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ARNO PRESS
A New York Times Company
New York / 1977

Editorial Supervision: LUCILLE MAIORCA

Reprint Edition 1977 by Arno Press Inc.

Reprinted from a copy in
    The Princeton University Library

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

London

HENRY FROWDE

Oxford University Press Warehouse

Amen Corner, E.C.

EDITED

FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS, WITH
INTRODUCTION, &c.

BY

LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

MDCCCLXXXVIII

[All rights reserved]

PREFACE.

This edition of the stories of Perrault is intended partly as an introduction to the study of Popular Tales in general. The text of the prose has been collated by M. Alfred Bauer with that of the first edition (Paris, 1697), a book which probably cannot be found in England. I have to thank M. Bauer for the kind and minute care he has bestowed on his task. We have tried to restore the original text of 1697, with its spelling, punctuation, use of capital letters, and so forth. One might have compared the text of Perrault's prose tales, as published in a book in 1697, with their original form in Moetjens's Recueil or Magazine. Unluckily the British Museum only possesses the earlier volumes of the Recueil, in which the less important stories, those in verse, were first published. The Text of the tales in Verse has been collated, by myself and Mrs. Ogilby, with that of the Recueil. The Paris editions of 1694 and 1695 I have never seen. In his 'Contes en Prose de Charles Perrault' (Jouaust, Paris, 1876), M. Paul Lacroix published the more important readings in which the Recueil differed from the ultimate text. The changes shew good taste on the part of Perrault: one or two tedious gallantries, out of keeping with the stories, were removed by him.

Two of the most useful books that have been read by me in preparing this edition are M. André Lefèvre's edition of the Contes, with his bibliographical and other notes, and the 'Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye avant Charles Perrault,' by the late M. Charles Deulin. I have also read, I think, most of the modern editions of the Contes which offer any fresh criticism or information, and acknowledgments will be found in the proper place.

The Introduction contains a brief sketch of Perrault, and of the circumstances in which his tales were composed and published. Each prose story has also been made the subject of a special comparative research; its wanderings and changes of form have been observed, and it is hoped that this part of the work may be serviceable to students of Folklore and Mythology.

In this little book, as in all researches into tradition, I have received much aid from the writings and from the kind suggestions of M. Henri Gaidoz, and from the knowledge and experience of Mr. Alfred Nutt. It is almost superfluous to add that without the industry of such students as Herr Reinhold Köhler, M. Paul Sébillot, Mr. Ralston, M. Cosquin, and very many others, these studies of story could never have been produced.

A. L.

INTRODUCTION.

CHARLES PERRAULT.

In Eisen's portrait of Charles Perrault, the medallion which holds the good-natured face under the large perruque is being wreathed with flowers by children. Though they do not, for the most part, know the name of their benefactor, it is children who keep green the memory of Perrault, of the author of Puss in Boots and Bluebeard. He flies for ever vivu' per ora virum, borne on the wings of the fabulous Goose, notre Mère L'Oye. He looked, no doubt, for no such immortality, and, if he ever thought of posthumous fame, relied on his elaborate Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (4 vols. Paris, 1688-96). But fate decided differently, and he who kept open the Tuileries gardens in the interests of children for ever, owes the best of his renown to a book in the composition of which he was aided by a child.

Though a man of unimpeached respectability of conduct, Charles Perrault was a born Irregular. He was a truant from school, a deserter of the Bar, an architect without professional training, a man of letters by inclination, a rebel against the tyranny of the classics, and immortal by a kind of accident.

He did many things well, above all the things that he had not been taught to do, and he did best of all the thing which nobody expected him to have done. A vivid, genial and indomitable character and humour made him one of the best-liked men of his age, and better remembered than people with far higher contemporary reputation than his own.

Charles Perrault, as he tells us in his Mémoires (1769, Patte, Paris; 1 vol. in 12), was born at Paris, on January 12, 1628. At the age of nine he was sent to the Collége de Beauvais, and was aided in his studies by his father, at home. He was always at the head of his form, after leaving the Sixth (the lowest) which he entered before he had quite learned to read. He was not a prodigy of precocious instruction, happily for himself. He preferred exercises in verse, and excelled in these, though the gods had not made him poetical. In the class of Philosophy he was deeply interested, wrangling with his teacher, and maintaining, characteristically, that his arguments were better than the stock themes, 'because they were new.' Thus the rebel against the Ancients raised his banner at school, where one recruit flocked to it, a boy called Beaurin. Young Perrault and his friend took a formal farewell of their master, and solemnly seceded to the garden of the Luxembourg, where they contrived a plan of study for themselves. For three or four years they read together as chance or taste directed: this course had not in it the making of a scholar.

Perrault's first literary effort was a burlesque of the Sixth book of the Æneid, a thing rather too sacred for parody in Scarron's manner. His brother the doctor took a hand in this labour, and Perrault says 'the MS. is on the shelf where there are no books but those written by members of the Family.' The funniest thing was held to be the couplet on the charioteer Tydacus, in the shades,

Perrault, as a young man, was moderately interested in the fashionable controversy about Grace, pouvoir prochain et pouvoir éloigné, and the jargon of the quarrel between Port Royal and the Jesuits. His brother, a doctor of the Sorbonne, explained the question, 'and we saw there was nothing in it to justify the noise it made.' He persuaded himself, however, that this little conference was the occasion of the Lettres Provinciales. The new Editor will doubtless deal with this pretension when he comes to publish Pascal's Life in the series of Grands Ecrivains de la France. Unlike Perrault, Pascal thought 'que le sujet des disputes de Sorbonne étoit bien important et d'une extrême conséquence pour la religion.'

The first of the Provincial Letters is dated January 23, 1656. Charles Perrault was now twenty-eight. In 1651 he had taken his licences at Orleans, where degrees were granted with scandalous readiness. Perrault and his friends wakened the learned doctors in the night, returned ridiculous answers to their questions, chinked their money in their bags,—and passed. The same month they were all admitted to the Bar. His legal reading was speculative, and he proposed the idea of codifying the various customs; but the task waited for Napoleon. Wearying of the Bar he accepted a place under his brother, Receiver-General of Paris. In this occupation he remained from 1654 to 1664. He had plenty of leisure for study, his brother had bought an excellent library, and Perrault speaks of 'le plaisir que j'eus de me voir au milieu de tant de bons livres.' He made verses, which were handed about and attributed to Quinault. That poet, getting a copy from Perrault, permitted a young lady whom he was courting to think they were his own. Perrault claimed them, and 'M. Quinault se trouvait un peu embarrassé.' However, when Quinault said that a lady was in the case, the plagiary was forgiven. Perrault afterwards wrote a defence of his Alceste. A trifling piece which Perrault composed on this little affair pleased Fouquet, who had it copied on vellum, with miniatures and gilt capitals.

In 1657 Perrault directed the construction of a house for his brother. The skill and taste he shewed induced Colbert to make him his subaltern in the superintendence of the Royal buildings, in 1663. A vision of a completed Louvre, and of 'obelisks, pyramids, triumphal arches, and mausoleums,' floated before the mind of Colbert. Then there would be fêtes and masquerades to describe, and as Chapelain recommended Perrault, who was already the author of some loyal odes, (such as the wise write about Jubilee times,) he finally received an elegant appointment, with 500, later 1000 livres a year. This he enjoyed till 1683. A little Academy of Medals and Inscriptions grew into existence: Perrault edited panegyrics on the king, and made designs for Gobelin tapestries.

