Popular Tales
by Charles Perrault · English, French · Gutenberg #33931 · 390,590 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Popular Tales
Author: Charles Perrault
Editor: Andrew Lang
Release date: October 13, 2010 [eBook #33931]
Language: English, French
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33931
Credits: Produced by Fritz Ohrenschall, Carol Brown, Sania Ali Mirza
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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
[Illustration: New York Times Company logo]
ARNO PRESS
A New York Times Company
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
[Illustration: Oxford Logo]
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
Oxford
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. Andre Lefevre's _edition of the Contes, with his
bibliographical and other notes, and the 'Contes de Ma Mere 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 Koehler, M. Paul Sebillot, 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 Mere L'Oye_. He looked, no doubt, for no such immortality, and,
if he ever thought of posthumous fame, relied on his elaborate
_Parallele 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 _Memoires_ (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 College 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 AEneid, 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 eloigne_, 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 etoit bien important et d'une extreme
consequence 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 embarrasse.' 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
_fetes_ 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 etre bien malade, puisqu'on la
mettait entre les mains des medecins.'
'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 Abbe, and next
time, a doctor had secured it for a _cure_. 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 Moliere. If Perrault thought at
all of the interests of Moliere, he probably remembered that his own
brother was a physician, and that physicians were Moliere's favourite
butts. 'Il ne devait pas tourner en ridicule les bons Medecins, que
l'Ecriture nous enjoint d'honorer,' says Perrault in his _Eloges des
Hommes Illustres_ (1696-1700). Moliere'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 Academie_. 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 moeurs ne sont pas en
si grande surete' 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 passe_. 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 succes malgre 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 L85. It is a commercial but not inaccurate test of
merit.
Perrault's _Memoires_ end just where they begin to be interesting. He
tells us how he read his poem _Le Siecle 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 Parallele 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 defauts qu'on impute au siecle ou 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 Moliere 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 Poetique_. But
Boileau, stimulated by Conti, who wrote on his _fauteuil_, '_tu dors,
Brutus,_' chiefly thundered in his _Reflexions 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'a
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 Siecle 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 etoit plein de piete, de probite, de
vertu, poli, modeste, officieux, fidele a tous les devoirs qu'exigent
les liaisons naturelles et acquises; et, dans un poste considerable
aupres 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 particuliere, et il l'a toujours employee 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_.
[Footnote 1: _Registre de La Grange_, p. 11.]
[Footnote 2: 'Exquis' is good.]
[Footnote 3: _L'Oublieux_ was written in 1691. It was printed from the
MS. by M. Hippolyte Lucas. _Academie 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 Sevigne 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 Mere 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 a fleurs d'or et ma barriere
de diamans qui n'est pas des plus indifferentes.' 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 Sevigne's letter, that the
_Maerchen_ 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 simplicite_. They used to say, by
way of raillery, 'par simplicite je prends la meilleure place,' 'par
simplicite je vais me louer,' 'par simplicite 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 OEil de Boeuf[6]. Mlle. L'Heritier in
_Bigarrures Ingenieuses_ (p. 237) expressly says, 'Les Romances modernes
tachent d'imiter la simplicite 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 fees 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 Sevigne'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
Bibliotheque 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 Bibliotheque Bleue, not the Bibliotheque 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 pieces 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. Andre Lefevre, 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 _Parallele_, iii. p. 117, the
Abbe 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 a 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
Fenelon'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 heros ou l'heroine du conte sont dans le
malheur, et s'ecrier 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 Mere 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 Botte_ ('Puss in Boots,' or
'The Master Cat'), _Les Fees_ ('The Fairy'), _Cendrillon, ou la petite
pantoufle de verre_ ('Cinderilla,' in the older English versions, now
'Cinderella'), _Riquet a 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 Ingenieuses, ou Recueil de diverses Pieces
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 'a
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 Fees_ (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 Fees_, 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 raconte 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 _Privilege 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 meme 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 naivete, 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'agrement.' 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
Sevigne 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 _Maerchen_. 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
passe_. 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, 'mele 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'evanouir (car
c'est le premier expedient 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 la 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 a si peu de chose, qu'il ne
daignoit mettre en ligne de conte ce qu'il gagnoit de ce cote-la.' That
is the Academician's jibe, and it is he who makes Petit Poucet buy
Offices 'de la nouvelle creation 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 soeur 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 _fee_ 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 Passe_ 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
Fees_ 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 Abbe de Villiers, may be learned
from the opening sentence of _Le Parfait Amour_. 'Dans un de ces
agreables pais qui sont dependans de l'Empire des Fees, regnoit la
redoutable Danamo, elle estoit scavante dans son art, cruelle dans ses
actions, et glorieuse de l'honneur d'estre descendue de la celebre
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 _feerie_. _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 Fees_. 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.'
[Footnote 4: Grimm, _Kinder- und Hausmaerchen_. No. 89.]
[Footnote 5: _Ballet des Arts, danse par sa Majeste; le 8 Janvier,
1663._ A Paris. Par Robert Ballard. M.DC.LXIII.]
[Footnote 6: _Madame de Maintenon d'apres sa Correspondance._ Geffroy,
ii. 211. Paris, 1887.]
[Footnote 7: _Madame de Maintenon d'apres sa Correspondance._ Geffroy,
i. 322.]
[Footnote 8: Paris: de l'imprimerie de Jean Baptiste Coignard, imprimeur
du Roy et de l'Academie Francoise, rue Saint Jacques, la Bible d'or,
1691. The Bibliotheque Nationale and the Arsenal possess copies of this
duodecimo of 58 pages. One of the copies is inscribed _Donne par
Lautheur_ 1691. (Lefevre. _Contes de Charles Perrault_, p. 167. Paris,
_s. a._)]
[Footnote 9: Paul de Saint Victor, _Les Contes des Fees_, in _Hommes et
Dieux_, p. 475. Paris, 1883.]
[Footnote 10: _Les Fees du Moyen Age_, p. 101. Paris, 1843.]
[Footnote 11: Recueil, 1694. _Peau d'Ane_, p. 50. _Les Souhaits
Ridicules_, p. 93. _Griselidis_, p. 233.]
[Footnote 12: Coignard Veuve. Paris.]
[Footnote 13: _Dialogues des Morts par feu Messire Francois de Salignac
de la Motte Fenelon_, vol. i. p. 23. Paris, 1718. 'L'autre n'est qu'un
amas de contes de vieilles.' Achilles thus anticipates Gerland's
_Altgriechische Maerchen in der Odyssee_.]
[Footnote 14: Contes de Ma Mere 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 Mere Oye,
Se trouvant fabuleux et faux,
Ils deviendront tous bien penauts.'
]
[Footnote 15: In her _Moralite_, 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.'
]
[Footnote 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 Fee_, 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.]
[Footnote 17: _Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passe, avec des Moralites._ A
Paris. Chez Claude Barbin, sur le second peron de la Sainte-Chapelle; au
Palais. Avec Privilege de sa Majeste, 1697. In 12o. 230 pp. Bibliotheque
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 Mere 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.]
[Footnote 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.)]
[Footnote 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 Abbe de Villiers, however, in his _Entretiens sur les
Contes des Fees_ (a Paris chez Jacques Collombat, 1699), makes one of
his persons praise the stories 'que l'on attribue au fils d'un celebre
Academicien,' 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'Academicien, j'ai peine a croire que le pere
n'ait pas mis la main a 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
Abbe 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.]
[Footnote 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
Fees_, par Madame D----, Amsterdam, Roger, 1708.]
[Footnote 21: Paul de Saint Victor, _Hommes et Dieux_, p. 474.]
[Footnote 22: _L'Histoire de Melusine_ (Barbin, Paris, 1698) is
dedicated like _Histoires et Contes du Tems Passe_ to _Mademoiselle_.
The author says, 'Si tost que la plus celebre des Fees a sceu que votre
Altesse Royale avoit eu la bonte de donner de favourables audiences aux
Fees 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 'Privilege en faveur des Fees dans ce temps ou l'on
a tant d'engouement pour les Contes des Fees' 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 Fees 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 _Fee_; but this
only means that, like the seven-leagued Boots in _Hop o' my Thumb_
('elles estoient Fees'), the key has magical qualities. The part of
Fairies, then, is very restricted, even in Perrault, while, in
traditional _Maerchen_ 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, _fees_, _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
Fees_; 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 _Fees_ of the forest of Broceliande.
The _Fees_ 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 _Fees_ was set in the neighbouring
chamber[30]. But, in popular superstition, if not in Perrault's tales,
the _Fees_ 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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
Mueller, _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 _Fees_. 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. Littre, 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
Fees_, p. 169-172).
[Footnote 23: Fauno fuit uxor nomine Fatua. Justin, xliii. I. Preller,
_R. M._ I. 385.]
[Footnote 24: _Roemische Mythologie_, i. 100. Berlin, 1881.]
[Footnote 25: Preller, _op. cit._ ii. 194, quoting Tertullian, _De An._
39, and Augustine, _Civitas Dei_, iv. 11.]
[Footnote 26: _Les Fees du Moyen Age_, p. 13. Paris, 1843.]
[Footnote 27: Quam quidam, quod nomine dici prohibitum fuerat, _Bonam
Deam_ appellatam volunt. Servius, _AEneid_, viii. 315.]
[Footnote 28: Maury, _Les Fees du Moyen Age_, pp. 15, 16, and his
authorities in the _Capitulaires_ and _Life of Saint Eloi_.]
[Footnote 29: Amyot, in his Plutarch, actually renders _Moirai_ by
_Fees_ (1567).]
[Footnote 30: Maury, p. 31.]
[Footnote 31: Scott, _Border Minstrelsy_, iii. 381.]
[Footnote 32: _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_, p. 317; _Amatongo_, p. 227.]
[Footnote 33: In popular French versions the Ogre is often called _Le
Sarrasin_ to this day (Sebillot in _Melusine_, 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
_Maerchen_, 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 Mueller, 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 Pa_n_katantra, 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 formulae, 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
Mere 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'en Romanz ai turne 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 rime en Franceiz.'
That is to say, King Henry had translated into English a collection of
fables and _contes_ attributed to AEsop, and Marie rendered the English
into French. Now AEsop 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 AEsop, 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
Phaedrus, 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
mediaeval 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. Meon, 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 tresor 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 (_OEuvres 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_.
[Footnote 34: _Selected Essays_, i. 504.]
[Footnote 35: Benfey, ii. 341.]
[Footnote 36: See _Poesies de Marie de France, Poete Anglo-Normande du
xiiie Siecle_, vol. ii. p. 140. Paris, 1820.]
[Footnote 37: Benfey, _Pantschatantra_, ii. 341.]
[Footnote 38: Comparetti, _Book of Sindibad_, p. 3. Benfey,
_Pantschatantra_, i. 38.]
[Footnote 39: _Poesies 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 Althaea, 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 _a 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 _Fee_ 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 mediaeval
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, _a 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. Andre Lefevre's discovery that Poufle, the
dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in search of the
Dawn.
[Footnote 40: Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, p. 33.]
