouring jackal,
'remembering the grandeur of the weaver's forefathers, had compassion on
him.' This was pure sentiment on the jackal's part; his life had not
been spared, as in some European versions, by the weaver. There was no
gratitude in the case. 'I'll try to marry you,' said the jackal,
off-hand, 'to the daughter of the king of this country.' The weaver
said, 'Yes, when the sun rises in the west.' But the jackal had his
plan. He trotted off to the palace, many miles away, and on the road he
plucked quantities of the leaves of the betel plant. Then he lay down at
the entrance of the tank where the princess bathed twice a day, and
began ostentatiously chewing betel-leaves. 'Why,' said the princess,
'what a rich land this jackal must have come from. Here he is chewing
betel, a luxury that thousands of men and women among us cannot afford.'
The princess asked the jackal whence he came, and he said he was the
native of a wealthy country. 'As for our king, his palace is like the
heaven of Indra; your palace here is a miserable hovel compared to it.'
So the princess told the queen, who at once, and most naturally, asked
the jackal if his king were a bachelor. 'Certainly,' said the jackal,
'he has rejected princesses from all parts.' So the queen said
she had a pretty daughter, still zu haben, and the jackal
promised to try to persuade his master to think of the princess. The
jackal returned on his confidential mission, telling the weaver to
follow his instructions closely. He went back to court, and suggested
that his master should come in a private manner, not in state, as his
retinue would eat up the substance of his future father-in-law. He
returned and made the weaver borrow a decent suit of clothes from the
washermen. Then he made interest with the king of the jackals, the
paddy-birds, and the crows, each of whom lent a contingent of a thousand
beasts or birds of their species. When they had all arrived within two
miles of the palace, the jackal bade them yell and cry, which they did
so furiously that the king supposed an innumerable company of people
were attending his son-in-law. He therefore implored the jackal to ask
his master to come quite alone. 'My master will come alone in undress,'
said the jackal; 'send a horse for him.' This was done, and the jackal
explained that his master arrived in mean clothes that he might not
abash the king by his glory and splendour. The weaver held his tongue as
commanded, but at night his talk was of looms and beams, and the
princess detected him. The jackal explained that his philanthropic
prince was establishing a colony of weavers, and that his mind ran a
good deal on this benevolent project.
Here the Puss in Boots character of the tale disappears. The
weaver and the princess go home, but the jackal does not cajole
anyone out of a castle and lands. He has made the match, and there he
leaves it. The princess, however, has fortunately a magical method of
making gold, by virtue of which she builds the weaver a splendid palace,
and 'hospitals were established for diseased, sick, and infirm animals,'
a very Indian touch. The king visits his daughter, is astonished at her
wealth, and the jackal says, 'Did I not tell you so?'
Here, as we said, there is no moral, or if any moral, it is the
gratitude of man, as displayed in founding hospitals for beasts, not, as
M. Cosquin says, 'l'idée toute bouddhique de l'ingratitude de l'homme
opposée à la bonté native de l'animal.' Plainly, if any moral was really
intended, it was a satire on people who seek great marriages, just as in
the story of The Rat's Wedding, the moral is a censure on
bargain-hunters.
The failure of the only Indian Puss in Boots we know to
establish a theory of an Indian origin, does not, of course, prove a
negative. We can only say that puss certainly did not come from India to
Europe by the ordinary literary vehicles, and that, when he is found in
India, he does not preach what is called the essentially Buddhist
doctrine of the ingratitude of man and the gratitude of beasts.
There remains, however, an Eastern form of the tale, an African
version, which is of morality all compact. This is the Swahili version
from Zanzibar, and it is printed as Sultan Darai, in Dr. Steere's
Swahili Tales, as told by Natives of Zanzibar (Bell and Daldy,
London, 1870). If a tale first arose where it is now found to exist with
most moral, with most didactic purpose, then Puss in Boots is
either Arab or Negro, or a piece in which Negroes and Arabs have
collaborated. For nowhere is the conte so purposeful as among the
Swahilis, who are by definition 'men of mixed Negro and Arab origin.'
There may be Central African elements in the Swahili tales, for most of
them have 'sung parts,' almost unintelligible even to the singers. 'I
suppose,' says Dr. Steere, 'they have been brought down from the
interior by the slaves, and perhaps corrupted by them as they gradually
forgot their own language.' Thus Central Africa may have contributed to
the Swahili stories, but the Swahili Puss in Boots, as it at
present exists, has been deeply modified by Mussulman ideas.
Sultan Darai, the Swahili Puss in Boots, really
contains two tales. The first is about a wicked step-mother; the second
begins when the hero, losing his wife and other kinsfolk, takes to
vicious courses, and becomes so poor that he passes his time scratching
for grains of millet on the common dustheap. While thus scratching he
finds a piece of money, with which he buys a gazelle. The gazelle has
pity on him, and startles him by saying so: 'Almighty God is able to do
all things, to make me to speak, and others more than I.' The story
comes, therefore, through narrators who marvel, as in the fairy world
nobody does marvel, at the miracle of a speaking beast.
The gazelle, intent on helping the man, finds a splendid diamond,
which he takes to the sultan, just as puss took the game, as 'a present
from Sultan Darai.' The sultan is much pleased; the gazelle proposes
that he shall give his daughter to Sultan Darai, and then comes the old
trick of pretending the master has been stripped by robbers, 'even to
his loin-cloth.' The gazelle carries fine raiment to his master, and, as
in the French popular and traditional form, bids him speak as little as
may be. The marriage is celebrated, and the gazelle goes off, and kills
a great seven-headed snake, which, as in Russia, is the owner of a rich
house. The snake, as he travels, is accompanied (as in the Kaffir story
of Five Heads) by a storm of wind, like that which used to shake
the 'medicine lodges' of the North American Indians, puzzling the
missionaries. The snake, like the ogre in all Hop o' My Thumb
tales, smells out the gazelle, but is defeated by that victorious
animal. The gazelle brings home his master, Sultan Darai, and the
Princess to the snake's house, where they live in great wealth and
comfort.
Now comes in the moral: the gazelle falls sick, Sultan Darai refuses
to see it, orders coarse food to be offered it; treats his poor
benefactor, in short, with all the arrogant contempt of an ungrateful
beggar suddenly enriched. As the ill-used cat says in the
Pentamerone—