Perrault's next feat was the suggestion of the peristyle of the Louvre, introduced into the design of his brother Claude, the architect. After the Chevalier Bernini had been summoned from Rome to finish the Louvre, and had been treated with sumptuous hospitality, a variety of disputes and difficulties arose, and, by merit or favour, the plan of Perrault's brother, Claude, by profession a physician, was chosen and executed. People said 'que l'architecture devoit être bien malade, puisqu'on la mettait entre les mains des médecins.'

'M. Colbert asked me for news of the Academy, supposing that I was a member. I told him that I could not satisfy him, as I had not the honour of belonging to that company. He seemed surprised, and said I ought to be admitted. "'Tis a set of men for whom the king has a great regard, and as business prevents me from often attending their councils, I should be glad to hear from you what passes. You should stand at the next vacancy."' So writes Perrault, and he did become a candidate for Immortality. But a lady had begged the next place for an Abbé, and next time, a doctor had secured it for a curé. Finally, the Academy elected Perrault, he says, without any canvass on his part. Perrault introduced election for the Academy by ballot, and he himself invented and provided a little balloting machine, which he does not describe. One day when the King was being publicly rubbed down after a game at tennis, an Academician prayed that the Academy might be allowed to read addresses to his Majesty. The King, who had probably given some courtier the side walls and a beating, graciously permitted the Academy to add its voice to the chorus of flattery. Perrault now disported himself among harangues, the new Versailles fountains, grottoes, arches of triumph, and royal devices, his brother executing his designs. They were sunny years, and Le Roi Soleil beamed upon the house of Perrault. But a dispute between his brother, the receiver of taxes, and Colbert caused a coolness between Charles Perrault and the Minister. M. Perrault also married a young lady to please himself, not to please Colbert. But, before leaving the service of the Minister, the good Perrault had succeeded in saving the Tuileries gardens for the people of Paris, and for the children, when it was proposed to reserve them to the Royal use. 'I am persuaded,' he said, 'that the gardens of Kings are made so great and spacious that all their children may walk in them.' We owe Perrault less gratitude for aiding Lulli, who obtained the monopoly of Opera, a privilege adverse to the interests of Molière. If Perrault thought at all of the interests of Molière, he probably remembered that his own brother was a physician, and that physicians were Molière's favourite butts. 'Il ne devait pas tourner en ridicule les bons Médecins, que l'Ecriture nous enjoint d'honorer,' says Perrault in his Eloges des Hommes Illustres (1696-1700). Molière's own influence with the king corrected the influence of Lulli, and he obtained the right to give musical pieces, in spite of Lulli's privilege, but he did not live long to enjoy it[1].

Ten years afterwards Colbert became si difficile et si chagrin, that Perrault withdrew quietly from his service. He had been employed in public functions for twenty years (1663-1683), he was over fifty, and he needed rest. Louvois excluded him on the death of Colbert from the petite Académie. He devoted himself to the education of his children, who were 'day-boarders' at the colleges, and returned at night to the paternal house in the Faubourg St. Jacques. 'Les mœurs ne sont pas en si grande sûreté' at a public school, Perrault thought. In 1686 he published his 'Saint Paulin Evesque de Nole, avec une Epistre Chrestienne sur la Penitence, et une Ode aux Nouveaux Convertis.' (Paris, J. R. Coignard.) It is dedicated to Bossuet, in a letter, and Perrault trusts that great poets will follow his example, and write on sacred subjects. Happily his example was not followed, la raillerie et l'amour possessing stronger attractions for minstrels, as Perrault complains. He throws his stone at Comedy, which Bossuet notably disliked and condemned. But this did not prevent Perrault, seven years later, from writing little comedies of his own. Saint Paulin is prettily illustrated with vignettes on copper after Sebastien le Clerc, vignettes much better than those which hardly decorate Histoires ou Contes du Tems passé. An angel appearing to Saint Paulin in gardens exactly like the parterres of Versailles is particularly splendid and distinguished. As for the poem, 'qui eut assez de succès malgré les critiques de quelques personnes d'esprit,' the story is not badly told, for the legend of the Bishop has a good deal of the air of a conte, reclaimed for sacred purposes. The Ode aux Nouveaux Convertis is not a success. Perrault comparing Reason to Faith, says that Reason makes the glories beheld by Faith disappear, as the Sun scatters the stars. This was an injudicious admission. The Saint Paulin may be bought for two or three francs, while the Histoires ou Contes, when last sold by public auction in the original edition (Nodier's copy, at the Hamilton Sale, May 1884), fetched £85. It is a commercial but not inaccurate test of merit.

Perrault's Mémoires end just where they begin to be interesting. He tells us how he read his poem Le Siècle de Louis XIV, to the Academy, how angrily Boileau declared that the poem was an insult to the great men of times past, how Huet took Perrault's side, how Boileau wrote epigrams against him, how Racine pretended not to think him in earnest, and how he defended himself in Le Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes. Here close the Memoirs, and the hero of the great Battle of the Books leaves its tale untold.

The quarrel is too old and too futile to require a long history. Perrault's remarks on Homer, the cause of the war, merely show that Perrault was quite out of sympathy with the heroic age and with heroic song. He avers that, if a favourable Heaven had permitted Homer to be born under Louis XIV, Homer would have been a much better poet.

Men of letters who were men of sense would have smiled and let Perrault perorate. But men of letters are rarely men of sense, and dearly love a brawl. M. E. de Goncourt once complained that M. Paul de St. Victor looked at him 'like a stuffed bird,' because M. de Goncourt declared that Providence had created antiquity to prevent pedagogues from starving. Boileau was not less indignant with Perrault, who, by the way, in his poem had damned Molière with faint praise, and had not praised La Fontaine, Racine, and Boileau at all. The quarrel 'thundered in and out the shadowy skirts' of Literature for ten years. Boileau turned and rent the architect-physician Claude Perrault in his Art Poétique. But Boileau, stimulated by Conti, who wrote on his fauteuil, 'tu dors, Brutus,' chiefly thundered in his Réflexions Critiques on Longinus (1694). 'He makes four errors, out of ignorance of Greek, and a fifth out of ignorance of Latin,' is an example of Boileau's amenities. Why Boileau should have written at such length and so angrily on un livre que personne ne lit, he does not explain. Perrault kept his temper, Boileau displayed his learning. Arnauld had the credit of making a personal peace between the foes. Boileau suppressed some of his satirical lines (Satire X. line 459), and we now read them only in the foot-notes. Boileau's letter to Arnauld, in which he expresses his willingness even to read Saint Paulin for the sake of a peaceful life, is not unamusing. 'Faut-il lire tout Saint Paulin? Vous n'avez qu'à dire: rien ne me sera difficile' (June 1694). Meanwhile Perrault, in his comedy L'Oublieux, was mocking people who think it a fine thing 'to publish old books with a great many notes[3].' But Perrault himself was about to win his own fame by publishing versions of old traditional Fairy Tales.