[Footnote 41: _Contes de Ma Mere 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 etre regulier avec les Reguliers, comme j'ai ete
loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos comperes.[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
_Maerchen_ 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 _Maerchen_ 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 _role_ 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 _role_, 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. Goldstuecker 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 Vedique_, 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 Mueller, 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 Rothkaeppchen, 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.'
[Footnote 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 Nievre, 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. (_Melusine_, May 5,
1887.)]
[Footnote 43: A. M. de la Fontaine, a Usez, le ii. Nov. 1661.]
[Footnote 44: Tylor, _Prim. Cult._ i. 338.]
[Footnote 45: Brough Smyth, _Natives of Victoria_, i. p. 432.]
[Footnote 46: Grimm, Note on 5.]
[Footnote 47: Max Mueller'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 _fee_, 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 (_OEuvres 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
mediaeval 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
_Maerchen_ 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 _Maerchen_ 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 _Maerchen_ 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 Loewe's
_Esthnische Maerchen_ (No. 20) a tale almost too closely like Perrault's.
There is a sister, and the goose boy takes the _role_ 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. Andre Lefevre, when he thinks that, in the two avenging
brothers, he recognises the Vedic Asvins.
[Footnote 48: The passages in the legend of Sainte Triphime are quoted
by M. Deulin, _Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye_, p. 178. See also _Annuaire
Hist. et Arch. de Bretagne_, Annee 1862. The Saint has a warning vision
of the dead wives, but not in consequence of opening a forbidden door.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 50: Compare Mrs. Hunt's note to Grimm, i. 389.]
[Footnote 51: Crane, p. 78.]
LE MAISTRE CHAT, OU LE CHAT BOTTE.
_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
Gogue_; 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 Gogue, 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 _rakshasa_
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 _formulae_; 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 _formulae_ 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 ete imaginees des 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
_Maitre Chat, ou Chat botte_, 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
chateau 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 _role_, 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 Francais_ (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 _Maerchen_ 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'idee toute bouddhique de l'ingratitude de l'homme
opposee a la bonte 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_--
De riche appauvri Dieu te gard'
Et de croquant passe richard!
Finally the gazelle dies of sorrow, and Sultan Darai dreams that he is
scratching on his old dustheap. He wakens and finds himself there, as
naked and wretched as ever, while his wife is wafted to her father's
house at home.
The moral is obvious, and the story is told in a very touching manner,
moreover all the world takes the side of the gazelle, and it is _mourned
with a public funeral_.
Here, then, in Zanzibar we have decidedly the most serious and
purposeful form of _Puss in Boots_. It is worth noting that the animal
hero is _not_ the Rabbit who is the usual hero in Zanzibar as he is in
Uncle Remus's tales. It is also worth noticing that a certain tribe of
Southern Arabians do, as a matter of fact, honour all dead gazelles with
seven days of public mourning. 'Ibn al-Moghawir,' says Prof.
Robertson-Smith, in _Kinship in Early Arabia_ (p. 195), 'speaks of a
South Arab tribe called Beni Harith or Acarib, among whom if a dead
gazelle was found, it was solemnly buried, and the whole tribe mourned
for it seven days.... The gazelle supplies a name to a clan of the Azd,
the Zabyan.' Prof. Robertson-Smith adds (p. 204), 'And so when we find a
whole clan mourning over a dead gazelle, we can hardly but conclude that
when this habit was first formed, they thought that they were of the
gazelle-stock' or Totem kindred.
It is quite possible that all these things are mere coincidences.
Certainly we shall not argue, because the most moral form of _Puss in
Boots_ gives us a gazelle in place of a cat, and because a certain Arab
clan mourns gazelles, while the gazelle hero is found in the story of a
half-Arab race, that, therefore, the Swahili gazelle story is the
original form of _Puss in Boots_, and that from Arabia the tale has been
carried into Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, India, and France, often
leaving its moral behind it, and always exchanging its gazelle for some
other beast-hero.
This kind of reasoning is only too common, when the object is to show
that India was the birthplace of any widely diffused popular fiction. In
India, people argue, this or that tale has a moral. Among Celts and
Kamschatkans it has _no_ moral. But certain stories did undeniably come
from India in literary works, like the stories of Sindibad. Therefore
this or that story also came from India, dropping its moral on the way.
Did we like this sort of syllogism, we might boldly assert that _Puss
in_ _Boots_ was originally a heroic myth of an Arab tribe with a gazelle
for Totem. But we like not this kind of syllogism. The purpose of this
study of _Puss in Boots_ is to show that, even when a tale has probably
been invented but once, in one place, and has thence spread over a great
part of the world, the difficulty of finding the original centre is
perhaps insuperable. At any time a fresh discovery may be made. Puss
_may_ turn up in some hitherto unread manuscript of an old missionary
among Mexicans or Peruvians[66].
[Footnote 52: George Cruikshank had also turned _Hop o' My Thumb_ and
_Cinderella_ into temperance tracts. See Cruikshank's _Fairy Library_,
G. Bell and Sons.]
[Footnote 53: The French version is in M. Charles Deulin's _Contes du
Roi Gambrinus_. The German (Grimm, 64) omits the story of the exchanges,
but ends like _Jean Gogue_. The Zulu is in Dr. Callaway's
_Inzinganekwane_, pp. 38-40.]
[Footnote 54: _Wide-awake Stories._ A collection of tales told by little
children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Punjaub and Kashmir. Steel
and Temple, London, 1884, p. 26.]
[Footnote 55: Andree, _Die Anthropophagie_, 'Ueberlebsel im
Volksglauben.' Leipzig, 1887.]
[Footnote 56: _Causeries du Lundi_, December 29, 1851.]
[Footnote 57: _Schol. ad. Theog._ 885.]
[Footnote 58: Thorpe's _Palace with Pillars of Gold_.]
[Footnote 59: Dasent's _Lord Peter_.]
[Footnote 60: _Piacevoli Notti_, xi. 1, Venice, 1562. Crane's _Italian
Popular Tales_, p. 348.]
[Footnote 61: Pitre, No. 188; Crane, p. 127. Gonzenbach, 65, _Conte
Piro_. In Gonzenbach, the man does not kill the fox, which pretends to
be dead, and is bilked of its promised reward, a grand funeral.]
[Footnote 62: Lou Compaire Gatet, 'Father Cat,' _Revue des Langues
Romanes_, iii. 396. See Deulin, _Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye_, p. 205.]
[Footnote 63: _Boukoutchi Khan_, translated into German by Schiefner.
_Memoires de l'Academie de St. Petersbourg_, 1873. With Dr. Koehler's
Notes.]
[Footnote 64: Gubernatis. _Zoological Mythology_, ii. 136. Quoting
Afanassieff, iv. 11. Compare a similar snake in Swahili.]
[Footnote 65: _Pantschatantra_, i. 222.]
[Footnote 66: The work of M. Cosquin's referred to throughout is his
valuable _Contes de Lorraine_, Paris, 1886. A crowd of _Puss in Boots_
stories are referred to by Dr. Koehler in Gonzenbach's _Sicilianische
Maerchen_, ii. 243 (Leipzig, 1870). They are Finnish, Bulgarian, Russian,
and South Siberian. The Swahili and Hindu versions appear to have been
unknown, in 1870, to Dr. Koehler. In 1883, Mr. Ralston, who takes the
Buddhist side, did not know the Indian version (_Nineteenth Century_,
Jan. 1883).]
LES FEES.
_Toads and Diamonds._
The origin of this little story is so manifestly moral, that there is
little need to discuss it. A good younger sister behaves kindly to a
poor old woman, who, being a fairy, turns all her words into flowers and
diamonds. The wicked elder sister treats the fairy with despite: _her_
words become toads and serpents, and the younger marries a king's son.
The preference shown to the youngest child is discussed in the note on
Cinderella. M. Deulin asks whether _Toads and Pearls_ is connected with
the legend of Latona (Leto) and the peasants whom she changed into
frogs, for refusing to allow her to drink[67]. Latona really wished to
bathe her children, and the two narratives have probably no connection,
though rudeness is punished in both. Nor is there a closer connection
with the tales in which tears (like the tears of Wainamoinen in the
_Kalewala_) change into pearls. It is an obvious criticism that the
elder girl should have met the fairy first; she was not likely to behave
so rudely when she knew that politeness would be rewarded. The natural
order of events occurs in Grimm's _Golden Goose_ (64), where the eldest
and the second son refuse to let the old man taste their cake and wine.
Here, as in a tale brought by M. Deulin from French Flanders, the polite
youngest son, by virtue of a Golden Goose, makes a very serious princess
laugh, and wins her for his wife. Turning on a similar moral conception
Grimm's _Mother Holle_ (24) is infinitely better than _Les Fees_. The
younger daughter drops her shuttle down a well; she is sent after it,
and reaches a land where apples speak and say, 'Shake us, we are all
ripe.' She does all she is asked to do, and makes Mother Holle's
feather-bed so well that the feathers (snow-flakes) fly about the world.
She goes home covered with golden wages, and her elder sister follows
her, but not her example. She insults the apples, is lazy at Mother
Holle's, and is sent home covered with pitch. Grimm gives many variants.
Mlle. L'Heritier amplifies the tale in her _Bigarrures_ (1696). The
story begins to be more exciting, when it is combined, as commonly
happens, with that of the substituted bride. It is odd enough that the
Kaffirs have the incident of the good and bad girl, the bad girl laughs
at the trees, as in Grimm's she mocks the apples (Theal, _Kaffir
Folklore_, p. 49). This tale (in which there is no miracle of uttering
toads or pearls) diverges into that of the _Snake Husband_, a rude
_Beauty and the Beast_. The Zulus again have the story of the
substituted bride ('Ukcombekcantsini,' Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the
Zulus_, Natal, 1868). The idea recurs in Theal's Kaffir Collection (p.
136); in both cases the substituted bride is a beast. In Scotland the
story of the _Black Bull o' Norroway_ contains the incident of the
substituted bride. The Kaffirs, in _The Wonderful Horns_, have a large
part of that story, but without the substituted bride, who, in Europe,
occasionally attaches herself as a sequel to _Toads and Diamonds_. This
is illustrated especially in Grimm's _Three Dwarfs in the Wood_ (13),
where the good girl's speech is made literally golden. The bad girl, who
speaks toads, marries the king's son who loves the good girl. Fragments
of verse, in which the good girl tries to warn her husband, resemble
those in the _Black Bull o' Norroway_. The tale is complicated by the
metamorphosis of the true bride (no great change her lover would say)
into 'a little duck.' She regains her shape when a sword is swung over
her. The bad girl is tortured like Regulus. This is _Bushy-bride_ in
Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_.
There seems to be no reason why the adventure of the good and bad
sisters should merge in the formula of the substituted bride, more than
in the adventure of the princess accused of bearing bestial children, or
in any other. Probably Perrault felt this, and, having made his moral
point, was content to do without the sequel.
_Les Fees_ is interesting then, first, as an example of a moral idea
illustrated in tales even in South Africa, and, secondly (in its longer
and more usual form), as an example of the manner in which any story may
glide into any other. All the incidents of popular tales, like the bits
of glass in a kaleidoscope, may be shaken into a practically limitless
number of combinations.
[Footnote 67: Antoninus Liberalis, xxxv.]
CENDRILLON.