The following essay traces the history and bibliography of these Tales. Perrault's last years were occupied with his large illustrated book, Eloges des Hommes Illustres du Siècle de Louis XIV (2 vols. in folio. 102 portraits.) He died on May 16, 1703. His fair enemy in the bookish battle, Madame Dacier, says 'il étoit plein de piété, de probité, de vertu, poli, modeste, officieux, fidèle à tous les devoirs qu'exigent les liaisons naturelles et acquises; et, dans un poste considérable auprès d'un des plus grands ministres que la France ait eus et qui l'honoroit de sa confiance, il ne s'est jamais servi de sa faveur pour sa fortune particulière, et il l'a toujours employée pour ses amis.'

Charles Perrault was a good man, a good father, a good Christian, and a good fellow. He was astonishingly clever and versatile in little things, honest, courteous, and witty, and an undaunted amateur. The little thing in which he excelled most was telling fairy tales. Every generation listens in its turn to this old family friend of all the world. No nation owes him so much as we of England, who, south of the Scottish, and east of the Welsh marches, have scarce any popular tales of our own save Jack the Giant Killer, and who have given the full fairy citizenship to Perrault's Petit Poucet and La Barbe Bleue.

'Madame Coulanges, who is with me till to-morrow, was good enough to tell us some of the stories that they amuse the ladies with at Versailles. They call this mitonner, so she mitonned us, and spoke to us about a Green Island, where a Princess was brought up, as bright as the day! The Fairies were her companions, and the Prince of Pleasure was her lover, and they both came to the King's court, one day, in a ball of glass. The story lasted a good hour, and I spare you much of it, the rather as this Green Isle is in the midst of Ocean, not in the Mediterranean, where M. de Grignan might be pleased to hear of its discovery.'

So Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter, on the 6th of August, 1676.

The letter proves that fairy tales or contes had come to Court, and were in fashion, twenty years before Charles Perrault published his Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, our 'Mother Goose's Tales.' The apparition of the simple traditional stories at Versailles must have resembled the arrival of the Goose Girl, in her shabby raiment, at the King's Palace[4]. The stories came in their rustic weeds, they wandered out of the cabins of the charcoal burners, out of the farmers' cottages, and, after many adventures, reached that enchanted castle of Versailles. There the courtiers welcomed them gladly, recognised the truant girls and boys of the Fairy world as princes and princesses, and arrayed them in the splendour of Cinderella's sisters, 'mon habit de velours rouge, et ma garniture d'Angleterre; mon manteau à fleurs d'or et ma barrière de diamans qui n'est pas des plus indifférentes.' The legends of the country folk, which had been as simple and rude as Peau d'Ane in her scullion's disguise, shone forth like Peau d'Ane herself, when she wore her fairy garments, embroidered with the sun and moon in thread of gold and silver. We can see, from Madame de Sévigné's letter, that the Märchen had been decked out in Court dress, in train and feathers, as early as 1676. When the Princess of the Green Isle, and the Prince of Pleasures alighted from their flying ball of crystal, in Madame Coulanges' tale, every one cried, 'Cybele is descending among us!' Cybele is remote enough from the world of fairy, and the whole story, like the stories afterwards published by Madame d'Aulnoy, must have been a highly decorated and scarcely recognisable variant of some old tradition.

How did the fairy tales get presented at Court, and thence win their way, thanks to Perrault, into the classical literature of France? Probably they were welcomed partly in that spirit of sham simplicity, which moved Louis XIV and his nobles and ladies to appear in Ballets as shepherds and shepherdesses[5]. In later days the witty maidens of Saint Cyr became aweary of sermons on la simplicité. They used to say, by way of raillery, 'par simplicité je prends la meilleure place,' 'par simplicité A Paris. Par Robert Ballard. M.DC.LXIII.] je vais me louer,' 'par simplicité je veux ce qu'il y a de plus loin de moi sur une table.' This, as Madame de Maintenon remarked, was 'laughing at serious things,' at sweet simplicity, which first brought Fairy Tales to the Œil de Bœuf[6]. Mlle. L'Heritier in Bigarrures Ingénieuses (p. 237) expressly says, 'Les Romances modernes tâchent d'imiter la simplicité des Romances antiques.' It is curious that Madame de Maintenon did not find this simplicity simple enough for her pupils at St. Cyr. On the 4th of March, 1700, when the fashion for fairy tales was at its height, she wrote to the Comte d'Ayen on the subject of harmless literature for demoiselles, and asked him to procure something, 'mais non des contes de fées ou de Peau d'Ane, car je n'en veux point[7].'

Indeed it is very probable that weariness of the long novels and pompous plays of the age of Louis XIV made people find a real charm in the stories of Cendrillon, and La Belle au Bois Dormant. For some reason, however, the stories (as current in France) existed only by word of mouth, and in oral narrative, till near the end of the century. In 1691 Charles Perrault, now withdrawn from public life, and busy fighting the Battle of the Books with Boileau, published anonymously his earliest attempt at story telling, unless we reckon L'Esprit Fort, a tale of light and frivolous character. The new story was La Marquise de Salusses, ou la Patience de Griselidis, nouvelle[8]. Griselidis is not precisely a popular tale, as Perrault openly borrowed his matter from Boccaccio, and his manner (as far as in him lay) from La Fontaine. He has greatly softened the brutality of the narrative as Boccaccio tells it, and there is much beauty in his description of the young Prince lost in the forest, after one of those Royal hunts in Rambouillet or Marly whose echoes now scarce reach us, faint and fabulous as the horns of Roland or of Arthur[9]. Nay, there is a certain simple poetry and sentiment of Nature, in Griselidis, which comes strangely from a man of the Town and the Court. The place where the wandering Prince encounters first his shepherdess

So the Prince rides on his way

The sentiment is like Madame de Sévigné's love of her woods at Les Rochers, the woods where she says goodbye to the Autumn colours, and longs for the fairy feuille qui chante, and praises 'the crystal October days.' Of all this there is nothing in Boccaccio. Perrault, of course, does not repeat the brutalities of the Italian tyrant, in which Boccaccio takes a kind of pleasure, while Chaucer veils them in his kindly courtesy.

To Griselidis Perrault added an amusing little essay on the vanity of Criticism, and the varying verdicts of critics. In this Essay, Perrault apparently shews us the source from which he directly drew his matter, namely Boccaccio in the popular form of the chap-books called La Bibliothèque Bleue. 'If I had taken out everything that every critic found fault with,' he says, 'I had done better to leave the story in its blue paper cover, where it has been for so many years.' Thus Perrault borrowed from the Bibliothèque Bleue, not the Bibliothèque Bleue, as M. Maury fancied, from Perrault[10].

In 1694 Moetjens, the bookseller at The Hague, began to publish a little Miscellany, or Magazine, in the form of the small Elzevir collection, called Recueil de pièces curieuses et nouvelles, tant en prose qu'en vers. Perrault had already published Les Souhaits Ridicules, in a Society paper, Le Mercure Galant (Nov. 1693). He now reprinted this piece, with Griselidis and Peau d'Ane, in Moetjens' Recueil[11]. These versified tales caused some discussion, and were rather severely handled by anonymous writers in the Recueil. In 1694, Perrault put forth the three, with the introductions and essay, in a small volume. Probably each tale had appeared separately, but these treasures of the book-hunter are lost. Another edition came out, with a new preface, in 1695[12].

This is the early bibliographical history, as far as it has been traced by M. André Lefèvre, of the stories in verse. They received a good deal of unfriendly criticism, and Perrault was said, in Peau d'Ane, to have presented the public with his own natural covering. This witticism, rather lacking in finish, is attributed to Boileau in an epigram published in Moetjens' Recueil. Boileau was still irritated with Perrault for his conduct in the great Battle of the Books between the Ancients and Moderns. By a curious revenge Perrault, who had blamed Homer for telling, in the Odyssey, old wives' fables, has found, in old wives' fables, his own immortality. In the Parallèle, iii. p. 117, the Abbé quotes Longinus, and his admiration of certain hyperboles in Homer. The Chevalier, another speaker in the dialogue, replies, 'this sort of Homeric hyperbole is only imitated by people who tell stories like Peau d'Ane, and introduce Ogres in seven-leagued boots (bottes à sept lieues).' The 'seven-leagued boots' are in the Chevalier's fancy an apt parallel to the prodigious bounds made by the horses of Discord, in the Iliad. Thus, even before Perrault began to write fairy tales, he and Boileau had a very pretty quarrel about Peau d'Ane. Boileau happened to remember that Zoilus of old had reviled Homer for his contes de Vieilles, and thus he could conscientiously treat Perrault as a new Zoilus. In the fifth volume of his works (Paris, 1772), in which these amenities are republished, there is a Vignette by Van der Meer representing Homer, very old and timid, cowering behind a shield which Boileau, like Ajax, holds up for his protection, while Perrault, in a sword and cocked hat, throws arrows at the blind bard of Chios. The strange thing is that they were all in the right. The Odyssey, as Fénelon's Achilles tells Homer in Hades, and as Perrault knew, is a mass of popular tales, but then these are moulded by the poet's art into an epic which Boileau could not over-praise[13].

In the edition of his stories in verse, published in 1695, Perrault replied to the criticisms that reached him, 'I have to do,' he said, 'with people who can only be moved by Authority, and the example of the Ancients;' meaning Boileau and the survivors of the great literary feud. Perrault therefore adduces old instances of classical contes, the Milesian Tales, and Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. 'The Moral of Cupid and Psyche,' he says, 'I shall compare to that of Peau d'Ane, when once I know what it is.' Then he declares that his Contes have abundance of moral, which is true, but there are morals even in Cupid and Psyche. He sketches, very pleasantly, the enjoyment of children in those old wives' fables; 'on les voit dans la tristesse et dans l'abattement tant que le héros ou l'héroïne du conte sont dans le malheur, et s'écrier de joie quand le temps de leur bonheur arrive.' Indeed this was and is the best apology for M. Perrault of the French Academy, when he stooped his great perruque to listen to his little boy's repetition of his nurse's stories, and recorded them in the chronicles of Mother Goose.

Had Perrault only written contes in verse, it is probable that he would now be known chiefly as an imitator of La Fontaine. Happily he went further, and printed seven stories in prose. It is by these that he really lives, now that his architectural exploits, his sacred poems, his Defence of the Moderns, are all forgotten save by the learned. His Fairies have saved him from oblivion, and the countless editions and translations of his Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, have won him immortality[14].

The tales in prose appeared in Moetjens' Recueil in the following order: In 1696, in the second part of Volume V, came La Belle au Bois Dormant (our 'Sleeping Beauty'); and in 1697 (Vol. V. part 4), came Le Petit Chaperon Rouge ('Red Riding Hood'), La Barbe Bleue ('Blue-beard'), Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botté ('Puss in Boots,' or 'The Master Cat'), Les Fées ('The Fairy'), Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre ('Cinderilla,' in the older English versions, now 'Cinderella'), Riquet à la Houppe ('Riquet of the Tuft'), and Le Petit Poucet ('Hop o' My Thumb, Little Thumb').

While Moetjens was producing these in his Miscellany, there was published in Paris, at Perrault's bookseller's (Guignard), a little volume called Bigarrures Ingénieuses, ou Recueil de diverses Pièces galantes en prose et en vers. The author was Mlle. L'Heritier de Villaudon, a relation of Perrault's. It is to his daughter, a Mademoiselle Perrault, that she addresses her first piece, Marmoisan ou l'Innocente Tromperie. The author says she was lately in a company where people began to praise M. Perrault's Griselidis, Peau d'Ane and Les Souhaits. They spoke also of 'the excellent education which M. Perrault gives his children, of their ingenuity, and finally of the Contes naifs which one of his young pupils has lately written with so much charm. A few of these stories were narrated and led on to others.' Marmoisan is one of the others, and Mlle. L'Heritier says she told it, 'avec quelque broderie qui me vint sur le champ dans l'esprit.' The tale is, indeed, all embroidery, beneath which the original stuff is practically lost[15]. But the listener asked the narrator to offer it 'à ce jeune Conteur, qui occupe si spirituellement les amusemens de son enfance.'

In a later page she wonders that the Contes should have been 'handed to us from age to age, without any one taking the trouble to write them out.' Then she herself takes the trouble to write the story of Diamonds and Toads, a story known in a rough way to the Kaffirs—and hopelessly spoils it by her broderie, and by the introduction of a lay figure called Eloquentia Nativa (Les Enchantemens de l'Eloquence, ou Les Effets de la Douceur). One has only to compare Mlle. L'Heritier's literary and embroidered Eloquentia with Perrault's Les Fées (the original of our Diamonds and Toads), to see the vast difference between his manner, and that of contemporary conteurs. Perrault would never have brought in a Fairy named Eloquentia Nativa. Mlle. L'Heritier's Eloquentia (1696) was in the field before Perrault's unembroidered version, Les Fées, which appeared in Moetjens' Recueil in 1697. The Lady writes:

Here, then, is Mlle. L'Heritier speaking of one of Perrault's children who has written the fairy tales, 'with so much charm.' At this very time (1696-1697), fairy tales, 'written with much charm,' in prose, and without the author's name, were appearing in Moetjens' Recueil. In 1697 these prose contes were collected, published, and declared to be by P. Darmancour, Perrault's little boy, to whom the Privilége du Roy is granted[17].

Critics have often declared that Perrault merely used the boy's name as a cover for his own, because it did not become an Academician to publish fairy tales, above all in prose. It may be noted that Perrault did not employ his usual publisher, Coignard, but went to Barbin. There might also have been a hope that little Perrault Darmancour, while shielding his father, 'fit parfaitement bien sa Cour en même tems,' like Le Petit Poucet. Considering how Perrault's other works are forgotten, and how his Tales survive, and regarding his boy as partly their author, we may even apply to him the Moral of Le Petit Poucet.

The dedication, signed P. Darmancour, is addressed to Mademoiselle, and contains very agreeable flattery of the sister of the future Regent[18]. These motives would, indeed, account for Perrault's use of his boy's name. But it had occurred to me, before discovering the similar opinion of M. Paul Lacroix, that P. Darmancour really was the author of the Contes, or at least a collaborateur[19]. The naïveté, and popular traditional manner of their telling, recognised by all critics, and the cause of their popularity, was probably given by the little lad who, as Mlle. L'Heritier said, a year before the tales were published, 'a mis depuis peu les Contes sur le papier avec tant d'agrément.' The child, according to this theory, wrote out, by way of exercise, the stories as he heard them, not from brodeuses in Society, but from his Nurse, or from old women on his father's estates. The evidence of Madame de Sévigné and of Mlle. L'Heritier, as well as the testimony of the contes which ladies of rank instantly took to printing, shews how the stories were told in Society. Allegorical and other names were given to the characters, usually nameless in Märchen. Historical circumstances were introduced, and references to actual events in the past. Esprit raged assiduously through the narratives. Moreover the traditional tales were so confounded that Madame d'Aulnoy, in Finette Cendron, actually mixes Cinderella with Hop o' My Thumb[20].