_Cinderella._
The story of Cinderella (_Cendrillon_, _Cucendron_, _Cendreusette_,
_Sainte Rosette_) is one of the most curious in the history of
_Maerchen_. Here we can distinctly see how the taste and judgment of
Perrault altered an old and barbarous detail, and there, perhaps, we
find the remains of a very ancient custom.
There are two points in _Cinderella_, and her cousin _Peau d'Ane_,
particularly worth notice. First, there is the process by which the
agency of a _Fairy Godmother_ has been substituted for that of a
_friendly beast_, usually a connection by blood-kindred of the hero or
heroine. Secondly, there is the favouritism shown, in many versions, to
the _youngest child_, and the custom which allots to this child a place
by the hearth or in the cinders (_Cucendron_).
Taking the first incident, the appearance in Perrault of a Fairy
Godmother in place of a _friendly beast_, we may remark that this kind
of change is always characteristic of the promotion of a story. Just as
Indian 'aboriginal' tribes cashier their beast-ancestors ('Totems') in
favour of a human ancestor of a similar name, when they rise in
civilisation, so the _roles_ which are filled by beasts in savage
_Maerchen_ come to be assigned to men and women in the _contes_ of more
cultivated people[68]. In Cinderella, however, the friendly beast holds
its own more or less in nearly all European versions, except in those
actually derived from Perrault. In every shape of the story known to us,
the beast is a _domesticated animal_. Thus it will not be surprising if
no native version is found in America, where animals, except dogs, were
scarcely domesticated at all before the arrival of Europeans.
In examining the incident of the friendly and protecting beast, it may
be well to begin with a remote and barbarous version, that of the
Kaffirs. Here, as in other cases, we may find one situation in a
familiar story divorced from those which, as a general rule, are in its
company. Theorists may argue either that the Kaffirs borrowed from
Europeans one or two incidents out of a popular form of _Cinderella_, or
that they happen to make use of an opinion common to most early peoples,
the belief, namely, in the superhuman powers of friendly
beast-protectors. As to borrowing, Europeans and Kaffirs have been in
contact, though not very closely, for two hundred years. No one,
however, would explain the Kaffir custom of daubing the body with white
clay, in the initiatory rites, as derived from the similar practice of
the ancient Greeks[69]. Among the neighbouring Zulus, Dr. Callaway found
that _Maerchen_ were the special property of the most conservative
class,--the old women. 'It is not common to meet with a man who is
willing to speak of them in any other way than as something which he has
some dim recollection of having heard his grandmother relate[70].'
Whether the traditional lore of savage grandmothers is likely to have
been borrowed from Dutch or English settlers is a question that may be
left to the reader.
The tale in which the friendly beast of European folklore occurs among
the Kaffirs is _The Wonderful Horns_[71]. As among the Santals (an
'aboriginal' hilltribe of India) we have a hero, not a heroine. 'There
was once a boy whose mother that bore him was dead, and who was
ill-treated by his other mothers,' the Kaffirs being polygamous. He rode
off on an ox given him by his father. The ox fought a bull and won. Food
was supplied out of his right horn, and the 'leavings' (as in the _Black
Bull o'Norroway_) were put into the left horn. In another fight the ox
was killed, but his horns continued to be a magical source of supplies.
A new mantle and handsome ornaments came out of them, and by virtue of
this fairy splendour he won and wedded a very beautiful girl.
Here, it may be said, there is nothing of _Cendrillon_, except that rich
garments, miraculously furnished, help to make a marriage; and that the
person thus aided was the victim of a stepmother. No doubt this is not
much, but we might sum up _Cendrillon_ thus. The victim of a stepmother
makes a great marriage by dint of goodly garments supernaturally
provided.
In _Cendrillon_ the _recognition_ (anagnorisis) makes a great part of
the interest. There is no anagnorisis in the Kaffir legend, which is
very short, being either truncated or undeveloped.
Let us now turn to the Santals, a remote and shy non-Aryan hill-tribe of
India. Here we find the anagnorisis, but in a form not only
disappointing but almost cynical[72].
In the Santal story we have the cruel Stepmother, the hero,--not a
heroine, but a boy,--the protecting and friendly Cow, the attempt to
kill the Cow, the Flight, the great good-fortune of the hero, the
Princess who falls in love with a lock of his hair, which is to play the
part of Cinderella's glass slipper in the anagnorisis, and, finally, a
cynically devised accident, by which the beauty of the hair is
destroyed, and the hero's chance of pleasing the princess perishes. It
will be noticed that the use of a lock of hair floating down a river, to
be fallen in love with and help the _denouement_, is found, first, in
the Egyptian _conte_ of the _Two Brothers_, written down in the reign of
Ramses II., fourteen hundred years before our era.
In that story, too, the hero has a friendly cow, which warns him when he
is in danger of being murdered. But the Egyptian story has no other
connection with _Cendrillon_[73]. The device of a floating lock of hair
is not uncommon in Bengali _Maerchen_.
From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still
non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow _Maerchen_ from their
Hinduised aboriginal neighbours is not certain, but is perfectly
possible and even probable. Though some theorists have denied that races
borrow nursery tales from each other, it is certain that Loennrot,
writing to Schiefner in 1855, mentions a Finnish fisher who, meeting
Russian and Swedish fishers, 'swopped stories' with them when stormy
weather made it impossible to put to sea[75]. No doubt similar
borrowings have always been going on when the peasantry on the frontiers
met their neighbours, and where Kaffirs have taken Hottentot wives, or
Sidonians have carried off Greek children as captives, in fact, all
through the national and tribal meetings of the world[76].
_The Wonderful Birch_ (Emmy Schreck, ix.) is a form of _Cinderella_ from
Russian Carelia. The story has a singularly dramatic and original
opening. A man and his wife had but one daughter, and one Sheep. The
Sheep wandered away, the woman sought him in the woods, and she met a
witchwife. The witchwife turned the woman into the semblance of the
Sheep, and herself took the semblance of the woman. She went to the
woman's house, where the husband thought he was welcoming his own wife
and the sheep that was lost. The new and strange stepmother demanded the
death of the Sheep, which was the real mother of the heroine. Warned by
the Sheep, a black sheep, the daughter did not taste of her flesh, but
gathered and buried the bones and fragments. Thence grew a beautiful
birch tree. The man and the witchwife went to court, the witchwife
leaving the girl to accomplish impossible tasks. The voice of the dead
mother from the grave below the birch bade the girl break a twig from
the tree, and therewith accomplish the tasks. Then out of the earth came
beautiful raiment (as in _Peau d'Ane_), and the girl dressed, and went
to court. The Prince falls in love with her, and detects her by means of
her ring, which takes the part of the slipper. Then comes in the
frequent formula of a false bride substituted by the witchwife, a number
of trials, and the punishment of the witch.
Here, then, the friendly beast is but the Mother surviving in two
shapes, first as a sheep, then as a tree, exactly the idea of the
ancient Egyptian story of the _Two Brothers_, where Bitiou first becomes
a bull, and then a persea tree[77]. In Finnish the Cinderella plot is
fully developed. A similar tale, still with the beast in place of the
Fairy Godmother, is quoted by Mr. Ralston from the Servian (_Vuk
Karajich_, No. 32). Three maidens were spinning near a cleft in the
ground, when an old man warned them not to let their spindles fall into
the cleft, or their mother would be changed into a cow. Mara's spindle
fell in, and the mother instantly shared the fate of Io. Mara tended the
cow that had been her mother lovingly, but the father married again, and
the new wife drove Mara to dwell among the cinders (_pepel_), hence she
was called _Pepelluga_, cinderwench[78]. The cruel Servian stepmother
had the cow slain, but not before it had warned Mara to eat none of the
kindred flesh[79], and to bury the bones in the ashes of the hearth.
From these bones sprang two white doves, which supplied Mara with
splendid raiment, and, finally, won for her the hand of the prince,
after the usual incidents of the lost slipper, the attempt to substitute
the stepmother's ugly daughter, and the warning of the fowls, 'Ki erike,
the right maiden is under the trough.'
In a modern Greek variant (Hahn, ii.), the Mother (not in vaccine form)
is eaten by her daughters, except the youngest, who refuses the hideous
meal. The dead woman magically aids the youngest from her tomb, and the
rest follows as usual, the slipper playing its accustomed part.
In Gaelic a persecuted stepdaughter is aided by a Ram. The Ram is
killed, his bones are buried by his _protegee_, he comes to life again,
but is lame, for his bones were not all collected, and he plays the part
of Fairy Godmother[80].
Turning from the Gaelic to the Lowland Scotch, we find _Rashin Coatie_
as a name under which either _Peau d'Ane_ or _Cendrillon_ may be
narrated. We discovered Cendrillon as _Rashin Coatie_, in
Morayshire[81]. Here a Queen does not become a _cow_, indeed, but dies,
and leaves to her daughter a _Red Calf_, which aids her, till it is
slain by a cruel stepmother.
The dead calfy said
_Tak me up, bane by bane
And pit me aneth yon grey stane,_
and whatever you want, come and seek it frae me, and I will
give you it.
The usual adventures of Cinderella ensue, the birds denouncing the False
Bride, whose foot is pinched to make it fit the 'beautiful satin
slipper' of the heroine.
In most of these versions the heroine is aided by a beast, and even when
that beast is dead, it continues helpful, in one case actually coming to
life again, like the ox in the South African _Maerchen_[82].
In all these thoroughly popular and traditional tales, the supernatural
machinery varies much from that of Perrault, who found _Peau d'Ane_
'difficile a croire.' But, in all the wilder tales, the machinery is
exactly what we note in the myths and actual beliefs of the lower races.
_They_ do not shrink from the conception of a mother who becomes a cow
(like Io), nor of a cow (as in the case of Heitsi Eibib among the
Hottentots), who becomes the mother of human progeny. It is not unlikely
that the Scotch mother, in _Rashin Coatie_, who bequeathes to her
daughter a wonder-working calf (a cow in Sicily, Pitre, 41), is a
modification of an idea like that of the cannibal Servian variant[83].
Then the _Mouton_ of Madame d'Aulnoy seems like a courtly survival of
the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_ mixed with the _donnee_ of _Beauty and the
Beast_[84]. The notion of helpful animals makes all the 'Manitou'
element in Red Indian religion, and is common in Australia. The helpful
calf, or sheep, bequeathed by the dying mother, reminds one of the
equally helpful, but golden Ram, which aids Phrixus and Helle against
their stepmother, after the death or deposition of their mother Nephele.
This Ram also could speak,--
alla kai auden
andromeen proeeke kakon teras[85].
This recalls not only the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_, but also Madame
d'Aulnoy and her princess, 'je vous avoue que je ne suis pas accoutumee
a vivre avec les moutons qui parlent.'
The older rural and popular forms of _Cinderella_, then, are full of
machinery not only supernatural, but supernatural in a wild way: women
become beasts, mothers are devoured by daughters (a thing that even Zulu
fancy boggles at), life of beast or man is a separable thing, capable of
continuing in lower forms. Thus we may conjecture that the ass's skin
worn by _Peau d'Ane_ was originally the hide of a beast helpful to her,
even connected, maybe, with her dead mother, and that the ass, like the
cow, the calf, the sheep, and the doves of _Maerchen_, befriended her,
and clothed her in wondrous raiment.
For all these antique marvels Perrault, or the comparatively civilised
tradition which Perrault followed, substituted, in _Peau d'Ane_, as in
_Cendrillon_, the Christian conception of a Fairy Godmother. This
substitute for more ancient and less _speciosa miracula_ is confined to
Perrault's tales, and occurs nowhere in purely traditional _Maerchen_. In
these as in the widely diffused ballad of the _Re-arisen Mother_--
'Twas late in the night and the bairns grat,
The Mother below the mouls heard that,--
the idea of a Mother's love surviving her death inspires the legend,
and, despite savage details, produces a touching effect (Ralston,
_Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1879, p. 839).
Another notable point in _Cinderella_ is the preference shown, as usual,
to the youngest child. Cinderella, to be sure, is a stepchild, and
therefore interesting; but it is no great stretch of conjecture to infer
that she may have originally been only the youngest child of the house.
The nickname which connects her with the fireside and the ashes is also
given, in one form or another, to the youngest son (Sir George Dasent,
for some reason, calls him 'Boots') in Scandinavian tales. Cinderella,
like the youngest son, is taunted with sitting in the ashes of the
hearth. This notion declares itself in the names Cucendron,
Aschenpuettel, Ventafochs, Pepelluga, Cernushka[86], all of them titles
implying blackness, chiefly from contact with cinders. It has frequently
been suggested that the success of the youngest child in fairy tales is
a trace of the ideas which prevailed when _Juengsten-Recht_,
'Junior-Right' or Borough English, was a prevalent custom of
inheritance[87]. The invisible Bridegroom, of the Zulu _Maerchen_, is in
hiding under a snake's skin, because he was the youngest, and his
jealous brethren meant to kill him, for he would be the heir. It was
therefore the purpose of his brethren to slay the young child in the
traditional Zulu way, that is, to avoid the shedding of 'kindred blood'
by putting a clod of earth in his mouth. Bishop Callaway gives the
parallel Hawaian case of Waikelenuiaiku. The Polynesian case of Hatupati
is also adduced. In Grimm's _Golden Bird_ the jealousy is provoked, not
by the legal rights of the youngest, but by his skill and luck. The idea
of fraternal jealousy, with the 'nice opening for a young man,' which it
discovered (like Joseph's brethren) in a pit, occurs in Peruvian myth as
reported by Cieza de Leon (_Chronicles of the Yncas_, Second Part). The
diffusion of _Juengsten-Recht_, or _Mainete_, the inheritance by the
youngest, has been found by Mr. Elton among Ugrians, in Hungary, in
Slavonic communities, in Central Asia, on the confines of China, in the
mountains of Arracan, in Friesland, in Germany, in Celtic countries. In
Scandinavia Liebrecht adduces the Edda, '_der juengste Sohn Jarl's der
erste Koenig ist_.' Albericus Trium Fontium mentions Prester John, 'qui
cum fratrum suorum minimus esset, omnibus praepositus est.' In Hesiod we
meet _droit de juveignerie_, as he makes Zeus the _youngest_ of the
Cronidae, while Homer, making Zeus the eldest, is all for primogeniture
(Elton, _Origins of English History_, ch. viii. Liebrecht, _Zur
Volkskunde_).
The authorities quoted raise a presumption that _Juengsten-Recht_, an old
and widely diffused law, might have left a trace on myth and _Maerchen_.
If _Juengsten-Recht_ were yielding place to primogeniture, if the elders
were using their natural influence to secure advantages, then the
youngest child, still heir by waning custom, would doubtless suffer a
good deal of persecution. It may have been in this condition of affairs
that the myths of the brilliant triumph of the rightful but despised
heir, Cinderella, or Boots, were developed.
On the other hand, it is obvious that the necessities of fiction demand
examples of _failure_ in the adventures, to heighten the effect of the
final success. Now the failures might have begun with the youngest, and
the eldest might be the successful hero. But that would have reversed
the natural law by which the eldest goes first out into danger.
Moreover, the nursery audience of a _conte de nourrice_ is not
prejudiced in favour of the Big but of the Little Brother.
These simple facts of everyday life, rather than some ancient custom of
inheritance, may be the cause of the favouritism always shown to the
youngest son or daughter. (Compare Ralston, _Russian Folk Tales_, p. 81.
The idea of jealousy of the youngest brother, mixed up with a
miscellaneous assortment of _motifs_ of folk tales, occurs in
_Katha-sarit-sagara_, ch. xxxix.)
Against the notion that the successful youngest son or daughter of the
_contes_ is a descendant of the youngest child who is heir by _droit de
juveignerie_, it has been urged that the hero, if the heir, would 'not
start from the dust-bin and the coal-hole.' But if his heirship were
slipping from him, as has been suggested, the ashes of the hearth are
just what he _would_ start from. The 'coal-hole,' of course, is a modern
innovation. The hearth is the recognised legal position of the youngest
child in Gavel-kind. 'Et la mesuage seit autreci entre eux departi, mes
le ASTRE demorra al pune (ou al punee)[88].' In short, 'the Hearth-place
shall belong to the youngest,' and as far as forty feet round it. After
that the eldest has the first choice, and the others in succession
according to age. The Custumal of Kent of the thirteenth century is the
authority.
These rules of inheritance show, at least (and perhaps at most), a
curious coincidence between the tales which describe the youngest child
as always busy with the hearth, and the custom which bequeaths the
hearth (_astre_) to the youngest child. To _prove_ anything it would be
desirable to show that this rule of Gavel-kind once prevailed in all the
countries where the name of the heroine corresponds in meaning to
_Cendrillon_.
The attention of mythologists has long been fixed on the _slipper_ of
Cinderella. There seems no great mystery in the Prince's proposal to
marry the woman who could wear the tiny _mule_. It corresponds to the
advantages which, when the hero is a man, attend him who can bend the
bow, lift the stone, draw the sword, or the like. In a woman's case it
is beauty, in a man's strength, that is to be tested. Whether the
slipper were of _verre_ or of _vair_ is a matter of no moment. The
slipper is of red satin in Madame d'Aulnoy's _Finette Cendron_, and of
satin in _Rashin Coatie_. The Egyptian king, in Strabo and AElian, merely
concluded that the loser of the slipper must be a pretty woman, because
she certainly had a pretty foot. The test of fitting the owner recurs in
_Peau d'Ane_, where a ring, not a slipper, is the object, as in the
Finnish _Wonderful Birch tree_.
M. de Gubernatis takes a different view of Cinderella's slipper. The
Dawn, it appears, in the Rig Veda is said to leave no footsteps behind
her (_apad_). This naturally identifies her with Cinderella, who not
only leaves footsteps, probably, but one of her slippers. M. de
Gubernatis reasons that _apad_ 'may mean, not only she who has no feet,
but also she who has no footsteps ... or again, she who has no slippers,
the aurora having, as it appears, lost them.... The legend of the lost
slipper ... seems to me to repose entirely upon the double meaning of
the word _apad_, _i.e._ who has no foot, or what is the measure of the
foot, which may be either the footstep or the slipper....' (_Zoolog.
Myth._ i. 31). M. de Gubernatis adds that 'Cinderella, when she loses
the slipper, is overtaken by the prince bridegroom.' The point of the
whole story lies in this, of course, that she is _not_ overtaken. Had
she been overtaken, there would have been no need for the trial with the
slipper (_op. cit._ i. 161). M. de Gubernatis, in this passage, makes
the overtaking of Cinderella serve his purpose as proof; on p. 31 he
derives part of his proof from the statement (correct this time) that
Cinderella is _not_ overtaken, 'because a chariot bears her away.'
Another argument is that the dusky Cinderella is only brilliantly clad
'in the Prince's ball-room, or in church, in candle-light, and near the
Prince,--the aurora is beautiful only when the sun is near.' Is the sun
the candle-light, and is the Prince also the sun? If a lady is only
_belle a la chandelle_, what has the Dawn to do with that?
M. Andre Lefevre calls M. de Gubernatis's theory _quelque peu
aventureuse_ (_Les Contes de Charles Perrault_, p. lxxiv), and this
cannot be thought a severe criticism. If we supposed the story to have
arisen out of an epithet of Dawn, in Sanskrit, the other incidents of
the tale, and their combination into a fairly definite plot, and the
wide diffusion of that plot among peoples whose ancestors assuredly
never spoke Sanskrit, would all need explanation.
In Perrault's _Cinderella_, we have not the adventure of the False or
Substituted Bride, which usually swells out this and many other
_contes_, and which, indeed, is apparently brought in by popular
_conteurs_, whenever the tale is a little short. Thus it frequently
winds up the story which Perrault gives so briefly as _Les Fees_. Among
the Zulus[89], the Birds of the Thorn country warn the bridegroom that
he has the wrong girl,--she is a beast (_mbulu_) in Zululand. The birds
give the warning in _Rashin Coatie_[90], and birds take the same part in
Swedish, Russian, German, but a dog plays the _role_ in Breton (Reinhold
Koehler, _op. cit._ p. 373). In a song of Fauriel's _Chansons Romaiques_
the birds warn the girl that she is riding with a corpse. Birds give the
warning in Gaelic (Campbell, No. 14).
Perrault did more than suppress the formula of the False Bride. By an
artistic use of his Fairy Godmother he gave Cinderella her excellent
reason for leaving the ball, not because _cupit ipsa videri_, but in
obedience to the fairy dame. He made Cinderella forgive her stepsisters,
and get them good marriages, in place of punishing them, as even Psyche
does so treacherously in Apuleius, and as the wild justice of folk tales
usually determines their doom. An Italian Cinderella breaks her
stepmother's neck with the lid of a chest. But Cendrillon 'douce et
bonne au debut reste jusqu'a la fin douce et bonne' (Deulin, _Contes de
Ma Mere l'Oye_, p. 286). These are examples of Perrault's refined way of
treating the old tales. But in his own country there survives a version
of _Cendrillon_ in which a _Blue Bull_, not a Fairy Godmother, helps the
heroine. From the ear of the Bull, as from his horn in Kaffir lore, the
heroine draws her supplies. She is Jaquette de Bois, and reminds us of
Katie Wooden cloak. Her mother is dead, but the Bull is not said to have
been the mother in bestial form. (Sebillot, _Contes Pop. de la Haute
Bretagne_, Charpentier, Paris, 1880, p. 15). In these versions the
formula of _Cendrillon_ shifts into that of _The Black Bull o'
Norroway_.
[Footnote 68: H. H. Risley, _Asiatic Quarterly_, Number III. 'Primitive
Marriage in Bengal.']
[Footnote 69: Demosth. _De Corona_, 313, Harpocration, apomattein.
Theal, _Kaffir Folk Lore_, p. 22.]
[Footnote 70: _Izinganekwane_, p. 1.]
[Footnote 71: Theal, p. 158.]
[Footnote 72: _Indian Evangelical Review_, Oct. 1886. The collector is
Mr. A. Campbell.]
[Footnote 73: Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, p. 4.]
[Footnote 74: _Finnische Maerchen_, uebersetzt von Emmy Schreck. Weimar,
1887.]