Contrast with these refinements, these superfluities, and incoherences, the brevity, directness, and simplicity of Histoires et Contes du Tems passé. They have the touch of an intelligent child, writing down what he has heard told in plain language by plain people. They exactly correspond, in this respect, to the Hindoo folk tales collected from the lips of Ayahs by Miss Maive Stokes, who was a child when her collection was published.

But, if the little boy thus furnished the sketch, it is indubitable that the elderly Academician and beau esprit touched it up, here toning down an incident too amazing for French sobriety and logic, there adding a detail of contemporary court manners, or a hit at some foible or vanity of men. 'Livre unique entre tous les livres,' cries M. Paul de St. Victor, 'mêlé de la sagesse du vieillard et de la candeur de l'enfant!' This delightful blending of age and youth (which here can 'live together') is probably due to the collaboration we describe.

Were it a pious thing to dissect Perrault's Contes, as Professors of all nations mangle the sacred body of Homer, we might actually publish a text in which the work of the original Darmancour and of the paternal Diaskeuast should be printed in different characters. Without carrying mere guess-work to this absurd extent, cannot one detect the older hand in places like this,—the Ogre's wife finds that her husband has killed his own children by misadventure: 'Elle commenca par s'évanouir (car c'est le premier expédient que trouvent presque toutes les femmes en pareilles rencontres)'? One can almost see the Academician writing in that sentence on the margin of the boy's copy. Again, at the end of Le Petit Poucet, we read that he made a fortune by carrying letters from ladies to their lovers, 'ce fut là son plus large gain. Il se trouvoit quelques femmes qui le chargeoient de lettres pour leurs maris, mais elles le payoient si mal, et cela alloit à si peu de chose, qu'il ne daignoit mettre en ligne de conte ce qu'il gagnoit de ce côté-là.' That is the Academician's jibe, and it is he who makes Petit Poucet buy Offices 'de la nouvelle création pour sa famille.' 'You never did that of your own wit,' as the Giant says to the Laddie in the Scotch story, Nicht, Nought, Nothing. But 'Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?' 'Je ne vois rien que le Soleil qui poudroye et l'herbe qui verdoye!' or 'Tire la chevillette, le bobinette cherra,' or 'Elle alla donc bien loin, bien loin, encore plus loin'; there the child is listening to the old and broken voice of tradition, mumbling her ancient burden while the cradle rocks, and the spinning-wheel turns and hums.

It is to this union of old age and childhood, then, of peasant memories, and memories of Versailles, to this kindly handling of venerable legends, that Perrault's Contes owe their perennial charm. The nursery tale is apt to lose itself in its wanderings, like the children in the haunted forest; Perrault supplies it with the clue that guides it home. A little grain of French common sense ballasts these light minions of the Moon, the elves; with a little toss of Court powder on the locks, pulveris exigui jactu, he tames the wild fée into the Fairy Godmother, a grande dame de par le monde, with an agate crutch-handle on her magic wand. 'His young Princesses, so gentle and so maidenly, have just left the convent of Saint Cyr. The King's sons have the proud courtesy of Dauphins of France: the Maids of Honour, the Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber, the red-nosed Swiss guards, sleep through the slumber of the Belle au Bois Dormant[21].'

They are all departed now, Dukes and Vicomtes and Princes, the Swiss Guards have gone, that made the best end of any, the hunting horn is still, and silent is the spinning wheel. The great golden coaches have turned into pumpkins again, the coachman has jumped down from his box, and hidden in his rat-hole, the Dragoon and the Hussar have clattered off for ever, the Duchesses dance no more in the minuet, nor the fairies on the haunted green. But in Perrault's enchanted book they are all with us, figures out of every age, the cannibal ogre that little Zulu and Ojibbeway children fear not unreasonably; the starving wood-cutter in the famines Racine deplored; the Princess, so like Mademoiselle; the Fairy Godmother you might mistake for Madame d'Epernon; the talking animals escaped from the fables of days when man and beast were all on one level with gods, and winds, and stars. In Perrault's fairy-land is room for all of them, and room for children too, who wander hither out of their own world of fancy, and half hope that the Sleeping Beauty dwells behind the hedge of yew, or think to find the dangerous distaff in some dismantled chamber.

The Histoires et Contes du Tems Passé must clearly have been successful, though scant trace of their success remains in the criticism of the time[22]. We may measure it by the fleet of other books of fairy tales which 'pursue the triumph and partake the gale.' The Contes de Fées of Mad. La Comtesse de M—— (Murat) were published by Barbin in 1698. How little the manner resembles Perrault's 'fairy-way of writing,' how much it deserves the censure of the Abbé de Villiers, may be learned from the opening sentence of Le Parfait Amour. 'Dans un de ces agréables pais qui sont dependans de l'Empire des Fées, regnoit la redoutable Danamo, elle estoit scavante dans son art, cruelle dans ses actions, et glorieuse de l'honneur d'estre descendue de la célèbre Calipso, dont les charmes eurent la gloire et le pouvoir en arrestant le fameux Ulisse, de triompher de la prudence des vainqueurs de Troye.'

The second story, Anguillette, is so far natural, that it contains a friendly Eel (as in the Mangaian legend of the Eel-lover of Ina); but this Eel is a fairy, condemned to wear the form of a fish, for certain days in each month. These narratives are almost unreadable, and scarcely keep a trace of the popular tradition. The tales of Madame d'Aulnoy, on the other hand, introduced the White Cat, the Yellow Dwarf, Finette Cendron, and Le Mouton to literature and the stage, where they survive in pantomime and féerie. Beauty and the Beast first appears, at the immoderate length of three hundred and sixty-two pages, in Les Contes Marins (La Haye, 1740) by Madame de Villeneuve.

Literary Fairy Tales flourished all through the eighteenth century in the endless Cabinet de Fées. As for Perrault's Tales, they were republished at the Hague, in 1742, with illustrations by Fokke. In 1745, they appeared, with Fokke's vignettes, and with an English translation. An English version, translated by Mr. Samber, printed for J. Pote, was advertised, Mr. Austin Dobson tells me, in the Monthly Chronicle, March 1729. There have been innumerable editions, often splendidly equipped and illustrated, down to the present date. This little book alone, of all Charles Perrault's labours, has won 'the land of matters unforgot.' Odysseus, Figaro, and Othello are not more certain to be immortal than Hop o' my Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard, the heroes whom Charles Nodier so pleasantly called 'the Ulysses, the Figaro, and the Othello of children.'

Fairies and Ogres.

The stories of Perrault are usually called 'Fairy Tales,' and they deserve the name more than most contes, except the artificial contemporary tales, because in them Fairies or Fées do play a considerable part. Thus there were seven Fairies, and an old one 'supposed dead or enchanted,' in the Sleeping Beauty. There is a Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, and, as will be shown in the study on Cinderella, she takes the part usually given, in traditional versions, to a cow, a sheep, or a dead mother who has some mystic connection with the beast. The same remarks apply to the Fairy Godmother in Peau d'Ane. She, too, does for the heroine what beasts do in purely popular European variants, and in analogous tales from South Africa.

The fairies in Riquet of the Tuft are of little importance, as the narrative is not really traditional, but of literary invention for the most part. The fairy in The Two Wishes is not a fairy in the South African variants where divers magical or animal characters appear, nor can Mother Holle in Grimm (24) be properly styled a fairy. Thus, of all Perrault's Fairies only the Fairies of the Sleeping Beauty (repeated in Riquet of the Tuft) answer to Fairies as they appear in genuine popular traditions, under such names as Moirai, or Hathors, in ancient Greek, and Egyptian versions. These beings attend women in child-bed, as they attended Althea when she bore Meleager, and they predict the fortunes of the infant.

Perrault's fairy godmothers (unlike the fairies of real legend) are machinery of his own, and even he dispenses with Fairies altogether in Blue Beard, Hop o' my Thumb, and Puss in Boots; while in Les Trois Souhaits the mythological machinery of the classics is employed, and Jupiter does what a fairy might have done. It is true that the key of the forbidden door, in Blue Beard, is said to be Fée; but this only means that, like the seven-leagued Boots in Hop o' my Thumb ('elles estoient Fées'), the key has magical qualities. The part of Fairies, then, is very restricted, even in Perrault, while, in traditional Märchen all over the world, Fairies or beings analogous to the Fairies appear comparatively seldom.

In spite of this the Fairies have so successfully asserted their title over popular tales, that a few words on their character and origin seem not out of place. Fairies are doubtless much older than their name; as old as the belief in spirits of woods, hills, lonely places, and the nether world. The familiar names, fées, fades, are apparently connected with Fatum, the thing spoken, and with Fata, the Fates who speak it, and the God Fatuus, or Faunus, and his sister or wife Fatua[23]. Preller quotes the Fatuae as spiritual maidens of the forests and elements, adding the other names of Sagae and Sciae, to Fatuae, and Fata[24]. He compares the Slavonic Wilis: and, to be brief, the Apsaras of India, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, and the Good Ladies and Fairies of Scotland, with many of the Melanesian Vuis, forest-haunting spirits, are all of the same class, are fairy beings informing the streams and wilds. To these good folk were ascribed gifts of prophecy, commonly exercised beside the cradle of infancy, deabus illis quae fata nascentibus canunt, et dicuntur Carmentes[25]. As Maury shows[26], the local Fairies of Roman Gaul were propitiated with altars:

FATIS
DERVONIBUS
V. S. L. M. M. RVFNVS
SEVERVS.

Just as the Scotch Fairies are euphemistically styled 'The Good Folks,' 'The People of Peace,' the 'Good Ladies,' so it befell the daughter of Faunus. She was styled 'The Good Goddess,' and her real name was tabooed[27].

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

In the same way Chaucer calls Pluto 'King of Fayrie,' and speaks of 'Proserpine and all her fayrie,' in the Merchant's Tale. Moreover Alison Pearson, when she visited Elfland, found there many of the dead, among them Maitland of Lethington, and one of the Buccleughs. For all this dealing with fairies and the dead was Alison burned (Scott, Border Minstrelsy, ii. 137-152).

Because the mediæval Fairies had fallen heir to much of the pre-Christian theory of Hades, it does not follow, of course, that the Fairies were originally ancestral ghosts. This origin has been claimed for them, however, and it is pointed out that the stone arrow-heads of an earlier race are, when found by peasants, called 'elf-shots,' and attributed to the Fairies. Now the real owners and makers were certainly a race dead and gone, as far as a race can die. But probably the ownership of the arrows by elves is only the first explanation that occurs to the rural fancy. On the other hand, it is candid to note that the Zulu Amatongo, certainly 'ancestral ghosts,' have much in common with Scotch and Irish fairies. 'It appears to be supposed,' says Dr. Callaway, 'that the dead become "good people," as the dead among the Amazulu become Amatongo, and, in the funeral processions of the "good people" which some profess to see, are recognised the forms of those who have lately died, as Umkatshana saw his relatives among the Abapansi,' and as Alison saw Maitland of Lethington and Buccleuch in Elfland. This Umkatshana followed a deer into a hole in the ground, where he found dead men whom he knew[32]. Compare Campbell, Tales from the West Highlands, ii. 56, 65, 66, 106, where it is written, 'the Red Book of Clanranald is said not to have been dug up, but found on the moss. It seemed as if the ancestors sent it.'

Those rather gloomy fairies of the nether-world have little but the name in common with the fairies of Herrick, of the Midsummer Night's Dream, and of Drayton's Nymphidia. The gay and dancing elves have a way, in Greece, of making girls 'dance with the Nereids' till they dance themselves to death. In the same way it is told of Anne Jefferies, of St. Teath in Cornwall (born 1626), that one had seen her 'dancing in the orchard, among the trees, and that she informed him she was then dancing with the Fairies.' She lived to be seventy, in spite of the Fairies and the local magistrates who tried her case (Scott, B.M. ii. 156).

Perrault's fairies do not wed mortal men, in this differing from the Indian Apsaras, and the fairies of New Zealand and of Wales. (Taylor's New Zealand, p. 143. Compare story of Urvasi and Pururavas, Max Müller, Selected Essays, i. 408. A number of other examples of Fairy loves, including one from America, is given in Custom and Myth, pp. 68-86.)

On a general view of the evidence, it appears as if the fashion for fairy tales, in Perrault's time, had made rather free with the old Fata or Fées. Perrault sins much less than the Comtesse d'Aulnoy, or the Comtesse de Murat, but even he brings in a Fatua ex machina where popular tradition used other expedients.

As to the Ogres in Perrault, a very few words may suffice. They are simply the survival, in civilised folklore, of the cannibals, Rakshasas, Weendigoes, and man-eating monsters who are the dread of savage life in Africa, India, and America. Concerning them, their ferocity, and their stupidity, enough will be said in the study of Le Petit Poucet. As to the name of Ogre, Walckenaer derives it from Oigour, a term for the Hungarian invaders of the ninth century, a Tartar tribe[33]. Hence he concludes that the Ogre-stories are later than the others, though, even if 'Ogre' meant 'Tartar,' only the name is recent, and the Cannibal tales are of extreme antiquity. Littré, on the other hand, derives ogre from Orcus, cum Orco rationem habere meaning to risk one's life. Hop o' my Thumb certainly risked his, when he had to do 'cum Orco,' if Orcus be Ogre (Lettres sur les Contes de Fées, p. 169-172).

NOTES ON THE

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:

Their wishes are fulfilled.

2. In German popular tales, this idea appears, with additions, in Rich and Poor (Grimm 87). Here the virtue of the good is contrasted with the folly of the bad. The Poor man hospitably receives our Lord, and, for his three wishes, chooses eternal happiness, health and daily bread, and a new house. The Rich man rejects our Lord, but getting a second chance, loses his temper, wishes his horse dead, the saddle on his wife's back, and—the saddle off again!