[Footnote 75: Gustav Meyer, _op. cit._ p. xix.]
[Footnote 76: Theal, _op. cit._ p. 3.]
[Footnote 77: Compare the revived Ox. Callaway, _Zulu Nursery Tales_, p.
230; The _Edda_, Mallet, p. 436; _South African Folk Lore Journal_,
March, 1880; Aschenpuettel (The Dove and the Hazel tree), Grimm, 21.]
[Footnote 78: In the Catalan version _Ventafochs_, fire-lighter, Italian
_Cenerentola_. Deulin _Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye_, pp. 265, 266. In Emmy
Schreck the Finnish girl is _Aschenbroedel_, and foul with ashes.]
[Footnote 79: Exophagy.]
[Footnote 80: This is the _Mouton_ of Madame D'Aulnoy, but _he_ is a
prodigiously courtly creature, and becomes the _Beast_ who half dies for
love and is revived by a kiss. 'Un joli Mouton, brebis doux, bien
caressant, ne laisse pas de plaire, surtout quand on scait qu'il est
roi, et que la metamorphose doit finir.' But the heroine came too late,
and the gallant _Mouton_ expired.]
[Footnote 81: _Revue Celtique_, vol. iii. p. 365.]
[Footnote 82: In the Scandinavian _Katie Wooden cloak_ the buried bull
does all for Katie that the Ram, or Cow, or Calf, or Fairy Godmother
does for the other Cinderellas.]
[Footnote 83: Herr Koehler quotes M. Luzel's _Chat Noir_, a Breton tale,
in which a stepmother kills a cow that befriends Yvonne. Within the dead
cow were found two golden slippers. Then comes in the formula of the
False Bride (_Rev. Celtique_, 1870, p. 373).]
[Footnote 84: Among the Basutos this happens in 'The Murder of
Maciloniane.' Casalis, p. 309: 'The bird was the heart of
Maciloniane.']
[Footnote 85: Apoll. Rhod. i. 256. The story of Athamas is an ingenious
medley of _Maerchen_, including, as will be shown, part of _Hop o' my
Thumb_.]
[Footnote 86: Gubernatis, _Zoolog. Myth._ ii. 5.]
[Footnote 87: A Zulu tale in Callaway, pp. 64, 65, is proof that this
was once the Zulu custom.]
[Footnote 88: Elton, _op. cit._ p. 190.]
[Footnote 89: Callaway, p. 121.]
[Footnote 90: _Revue Celtique_, Jan., Nov. 1878, p. 366.]
RIQUET A LA HOUPPE.
_Riquet of the Tuft._
Of all Perrault's tales _Riquet_ is the least popular. Compared with the
stories of Madlle. L'Heritier or of the Comtesse de Murat, even _Riquet_
is short and simple. But it could hardly be told by a nurse, and it
would not greatly interest a child. We want to know what became of the
plain but lively sister, and she drops out of the narrative unnoticed.
The touch of the traditional and popular manner in the story is the love
of a woman redeeming the ugliness of a man. In one shape or another,
from the Kaffir _Bird who made Milk_, or _Five Heads_, to what was
probably the original form of _Cupid and Psyche_, this is the
fundamental notion of _Beauty and the Beast_[91]. But Perrault hints
that the miracle was purely 'subjective.' 'Some say that the Princess,
reflecting on the perseverance of her lover, and all his good qualities,
ceased to see that his body was deformed, and his face ugly.' There is
therefore little excuse for examining here the legends of ladies, or
lords, who marry a Tick (in Portugal), a Frog (in Scotland and India), a
Beaver (in North America), a Pumpkin (in Wallachia), an Iron Stove (in
Germany), a Serpent (in Zululand), and so forth. These tales are
usually, perhaps, of moral origin, and convey the lesson that no magic
can resist kindness. The strange husbands or wives are enchanted into an
evil shape, till they meet a lover who will not disdain them. Moral,
don't disdain anybody. Some have entertained angels unawares. But this
apologue could only have been invented when there was a general belief
in powers of enchantment and metamorphosis, a belief always more
powerful in proportion to the low culture of the people who entertain
it. In the Kaffir tale, where the girl disenchants the Crocodile by
_licking_ him (kissing, perhaps, being unfamiliar), the man who comes
out of the crocodile skin merely says that the girl's 'power' (her
native magical force) is greater than that of 'the enemies of his
father's house,' who had enchanted him (Theal, _The Bird who made
Milk_). This idea may and does exist apart from the notion, which so
commonly accompanies it, of a taboo, or prohibition on freedom of
intercourse between the lover and the lady, either of whom has been
disenchanted by the other.
If the original and popular basis of this kind of story was moral, the
moral was strangely coloured by the fancy of early men. In Perrault
little but the moral, told in a gallant apologue, remains. It may be
compared with a Thibetan story, analysed by M. Gaston Paris[92].
[Footnote 91: Theal's _Kaffir Folk Lore_, p. 37.]
[Footnote 92: _Revue Critique_, July, 1874.]
LE PETIT POUCET.
_Hop o' my Thumb._
Perrault's tale of _Le Petit Poucet_ has nothing but the name in common
with the legend of _Le Petit Poucet_ (our 'Tom Thumb') on which M.
Gaston Paris has written a learned treatise. The Poucet who conducts the
Walloon _Chaur-Poce_, our 'Charles's Wain,' merely resembles Hop o' my
Thumb in his tiny stature, and little can be gained by a comparison of
two personages so unlike in their adventures (Gaston Paris, _Mem. de la
Societe de Linguistique_, i. 4, p. 372).
In _Hop o' my Thumb_, as Perrault tells it, there are many traces of
extreme antiquity.
The incidents are (1) Design of a distressed father and mother to expose
their children in a forest. (2) Discovery and frustration of the scheme
by the youngest child, whose clue leads him and his brethren home again.
(3) The same incident, but the clue (scattered crumbs) spoiled by birds.
(4) Arrival of the children at the house of an ogre. They are
entertained by his wife, but the ogre discovers them by the smell of
human flesh. (5) Hop o' my Thumb shifts the golden crowns of the ogre's
children to the heads of his brethren, and the ogre destroys his own
family in the dark. (6) Flight of the boys, pursued by the ogre in
Seven-Leagued Boots. (7) There is a choice of conclusion. In one (8) Hop
o' my Thumb steals the boots of the sleeping ogre, and gets his
treasures from the ogre's wife. (9) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots and
by their aid wins court favour. Throughout the tale the skill of an
extremely small boy is the subject of admiration.
(1) The opening of the story has nothing supernatural or unusual in it.
During the famines which Racine and Vauban deplored, peasants must often
have been tempted to 'lose' their children (Sainte-Beuve, _Port Royal_,
vi. 153; _Memoires sur la Vie de Jean Racine_. A Geneve, M.DCCXLVII, pp.
271-3).
(2) The idea of dropping objects which may serve as a guide or 'trail'
is so natural and obvious that it is used in 'paper-chases' every day.
In the Indian story[93] of _Surya Bai_, a handful of grains is
scattered, the pearls of a necklace are used in the _Raksha's Palace_,
in Grimm (15, _Haensel and Grethel_) white pebbles and crumbs of bread
are employed. The Kaffir girl drops ashes[94]. In _Nennilloe Nennella_
(_Pentamerone_, v. 8) the father of the children has pity on them, and
makes a trail of ashes. Bran is used on the second journey, but it is
eaten by an ass[95].
(4) The children arrive at the house of an ogre, whose wife treats them
kindly; the ogre, however, smells them out.
This incident, quite recognisable, is found in Namaqua folklore (Bleek,
_Bushman Folk Lore_). A Namaqua woman has married an elephant. To her
come her two brothers, whom she hides away. 'Then the Elephant, who had
been in the veldt, arrived, and smelling something, rubbed against the
house.' His wife persuades him that she has slain and cooked a wether,
indeed she does cook a wether, to hide the smell of human flesh.
Compare Perrault, 'L'Ogre flairoit droite et a gauche, disant qu'il
sentoit la chair fraiche. Il faut, luy dit sa femme, que ce soit ce veau
que je viens d'habiller que vous sentez.' But the ogre, like the blind
mother of the Elephant in Namaqua, retains his suspicions. In the Zulu
tale of Uzembeni (Callaway, p. 49) there is an ogress very hungry and
terrible, who has even tried to eat her own daughters. She comes home,
where Uzembeni is concealed, and says, 'My children, in my house here
today there is a delicious odour!' As Callaway remarks, this
'Fee-fo-fum' incident recurs in Maori myth, when Maui visits
Murri-ranga-whenua, and in the legend of Tawhaki, where the ogre is a
submarine ogre (Grey's _Polynes. Myth._ pp. 34, 64). In a more familiar
passage the Eumenides utter their _fee-fo-fum_ when they smell out
Orestes[96].
In the extreme north-west of America this world-wide notion meets us
again, among the Dene Hareskins (Petitot, _Traditions Indiennes du
Canada Nord-Ouest_, Paris, 1886, p. 171). The stranger comes to strange
people, 'un jeune garcon sort d'une maison et dit, Moi, je sens l'odeur
humaine ... ce disant, il humait l'air, et reniflait a la maniere d'un
limier qui est sur une piste.' In the Aberdeenshire _Mally Whuppy_, we
have the old
Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of some earthly one![97]
The idea of cannibalism, which inspires most of these tales, like the
Indian stories of _Rakshas_, is probably derived from the savage state
of general hostility and actual anthropophagy (_Die Anthropophagie_,
Ueberlebsel im Volksglauben.' Andree, Leipzig, 1887). We know that
Basutos have reverted to cannibalism in this century; in Labrador and
the wilder Ojibbeway districts, Weendigoes, or men returned to
cannibalism, are greatly dreaded (Hind's _Explorations in Labrador_, i.
p. 59). There are some very distressing stories in Kohl (_Kitchi Gami_,
p. 355-359). A prejudice against eating kindred flesh, (as against
eating Totems or kindred animals and vegetables,) is common among
savages. Hence the wilder South American tribes, says Cieza de Leon,
bred children they might lawfully eat from wives of alien stock, the
father being reckoned not akin to his children, who follow the maternal
line. Thus the great prevalence of cannibalism in European _Maerchen_
seems a survival from the savage condition. In savage _Maerchen_, where
cannibalism is no less common, it needs little explanation; not that all
savages are cannibals, but most live on the frontier of starvation, and
have even less scruple than Europeans in the ultimate resort.
(5) Arrived at the ogre's house, Hop o' my Thumb deceives the cannibal,
and makes him slay his own children.