Now popular fancy has been better pleased with the burlesque ideas in the second part of this fable, than with the serious moral; and most of the tales turn on burlesque wishes, leaving the virtuous wishers out of the story. The narrative also shews a Protean power of altering details, the wishes vary, the power who grants the wish is different in different Märchen, the person whose folly wastes the wish may be the husband, or may be the wife.

A very old form of the Wasted Wish, originally no doubt a popular form, won its way into literature in the Pantschatantra. The tale has also been annexed by Buddhism, as Buddhism annexed most tales, by the simple process of making Sakya Muni the hero or narrator of the adventures.

The Pantschatantra is a collection of fables in Sanskrit. In its original form, according to Mr. Max Müller, its date can be fixed, by aid of an ancient Persian translation, as previous to 550 A.D. 'At that time a collection somewhat like the Pankatantra, though much more extensive, must have existed[34].' By various channels the stories of the Pantschatantra reached Persia, Arabia, Greece, and thence were rendered into Latin, and again, were paraphrased in different vernacular languages, by literary people. But when we find, as we do, a story in the Pantschatantra and a similar or analogous story in the Arabic Book of Sindibad (earlier than the tenth century), and again in the Greek Syntipas (eleventh and twelfth century), and again in Latin, or Spanish, or French literature, we cannot, perhaps, always be sure that the tale is derived from India through literary channels. Whoever will compare the Wish story of the Double-headed Weaver in the Pantschatantra[35] with The Three Wishes in the Book of Sindibad (Comparetti. Folk Lore Society, 1882, p. 147), and again, with Marie de France's twenty-fourth Fable (Dou Vilain qui prist un folet), and yet again with Perrault's Trois Souhaits, and, lastly, with the popular tales among Grimm's variants, will find many perplexing problems before him[36]. The differences in the details and in the conduct of the story are immense. Did the various authors borrow little but the main conception—the wasted wishes? Are the variations the result of literary caprice and choice? Has the story travelled from India by two channels,—(1) literary, in Pantschatantra, and Syntipas with the translations; (2) oral, by word of mouth from people to people? Are the popular versions derived from literature, or from oral tradition? Is the oldest literary version, that of the Pantschatantra, more akin to the original version than some of the others which meet us later? Finally, might not the idea of wasted wishes occur independently to minds in different ages and countries, and may not some of the versions be of independent origin, and in no way borrowed from India? Is there, indeed, any reason at all for supposing that so simple a notion was invented, once for all, in India?

It is easy to ask these questions, it is desirable to bear them in mind, so that we may never lose sight of the complexity and difficulty of the topic. But it is practically impossible to answer them once for all.

The nature of the problem may now be illustrated by a few examples. In the story of the Pantschatantra, the granter of the wish (there is but one wish) is a tree-dwelling spirit. A very stupid weaver one day broke part of his loom. He went out to cut down a tree near the shore, meaning to fashion it for his purpose, when a spirit, who dwelt in the timber, cried, 'Spare this tree.' The weaver said he must starve if he did not get the wood, when the spirit replied, 'Ask anything else you please.' The barber, being consulted, advised the weaver to wish to be king. The weaver's wife cried, 'No, stay as you are, but ask for two heads, and four hands, to do double work.' He got his wish, but was killed by the villagers, who very naturally supposed him to be a Rakshasa, or ogre. The moral is enunciated by the barber, 'Let no man take woman's counsel.' The poor woman's lack of immoderate ambition might seem laudable to some moralists.

Here the peculiarities are: A tree-ghost grants the wish.

There is only one wish.

It is made on a woman's advice.

It causes the death of the wisher[37].

The story is next found in the various forms of the Book of Sindibad, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and old Spanish, a book mentioned by all Arabic authors of the tenth century, and of Indian and Buddhistic origin[38]. As told in the various forms of Sindibad, the tale of The Three Wishes takes this shape. A man has a friendly spirit (a she-devil in the Spanish Libro de los Engannos), who is obliged to desert his company, but leaves him certain formulæ, by dint of repeating which he will have Three Wishes granted to him. The tree-spirit has disappeared, the one wish has become three. The man consults with his wife, who suggests that he should desire, not two heads and four hands, but an obscene and disgusting bodily transformation of another sort. He wishes the wish, is horrified by the result, and, on the woman's hint, asks to have all that embarrasses him removed. The granting of the wish leaves him with 'a frightful minus quantity,' and he expends the third wish in getting restored to his pristine and natural condition. The woman explains that she had not counselled him to desire wealth, lest he should weary of her and desert her. This, at least, is the conclusion in the Hebrew version, in the Parables of Sandabas (Deulin, Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, p. 71).

How are we to account for this metamorphosis of the story in the Pantschatantra? Is the alteration a piece of Arabian humour? Was there another Indian version corresponding to the shape of the tale in the Book of Sindibad? The questions cannot be answered with our present knowledge.

Another change, and a very remarkable one, occurs in the Fables of Marie de France. Of Marie not much is known. In the Conclusion of her Fables, she says—

That is to say, King Henry had translated into English a collection of fables and contes attributed to Æsop, and Marie rendered the English into French. Now Æsop certainly did not write the story of The Three Wishes. The text before Marie was probably a mere congeries of tales and fables, some of the set usually attributed to Æsop, some from various other sources. The Latin version, the model of the English version, was that assigned to a certain, or uncertain Romulus, whom Marie, in her preface, calls an emperor. Probably he borrowed from Phædrus, though he boasts that he rendered his fables out of the Greek. M. de Roquefort thinks he did not flourish before the eleventh or twelfth century[39]. Who was li rois Henris who turned the fables into Marie's English text? She lived under our Henry III. Perhaps conjecture may prefer Henry Beauclerk, our Henry I.

In any case Marie manifestly did render the fables, or some of the fables, in Le dit d'Ysopet out of English. The presence of English words in her French seems to raise a strong presumption in favour of the truth of the assertion. One of these English words occurs in her form of The Three Wishes (Fable xxiv), called Dou Vilain qui prist un Folet, also Des Troiz Oremens, or Du Vileins et de sa Fame. A Vilein captured a Folet (fairy or brownie?) who granted him Three Wishes. The Folet resembles the tree-bogle of the Pantschatantra. The vilein gave two wishes to his wife. Long they lived without using the wishes. One day, when they had a marrow bone for dinner, and found it difficult to extract the marrow, the wife wished that her husband had—

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—

'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—

We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or other shape of Syntipas. If it was, did the change come in the Latin handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the version worked on by Marie had a popular origin, whether derived by oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which had filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit? There seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no mediæval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale in Syntipas and its derivatives, though Marie would not have rhymed that offensive conte if she had met with it in the English collection. Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of The Three Wishes among backward and remote races, American or African. If such a version were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might argue that the tale was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as told in Pantschatantra, to make it seem essentially and peculiarly Indian, and incapable of having been invented elsewhere.

A fourteenth-century version (quoted by M. Deulin from Fabliaux et Contes published by St. Méon, vol. iv. p. 386) amplifies all that is least refined in Sendabar and in Sindibad. St. Martin grants the wishes, there are four of them, and nobody is one penny the better. With Philippe de Vigneules (1505-1514, the seventy-eighth of his hundred Nouvelles), God grants three wishes to a wedded pair. The woman wishes a new leg for her pot, the man wishes her le pied au ventre, and then wishes it back again. M. Deulin found this form in living popular tradition, at Leuze in Hainaut.