This is decidedly a milder form of the incident in which the captive
either cooks his captor, or makes the captor devour some of his own
family. In Zululand (Callaway, pp. 16-18, _Uhlakanyana_) we find the
former agreeable adventure. Uhlakanyana, trapped by the cannibal, gets
the cannibal's mother to play with him at boiling each other. The old
lady cries out that she is 'being done,' but the artful lad replies,
'When a man has been thoroughly done, he does not keep crying I am
already done. He just says nothing when he is already done.... Now you
have become silent; that is the reason why I think you are thoroughly
done. You will be eaten by your children.' Callaway justly compares the
Gaelic Maol a Chliobain, who got the Giant's mother to take her place in
the Giant's game-bag,--with consequences (Campbell, i. 255). In Grimm's
_Haensel and Grethel_ Peggy bakes the ogress. The trick recurs in the
Kaffir _Hlakanyana_[98]. There are two ways of doing this trick in
popular tales: either the prisoner is in a sack, and induces another
person to take his place (as in the Aberdonian _Mally Whuppy_, and among
the Kaffirs); or they play at cooking each other; or, in some other way,
the captive induces the captor to enter the pot or oven, and, naturally,
keeps him there. This is the device of the German Grethel and the Zulu
Uhlakanyana. The former plan, of the game-bag, prevails among the South
Siberian peoples of the Turkish race. Tardanak was caught by a
seven-headed monster and put in a bag. He made his way out, and induced
the monster's children to take his place. The monster, Jalbagan, then
cooked his own children. Perrault wisely makes his ogre a little
intoxicated, but he did not carry his mistake so far as to _eat_ his
children.
The expedient by which Hop o' my Thumb saves his company, and makes the
ogre's children perish, differs from the usual devices of the game-bag
and the oven. Hop o' my Thumb exchanges the nightcaps of himself and his
brothers for the golden crowns of the ogre's daughters. But even this is
not original. In the many _Maerchen_ which are melted together into the
legend of the Minyan House of Athamas, this idea occurs. According to
Hyginus, Themisto, wife of Athamas, wished to destroy the children of
her rival Ino. She, therefore, to distinguish the children, bade the
nurse dress her children in white night-gowns, and Ino's children in
black. But this nurse (so ancient is the central idea of _East Lynne_)
was Ino herself in disguise, and she reversed the directions she had
received. Themisto, therefore, murdered her own children in the dusk, as
the ogre slew his own daughters. M. Deulin quotes a Catalan tale, in
which the boys escape from a cupboard, where they place the daughters of
the ogress, and they then sleep in the daughters' bed.
(6) The flight of Hop o' my Thumb and his brethren is usually aided, in
Zulu, Kaffir, Iroquois, Samoan, Japanese, Scotch, German, and other
tales, by magical objects, which, when thrown behind the fugitives,
become lakes, forests, and the like, thus detaining the pursuer.
Perrault knows nothing of this. His seven-leagued boots, used by the
ogre and stolen by the hero, doubtless are by the same maker as the
sandals of Hermes; the goodly sandals, golden, that wax never old
(_Odyssey_, v. 45).
In addition to these shoon, and the shoon of Loki, and the slippers of
Poutraka in the _Kathasaritsagara_ (i. 13), we may name the
seven-leagued boots in the very rare old Italian rhymed _Historia
delliombruno_, a black-letter tract, which contains one of the earliest
representations of these famous articles.
While these main incidents of Hop o' my Thumb are so widely current, the
general idea of a small and tricksy being is found frequently, from the
Hermes of the Homeric Hymn to the Namaqua Heitsi Eibib, the other
_Poucet_, or Tom Thumb, and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. Extraordinary
precocity, even from the day of birth, distinguishes these beings (as
Indra and Hermes) in _myth_. In _Maerchen_ it is rather their smallness
and astuteness than their youth that commands admiration, though they
are often very precocious. The general sense of the humour of 'infant
prodigies' is perhaps the origin of these romances.
For a theory of _Hop o' my Thumb_, in which the forest is the night, the
pebbles and crumbs the stars, the ogre the devouring Sun, the ogre's
daughters 'the seven Vedic sisters,' and so forth, the curious may
consult M. Hyacinthe Husson, M. Andre Lefevre, or M. Frederick Dillaye's
_Contes de Charles Perrault_ (Paris, 1880).
[Footnote 93: _Old Deccan Days._]
[Footnote 94: Theal, p. 113.]
[Footnote 95: The remainder of the story in the _Pentamerone_ is
entirely different. There is no ogre, and there are sea-faring
adventures.]
[Footnote 96: _Eumenides_, 244.]
[Footnote 97: Compare _L'Oiseau Vert_. Cosquin, _Contes de Lorraine_, i.
103.]
[Footnote 98: Theal, p. 93.]
CONCLUSION.
The study of Perrault's tales which we have made serves to illustrate
the problems and difficulties of the subject in general. It has been
seen that similar and analogous _contes_ are found among most peoples,
ancient and modern. When the resemblances are only in detached ideas and
incidents, for example, the introduction of rational and loquacious
beasts, or of magical powers, the difficulty of accounting for the
diffusion of such notions is comparatively slight. All the backward
peoples of the world believe in magic, and in the common nature of men,
beasts, and things. The real problem is to explain the coincidence in
_plot_ of stories found in ancient Egypt, in Peru, in North America, and
South Africa, as well as in Europe. In a few words it is possible to
sketch the various theories of the origin and diffusion of legends like
these.
I. According to what may be called the Aryan theory (advocated by Grimm,
M. Andre Lefevre, Von Hahn, and several English writers), the stories
are peculiar to peoples who speak languages of the Aryan family. These
peoples, in some very remote age, before they left their original seats,
developed a copious mythology, based mainly on observation of natural
phenomena, Dawn, Thunder, Wind, Night, and the like. This mythology was
rendered possible by a 'disease of language,' owing to which statements
about phenomena came to appear like statements about imaginary persons,
and so grew into myths. _Maerchen_, or popular tales, are the _debris_,
or _detritus_, or youngest form of those myths, worn by constant passing
from mouth to mouth. The partisans of this theory often maintain that
the borrowing of tales by one people from another is, if not an
impossible, at least a very rare process.
II. The next hypothesis may be called the Indian theory. The chief
partisan of this theory was Benfey, the translator and commentator of
the _Pantschatantra_. In France M. Cosquin, author of _Contes Populaires
de Lorraine_, is the leading representative. According to the Indian
theory, the original centre and fountain of popular tales is India, and
from India of the historic period the legends were diffused over Europe,
Asia, and Africa. Oral tradition, during the great national movements
and migrations, and missions,--the Mongol conquests, the crusades, the
Buddhist enterprises, and in course of trade and commerce, diffused the
tales. They were also in various translations,--Persian, Arabic,
Greek,--of Indian literary collections like the _Pantschatantra_ and the
_Hitopadesa_, brought to the knowledge of mediaeval Europe. Preachers
even used the tales as parables or 'examples' in the pulpit, and by all
those means the stories found their way about the world. It is admitted
that the discovery of _contes_ in Egypt, at a date when nothing is known
of India, is a difficulty in the way of this theory, as we are not able
to show that those _contes_ came from India, nor that India borrowed
them from Egypt. The presence of the tales in America is explained as
the consequence of importations from Europe, since the discovery of the
New World by Columbus.
Neither of these theories, neither the Aryan nor the Indian, is quite
satisfactory. The former depends on a doctrine about the 'disease of
language' not universally accepted. Again, it entirely fails to account
for the presence of the _contes_ (which, _ex hypothesi_, were not
_borrowed_) among non-Aryan peoples. The second, or Indian theory,
correctly states that many stories were introduced into Europe, Asia,
and Africa from India, in the middle ages, but brings no proof that
_contes_ could only have been invented in India, first of all. Nor does
it account for the stories which were old in Egypt, and even mixed up
with the national mythology of Egypt, before we knew anything about
India at all, nor for the _Maerchen_ of Homeric Greece. Again it is not
shown that the _ideas_ in the _contes_ are peculiar to India; almost the
only example adduced is the _gratitude of beasts_. But this notion might
occur to any mind, anywhere, which regarded the beasts as on the same
intellectual and moral level as humanity. Moreover, a few examples have
been found of _Maerchen_ among American races, for example, in early
Peru, where there is no reason to believe that they were introduced by
the Spaniards[99].
In place of these hypotheses, we do not propose to substitute any
general theory. It is certain that the best-known popular tales were
current in Egypt under Ramses II, and that many of them were known to
Homer, and are introduced, or are alluded to, in the _Odyssey_. But it
is impossible to argue that the birthplace of a tale is the country
where it is first found in a literary shape. The stories must have been
current in the popular mouth long before they won their way into written
literature, on tablets of clay or on papyrus. They are certainly not of
literary invention. If they were developed in one place, history gives
us no information as to the region or the date of their birth. Again, we
cannot pretend to know how far, given the ideas, the stories might be
evolved independently in different centres. It is difficult to set a
limit to chance and coincidence, and modern importation. The whole
question of the importation of stories into savage countries by
civilised peoples has not been studied properly. We can hardly suppose
that the Zulus borrowed their copious and most characteristic store of
_Maerchen_, in plot and incident resembling the _Maerchen_ of Europe, from
Dutch or English settlers. On the other hand, certain Algonkin tales
recently published by Mr. Leland bear manifest marks of French
influence.
Left thus in the dark without historical information as to the 'cradle'
of _Maerchen_, without clear and copious knowledge as to _recent_
borrowing from European traders and settlers, and without the power of
setting limits to the possibility of _coincidence_, we are unable to
give any general answer to the sphinx of popular tales. We only know for
certain that there is practically no limit to the chances of
transmission in the remote past of the race. Wherever man, woman, or
child can go, there a tale may go, and may find a new home. Any drifted
and wandering canoe, any captured alien wife, any stolen slave passed
from hand to hand in commerce or war, may carry a _Maerchen_. These
processes of transmission have been going on, practically, ever since
man was man. Thus it is even more difficult to limit the possibilities
of transmission than the chances of coincidence. But the chances of
coincidence also are numerous. The _ideas_ and _situations_ of popular
tales are all afloat, everywhere, in the imaginations of early and of
pre-scientific men. Who can tell how often they might casually unite in
similar wholes, independently combined?
[Footnote 99: _Rites of the Yncas_, Francisco de Avila. Hakluyt
Society.]
[Illustration: Charles Perrault.]
HISTOIRES
OU
CONTES
DU TEMPS PASSE.
_Avec des Moralitez._
A PARIS,
Chez CLAUDE BARBIN, sur le
second Peron de la Sainte-Chapelle,
au Palais.
_Avec Privilege de Sa Majeste._
M.DC.XCVII.
TABLE
des Contes de ce Recueeil.
_La belle au bois dormant_ p. 7
_Le petit chaperon rouge_ p. 20
_La Barbe bleuee_ p. 23
_Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botte_ p. 30
_Les Fees_ p. 37
_Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre_ p. 41
_Riquet a la Houppe_ p. 50
_Le petit Poucet_ p. 60
A
MADEMOISELLE
MADEMOISELLE,
_On ne trouvera pas etrange qu'un Enfant ait pris plaisir a composer les
Contes de ce Recueeil, mais on s'etonnera qu'il ait eu la hardiesse de
vous les presenter. Cependant,_ MADEMOISELLE, _quelque disproportion
qu'il y ait entre la simplicite de ces Recits, & les lumieres de vostre
esprit, si on examine bien ces Contes, on verra que je ne suis pas aussi
blamable que je le parois d'abord. Ils renferment tous une Morale
tres-sensee, & qui se decouvre plus ou moins, selon le degre de
penetration de ceux qui les lisent; d'ailleurs comme rien ne marque tant
la vaste estendue d'un esprit, que de pouvoir s'elever en meme-temps aux
plus grandes choses, & s'abaisser aux plus petites; on ne sera point
surpris que la meme Princesse, a qui la Nature & l'education ont rendu
familier ce qu'il y a de plus eleve, ne dedaigne pas de prendre plaisir
a de semblables bagatelles. Il est vray que ces Contes donnent une image
de ce qui se passe dans les moindres Familles, ou la loueable impatience
d'instruire les enfans, fait imaginer des Histoires depourveues de
raison, pour s'accommoder a ces memes enfans qui n'en ont pas encore;
mais a qui convient-il mieux de connoitre comment vivent les Peuples,
qu'aux Personnes que le Ciel destine a les conduire? Le desir de cette
connoissance a pousse des Heros, & meme des Heros de vostre Race, jusque
dans des huttes & des cabanes, pour y voir de pres & par eux-memes ce
qui s'y passoit de plus particulier: Cette connoissance leur ayant paru
necessaire pour leur parfaite instruction. Quoi qu'il en soit,_
MADEMOISELLE,
Pouvois-je mieux choisir pour rendre vrai-semblable
Ce que la Fable a d'incroyable?
Et jamais Fee, au tems jadis
Fit-elle a jeune Creature,
Plus de dons, & de dons exquis,
Que vous en a fait la Nature.
_Je suis avec un tres-profond respect,_
MADEMOISELLE,
De Votre Altesse Royale,
Le tres-humble &
tres-obeissant serviteur,
P. DARMANCOUR.
LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT
_CONTE._
Il estoit une fois un Roi & une Reine, qui estoient si faschez de
n'avoir point d'enfans, si faschez qu'on ne scauroit dire. Ils allerent
a toutes les eaux du monde, voeux, pelerinages, menues devotions; tout
fut mis en oeuvre, & rien n'y faisoit: Enfin pourtant la Reine devint
grosse, & accoucha d'une fille: on fit un beau Baptesme; on donna pour
Maraines a la petite Princesse toutes les Fees qu'on pust trouver dans
le Pays, (il s'en trouva sept,) afin que chacune d'elles luy faisant un
don, comme c'estoit la coustume des Fees en ce temps-la, la Princesse
eust par ce moyen toutes les perfections imaginables. Apres les
ceremonies du Baptesme toute la compagnie revint au Palais du Roi, ou il
y avoit un grand festin pour les Fees. On mit devant chacune d'elles un
couvert magnifique, avec un estui d'or massif, ou il y avoit une
cuillier, une fourchette, & un couteau de fin or, garni de diamans & de
rubis. Mais comme chacun prenoit sa place a table, on vit entrer une
vieille Fee qu'on n'avoit point priee parce qu'il y avoit plus de
cinquante ans qu'elle n'estoit sortie d'une Tour, & qu'on la croyoit
morte, ou enchantee. Le Roi lui fit donner un couvert, mais il n'y eut
pas moyen de lui donner un estuy d'or massif, comme aux autres, parce
que l'on n'en avoit fait faire que sept pour les sept Fees. La vieille
crut qu'on la meprisoit, & grommela quelques menaces entre ses dents:
Une des jeunes Fees qui se trouva aupres d'elle, l'entendit, & jugeant
qu'elle pourrait donner quelque facheux don a la petite Princesse, alla
des qu'on fut sorti de table, se cacher derriere la tapisserie, afin de
parler la derniere, & de pouvoir reparer autant qu'il luy seroit
possible le mal que la vieille auroit fait. Cependant les Fees
commencerent a faire leurs dons a la Princesse. La plus jeune luy donna
pour don qu'elle seroit la plus belle personne du monde, celle d'apres
qu'elle auroit de l'esprit comme un Ange, la troisieme qu'elle auroit
une grace admirable a tout ce qu'elle feroit, la quatrieme qu'elle
danseroit parfaitement bien, la cinquieme qu'elle chanteroit comme un
Rossignol, & la sixieme qu'elle joueeroit de toutes sortes d'instrumens
dans la derniere perfection. Le rang de la vieille Fee estant venu, elle
dit en branlant la teste, encore plus de depit que de vieillesse, que la
Princesse se perceroit la main d'un fuseau, & qu'elle en mourroit. Ce
terrible don fit fremir toute la compagnie, & il n'y eut personne qui ne
pleurat. Dans ce moment la jeune Fee sortit de derriere la tapisserie, &
dit tout haut ces paroles: Rassurez-vous Roi et Reine, vostre fille n'en
mourra pas: il est vrai que je n'ay pas assez de puissance pour defaire
entierement ce que mon ancienne a fait. La Princesse se percera la main
d'un fuseau; mais au lieu d'en mourir, elle tombera seulement dans un
profond sommeil qui durera cent ans, au bout desquels le fils d'un Roi
viendra la reveiller. Le Roi pour tacher d'eviter le malheur annonce par
la vieille, fit publier aussi tost un Edit, par lequel il deffendoit a
toutes personnes de filer au fuseau, ny d'avoir des fuseaux chez soy sur
peine de la vie. Au bout de quinze ou seize ans, le Roi & la Reine
estant allez a une de leurs Maisons de plaisance, il arriva que la jeune
Princesse courant un jour dans le Chateau, & montant de chambre en
chambre, alla jusqu'au haut d'un donjon dans un petit galletas, ou une
bonne Vieille estoit seule a filer sa quenoueille. Cette bonne femme
n'avoit point oui parler des deffenses que le Roi avoit faites de filer
au fuseau. Que faites-vous-la, ma bonne femme, dit la Princesse; je
file, ma belle enfant, luy repondit la vieille qui ne la connoissoit
pas. Ha! que cela est joli, reprit la Princesse, comment faites-vous?
donnez-moy que je voye si j'en ferois bien autant. Elle n'eust pas
plutost pris le fuseau, que comme elle estoit fort vive, un peu
estourdie, & que d'ailleurs l'Arrest des Fees l'ordonnoit ainsi, elle
s'en perca la main, & tomba evanouie. La bonne vieille bien embarrassee,
crie au secours: on vient de tous costez, on jette de l'eau au visage de
la Princesse, on la delasse, on luy frappe dans les mains, on luy frotte
les temples avec de l'eau de la Reine de Hongrie; mais rien ne la
faisoit revenir. Alors le Roy, qui estoit monte au bruit, se souvint de
la prediction des Fees, & jugeant bien qu'il falloit que cela arrivast,
puisque les Fees l'avoient dit, fit mettre la Princesse dans le plus bel
appartement du Palais, sur un lit en broderie d'or & d'argent; on eut
dit d'un Ange, tant elle estoit belle; car son evanoueissement n'avoit
pas oste les couleurs vives de son teint: ses joues estoient incarnates,
& ses levres comme du corail: elle avoit seulement les yeux fermez, mais
on l'entendoit respirer doucement, ce qui faisoit voir qu'elle n'estoit
pas morte. Le Roi ordonna qu'on la laissast dormir en repos, jusqu'a ce
que son heure de se reveiller fust venue. La bonne Fee qui luy avoit
sauve la vie, en la condamnant a dormir cent ans, estoit dans le Royaume
de Mataquin, a douze mille lieues de la lorsque l'accident arriva a la
Princesse; mais elle en fut avertie en un instant par un petit Nain, qui
avoit des bottes de sept lieues, (c'estoit des bottes avec lesquelles on
faisoit sept lieues d'une seule enjambee.) La Fee partit aussi tost, &
on la vit au bout d'une heure arriver dans un chariot tout de feu,
traisne par des dragons. Le Roi luy alla presenter la main a la descente
du chariot. Elle approuva tout ce qu'il avoit fait; mais comme elle
estoit grandement prevoyante, elle pensa que quand la Princesse
viendroit a se reveiller, elle seroit bien embarassee toute seule dans
ce vieux Chateau: voicy ce qu'elle fit. Elle toucha de sa baguette tout
ce qui estoit dans ce Chasteau, (hors le Roi & la Reine) Gouvernantes,
Filles-d'Honneur, Femmes-de-Chambre, Gentilshommes, Officiers,
Maistres-d'Hostel, Cuisiniers, Marmitons, Galopins, Gardes, Suisses,
Pages, Valets-de-pied; elle toucha aussi tous les chevaux qui estoient
dans les Ecuries, avec les Palfreniers, les gros matins de basse cour, &
la petite Pouffe, petite chienne de la Princesse, qui estoit aupres
d'elle sur son lit. Des qu'elle les eust touchez, ils s'endormirent
tous, pour ne se reveiller qu'en meme temps que leur Maistresse, afin
d'estre tout prests a la servir quand elle en auroit besoin: les broches
memes qui estoient au feu toutes pleines de perdrix & de faizans
s'endormirent, & le feu aussi. Tout cela se fit en un moment; les Fees
n'estoient pas longues a leur besogne. Alors le Roi & la Reine apres
avoir baise leur chere enfant sans qu'elle s'eveillast, sortirent du
Chasteau, & firent publier des deffenses a qui que ce soit d'en
approcher. Ces deffenses n'estoient pas necessaires, car il crut dans un
quart-d'heure tout au tour du parc une si grande quantite de grands
arbres & de petits, de ronces & d'epines entrelassees les unes dans les
autres, que beste ny homme n'y auroit pu passer: en sorte qu'on ne
voyoit plus que le haut des Tours du Chasteau, encore n'estoit-ce que de
bien loin. On ne douta point que la Fee n'eust encore fait la un tour de
son metier, afin que la Princesse pendant qu'elle dormiroit, n'eust rien
a craindre des Curieux.
Au bout de cent ans, le Fils du Roi qui regnoit alors, & qui estoit
d'une autre famille que la Princesse endormie, estant alle a la chasse
de ce coste-la, demanda ce que c'estoit que des Tours qu'il voyoit au
dessus d'un grand bois fort epais, chacun luy repondit selon qu'il en
avoit oui parler. Les uns disoient que c'estoit un vieux Chateau ou il
revenoit des Esprits; les autres que tous les Sorciers de la contree y
faisoient leur sabbat. La plus commune opinion estoit qu'un Ogre y
demeuroit, & que la il emportoit tous les enfans qu'il pouvoit attraper,
pour les pouvoir manger a son aise, & sans qu'on le pust suivre, ayant
seul le pouvoir de se faire un passage au travers du bois. Le Prince ne
scavoit qu'en croire, lors qu'un vieux Paysan prit la parole, & luy dit:
Mon Prince, il y a plus de cinquante ans que j'ay oui dire a mon pere,
qu'il y avoit dans ce Chasteau une Princesse, la plus belle du monde;
qu'elle y devoit dormir cent ans, & qu'elle seroit reveillee par le fils
d'un Roy, a qui elle estoit reservee. Le jeune Prince a ce discours se
sentit tout de feu; il crut sans balancer qu'il mettroit fin a une si
belle avanture, & pousse par l'amour & par la gloire, il resolut de voir
sur le champ ce qui en estoit. A peine s'avanca-t-il vers le bois, que
tous ces grands arbres, ces ronces & ces epines s'ecarterent
d'elles-mesmes pour le laisser passer: il marche vers le Chasteau qu'il
voyoit au bout d'une grande avenue ou il entra, & ce qui le surprit un
peu, il vit que personne de ses gens ne l'avoient pu suivre, parce que
les arbres s'estoient rapprochez des qu'il avoit este passe. Il ne
laissa pas de continuer son chemin: un Prince jeune & amoureux est
toujours vaillant. Il entra dans une grande avancour ou tout ce qu'il
vit d'abord estoit capable de le glacer de crainte: c'estoit un silence
affreux, l'image de la mort s'y presentoit par tout, & ce n'estoit que
des corps etendus d'hommes & d'animaux, qui paroissoient morts. Il
reconnut pourtant bien au nez bourgeonne, & a la face vermeille des
Suisses, qu'ils n'estoient qu'endormis, & leur tasses ou il y avoit
encore quelques goutes de vin, montroient assez qu'ils s'estoient
endormis en beuvant. Il passe une grande cour pavee de marbre, il monte
l'escalier, il entre dans la salle des Gardes qui estoient rangez en
haye, la carabine sur l'epaule, & ronflans de leur mieux. Il traverse
plusieurs chambres pleines de Gentilshommes & de Dames, dormans tous,
les uns de bout, les autres assis; il entre dans une chambre toute
doree, & il vit sur un lit, dont les rideaux estoient ouverts de tous
cotez, le plus beau spectacle qu'il eut jamais veu: Une Princesse qui
paroissoit avoir quinze ou seize ans, & dont l'eclat resplendissant
avoit quelque chose de lumineux & de divin. Il s'approcha en tremblant &
en admirant, & se mit a genoux aupres d'elle. Alors comme la fin de
l'enchantement estoit venue, la Princesse s'eveilla; & le regardant avec
des yeux plus tendres qu'une premiere veue ne sembloit le permettre;
est-ce vous, mon Prince, luy dit-elle, vous vous estes bien fait
attendre. Le Prince charme de ces paroles, & plus encore de la maniere
dont elles estoient dites, ne scavoit comment luy temoigner sa joye & sa
reconnoissance; il l'assura qu'il l'aimoit plus que luy-mesme. Ses
discours furent mal rangez, ils en plurent davantage, peu d'eloquence,
beaucoup d'amour: Il estoit plus embarasse qu'elle, & l'on ne doit pas
s'en estonner; elle avoit eu le temps de songer a ce qu'elle auroit a
luy dire; car il y a apparence, (l'Histoire n'en dit pourtant rien) que
la bonne Fee pendant un si long sommeil, luy avoit procure le plaisir
des songes agreables. Enfin il y avoit quatre heures qu'ils se
parloient, & ils ne s'etoient pas encore dit la moitie des choses qu'ils
avoient a se dire.
Cependant tout le Palais s'estoit reveille avec la Princesse; chacun
songeoit a faire sa charge, & comme ils n'estoient pas tous amoureux,
ils mouroient de faim; la Dame d'honneur pressee comme les autres,
s'impatienta, & dit tout haut a la Princesse que la viande estoit
servie. Le Prince aida a la Princesse a se lever; elle estoit tout
habillee & fort magnifiquement; mais il se garda bien de luy dire
qu'elle estoit habillee comme ma mere grand, & qu'elle avoit un collet
monte, elle n'en estoit pas moins belle. Ils passerent dans un Salon de
miroirs, & y souperent, servis par les Officiers de la Princesse; les
Violons & les Hautbois joueerent de vieilles pieces, mais excellentes,
quoy qu'il y eut pres de cent ans qu'on ne les joueast plus; & apres
soupe sans perdre de temps, le grand Aumonier les maria dans la Chapelle
du Chateau, & la Dame-d'honneur leur tira le rideau; ils dormirent peu,
la Princesse n'en avoit pas grand besoin, & le Prince la quitta des le
matin pour retourner a la Ville, ou son Pere devoit estre en peine de
luy: le Prince luy dit, qu'en chassant il s'estoit perdu dans la forest,
& qu'il avoit couche dans la hutte d'un Charbonnier, qui luy avoit fait
manger du pain noir & du fromage. Le Roi son pere qui estoit bon-homme,
le crut, mais sa Mere n'en fut pas bien persuadee, & voyant qu'il alloit
presque tous les jours a la chasse, & qu'il avoit toujours une raison en
main pour s'excuser, quand il avoit couche deux ou trois nuits dehors,
elle ne douta plus qu'il n'eut quelque amourette: car il vecut avec la
Princesse plus de deux ans entiers, & en eut deux enfans, dont le
premier qui fut une fille, fut nommee l'Aurore, & le second un fils,
qu'on nomma le Jour, parce qu'il paroissoit encore plus beau que sa
soeur. La Reine dit plusieurs fois a son fils, pour le faire expliquer,
qu'il falloit se contenter dans la vie, mais il n'osa jamais se fier a
elle de son secret; il la craignoit quoy qu'il l'aimast, car elle estoit
de race Ogresse, & le Roi ne l'avoit epousee qu'a cause de ses grands
biens; on disoit meme tout bas a la Cour qu'elle avoit les inclinations
des Ogres, & qu'en voyant passer de petits enfans, elle avoit toutes les
peines du monde a se retenir de se jetter sur eux; ainsi le Prince ne
voulut jamais rien dire. Mais quand le Roy fut mort, ce qui arriva au
bout de deux ans, & qu'il se vit le maistre, il declara publiquement son
Mariage, & alla en grande ceremonie querir la Reine sa femme dans son
Chasteau. On luy fit une entree magnifique dans la Ville Capitale, ou
elle entra au milieu de ces deux enfans. Quelque temps apres le Roi alla
faire la guerre a l'Empereur Cantalabutte son voisin. Il laissa la
Regence du Royaume a la Reine sa mere, & luy recommanda fort sa femme &
ses enfans: il devoit estre a la guerre tout l'Este, & des qu'il fut
parti, la Reine-Mere envoya sa Bru & ses enfans a une maison de campagne
dans les bois, pour pouvoir plus aisement assouvir son horrible envie.
Elle y alla quelques jours apres, & dit un soir a son Maistre d'Hotel,
je veux manger demain a mon diner la petite Aurore. Ah! Madame, dit le
Maistre d'Hotel; je le veux, dit la Reine (& elle le dit d'un ton
d'Ogresse, qui a envie de manger de la chair fraische) & je la veux
manger a la Sausse-robert. Ce pauvre homme voyant bien qu'il ne falloit
pas se joueer a une Ogresse, prit son grand cousteau, & monta a la
chambre de la petite Aurore: elle avoit pour lors quatre ans, & vint en
sautant & en riant se jetter a son col, & luy demander du bon du bon. Il
se mit a pleurer, le couteau luy tomba des mains, & il alla dans la
basse-cour couper la gorge a un petit agneau, et luy fit une si bonne
sausse, que sa Maitresse l'assura qu'elle n'avoit jamais rien mange de
si bon. Il avoit emporte en meme temps la petite Aurore, & l'avoit
donnee a sa femme pour la cacher, dans le logement qu'elle avoit au fond
de la basse-cour. Huit jours apres la mechante Reine dit a son
Maistre-d'Hotel, je veux manger a mon souper le petit Jour: il ne
repliqua pas, resolu de la tromper comme l'autre fois; il alla chercher
le petit Jour, & le trouva avec un petit fleuret a la main, dont il
faisoit des armes avec un gros Singe, il n'avoit pourtant que trois ans:
il le porta a sa femme qui le cacha avec la petite Aurore, & donna a la
place du petit Jour, un petit chevreau fort tendre, que l'Ogresse trouva
admirablement bon.
Cela estoit fort bien alle jusques-la, mais un soir cette mechante Reine
dit au Maistre-d'Hotel, je veux manger la Reine a la mesme sausse que
ses enfans. Ce fut alors que le pauvre Maistre-d'Hotel desespera de la
pouvoir encore tromper. La jeune Reine avoit vingt ans passez, sans
compter les cent ans qu'elle avoit dormi: sa peau estoit un peu dure,
quoyque belle & blanche; & le moyen de trouver dans la Menagerie une
beste aussi dure que cela: il prit la resolution pour sauver sa vie, de
couper la gorge a la Reine, & monta dans sa chambre, dans l'intention de
n'en pas faire a deux fois; il s'excitoit a la fureur, & il entra le
poignard a la main dans la chambre de la jeune Reine: Il ne voulut
pourtant point la surprendre, & il lui dit avec beaucoup de respect,
l'ordre qu'il avoit receu de la Reine-Mere. Faites vostre devoir, luy
dit-elle, en lui tendant le col; executez l'ordre qu'on vous a donne;
j'irai revoir mes enfans, mes pauvres enfans que j'ay tant aimez, car
elle les croyoit morts depuis qu'on les avoit enlevez sans lui rien
dire. Non, non, Madame, lui repondit le pauvre Maistre-d'Hotel tout
attendri, vous ne mourrez point, & vous ne laisserez pas d'aller revoir
vos chers enfans, mais ce sera chez moy ou je les ay cachez, & je
tromperay encore la Reine, en luy faisant manger une jeune biche en
vostre place. Il la mena aussi-tost a sa chambre, ou la laissant
embrasser ses enfans & pleurer avec eux: il alla accommoder une biche,
que la Reine mangea a son soupe, avec le meme appetit que si c'eut este
la jeune Reine. Elle estoit bien contente de sa cruaute, & elle se
preparoit a dire au Roy a son retour, que les loups enragez avoient
mange la Reine sa femme & ses deux enfans.
Un soir qu'elle rodoit a son ordinaire dans les cours & basse-cours du
Chasteau pour y halener quelque viande fraische, elle entendit dans une
sale basse le petit Jour qui pleuroit, parce que la Reine sa mere le
vouloit faire foueetter, a cause qu'il avoit este mechant, & elle
entendit aussi la petite Aurore qui demandoit pardon pour son frere.
L'Ogresse reconnut la voix de la Reine & de ses enfans, & furieuse
d'avoir este trompee, elle commande des le lendemain au matin, avec une
voix epouventable, qui faisoit trembler tout le monde, qu'on apportast
au milieu de la cour une grande cuve, qu'elle fit remplir de crapaux, de
viperes, de couleuvres & de serpens, pour y faire jetter la Reine, & ses
enfans, le Maistre-d'Hostel, sa femme & sa servante: elle avoit donne
ordre de les amener les mains liees derriere le dos. Ils estoient la, &
les bourreaux se preparoient a les jetter dans la cuve, lorsque le Roi
qu'on n'attendoit pas si tost, entra dans la cour a cheval; il estoit
venu en poste, & demanda tout estonne ce que vouloit dire cet horrible
spectacle; personne n'osoit l'en instruire, quand l'Ogresse, enragee de
voir ce quelle voyoit, se jetta elle-mesme la teste la premiere dans la
cuve, & fut devoree en un instant par les vilaines bestes qu'elle y
avoit fait mettre. Le Roi ne laissa pas d'en estre fasche, elle estoit
sa mere, mais il s'en consola bientost avec sa belle femme & ses enfans.
MORALITE.
_Attendre quelque temps pour avoir un Epoux,
Riche bien-fait, galant & doux,
La chose est assez naturelle,
Mais l'attendre cent ans et toujours en dormant,
On ne trouve plus de femelle,
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