The Souhaits of La Fontaine (Fables, vii. 6) has this peculiarity, that the giver of the wishes, as in Marie de France and in Sindibad, is a Follet or brownie, or familiar spirit, obliged to leave his friends. He offers them three wishes; first, they ask for wealth and are embarrassed by their riches, then for a restoration of their mediocrity, then for wisdom.

La Fontaine's source is obscure; had he known Syntipas, he might (or might not) have introduced the story among his Contes. Perhaps it was too rude even for that unabashed collection.

As for Perrault, he probably drew from a popular tradition his Aune de Boudin. Collin de Plancy (Œuvres Choisies de Ch. Perrault, Paris, 1826, 240) gives a curious rustic version. Three brothers dance with the Fairies, who offer them a wish apiece. The eldest, as heir of the paternal property, wants no more, but, as wish he must, asks that their calf may cure the colic of every invalid who seizes it by the tail. (How manifestly Indian in origin is this introduction of the sacred beast whose tail is grasped by the pious Hindoo in his latest hours!) The youngest brother wishes the horns of cow and calf on his brother's head, the second wishes a bull's head on his brother's shoulders, and the Fairies make these wild wishes of none avail.

Manifestly the fundamental idea is capable of infinite transformations, literary or popular: a good example is the play of Le Bucheron, by Guichard and Philidor, acted in 1763.

The story has no connection with the three successful wishes by aid of which the devil is defeated in a number of popular tales belonging to a different cycle. All these are inspired, however, by the great god Wunsch, who presides over Wishing Gates.

says Clough, better inspired than Perrault's Bucheron.

La Belle au Bois Dormant.

The Sleeping Beauty.

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

Sigurd is bidden to awaken her, and this he does, rending her mail with his magic sword. But the rest of the tragic story does not correspond with La Belle au Bois Dormant. Perrault's tale has its closest companion in Grimm's Little Briar Rose (90), which lacks the conclusion about the wicked mother-in-law. Her conduct, again, recurs in various tales quite unlike La Belle in general plot. The incident of the sleep-thorn, or something analogous, occurs in Surya Bai (Old Deccan Days), where a prick from the poisoned nail of a demon acts as the soporific. To carry poison under the nail is one of the devices of the Voudou or Obi man in Hayti. Surya Bai, when wakened and married by a Rajah, is the victim of the jealousy, not of an ogress mother-in-law, but of another wife, and that story glides into a form of the Egyptian tale The Two Brothers (Maspero, i.). The sleep-thorn, or poisoned nail, takes again in Germany the shape of the poisoned comb. Snow-white is wounded therewith by the jealousy of a beautiful step-mother, with a yet fairer step-daughter (Grimm, 53). In mediæval romances, as in Perceforest, an incident is introduced whereby the sleeping maid becomes a mother. Lucina, Themis, and Venus take the part of the Fairies, Fates, or Hathors. In the Neapolitan Pentamerone the incident of the girl becoming a mother in her sleep is repeated. The father (as in Surya Bai) is a married man, and the girl, Thalia, suffers from the jealousy of the first wife, as Surya Bai does. The first wife wants to eat Thalia's children, à diverses sauces, which greatly resembles Perrault's sauce Robert. The children of Thalia are named Sun and Moon, while those of the Sleeping Beauty are L'Aurore et Le Jour. The jealous wife is punished, like the Ogre mother-in-law[41].

While the idea of a long sleep may possibly have been derived from the repose of Nature in winter, it seems useless to try to interpret La Belle au Bois Dormant as a Nature myth throughout. The story, like all contes, is a patchwork of incidents, which recur elsewhere in different combinations. Even the names Le Jour and L'Aurore only appear in such late and literary forms as the Pentamerone, where they are mixed up with Thalia, clearly a fanciful name for the mother, as fanciful as that of the sleeping Zellandine, who marries the god Mars in Perceforest. As an example of the length to which some mythologists will go, may be mentioned M. André Lefèvre's discovery that Poufle, the dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in search of the Dawn.

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—

Racine, in an early letter, admits that he himself has been one of these wolves.

'Il faut être régulier avec les Réguliers, comme j'ai été loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos compères.[43]'

But the nurses from whom Perrault or his little boy heard Le petit Chaperon Rouge had probably no such moral ideas as these. They may have hinted at the undesirable practice of loitering when one is sent on an errand, but the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence. As it stands, the tale is merely meant to waken a child's terror and pity, and probably the narrator ends it by making a pounce, in the character of Wolf, c'est pour te manger, at the little listener. This was the correct 'business' in our old Scotch nurseries, when we were told The Cattie sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning.

'The old nurse's imitation of the gnash, gnash, which she played off upon the youngest urchin lying in her lap, was electric' (Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1842, p. 54).

If Little Red Riding Hood ended, in all variants, where it ends in Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the machinery of the story is derived from 'the times when beasts spoke,' or were believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known that in the German form, Little Red Cap (Grimm 26), the tale by no means ends with the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her grandmother are resuscitated, 'the wolf it was that died.' This may either have been the original end, omitted by Perrault because it was too wildly impossible for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or children may have insisted on having the story 'turn out well.' In either case the German Märchen preserves one of the most widely spread mythical incidents in the world,—the reappearance of living people out of the monster that has devoured them.

In literature, this incident first meets us in the myth of Cronus (Hesiod, Theog. 497; Pausanias, x. 24), where Cronus disgorges his swallowed children alive, after gulping up the stone in swaddling bands which he had taken for Zeus, his youngest infant. He had previously dined on a young foal that he was assured his wife had just borne, when, in reality, the child was Poseidon. In this adventure Cronus united the mistake of the ogress mother-in-law, in La Belle au Bois Dormant, who ate the kid in place of the Sleeping Beauty's boy, the adventure of the king who hears his wife has borne a beast-child, and the adventure of the Wolf who disgorges his prey alive. The local fancy of Arne in Arcadia had combined all these ideas of Märchen into one divine myth (Pausan. viii. 8, 2). It would be superfluous to enumerate here all the savage and civilised stories of beings first swallowed and then disgorged alive. A fabulous monster Kwai Hemm is the swallower in Bushman story. The Iqong qongqo takes the rôle among the Kaffirs. There are some five examples in Callaway's Zulu Nursery Tales. Night is the swallower in Melanesia (Codrington, Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881), while the Sun swallows the stars in a Piute myth. It is quite possible that a savage theory of Night swallowing and restoring Light, or of the Sun swallowing the stars, is the origin of the conception[44]. The Australians tell it in a shape not unlike Grimm's. The Eagle met the Moon and offered him some Kangaroo meat. The Moon ate up the Kangaroo, and then swallowed the Eagle. The wives of the Eagle met the Moon, who asked them the way to a spring. As he stooped to drink, they cut him open with a stone tomahawk, and extracted the Eagle, who came alive again[45]. In Germany it was with a pair of scissors that the Wolf was cut up, and he was then stuffed with stones (as in Grimm 5, The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids). The stones kill him in Little Red Cap; in the German tale, their weight drags him into the well, where he, like the Australian Moon, wants to drink after his banquet. In Pomerania a ghost takes the Wolf's rôle, the stones are felt to be rather 'heavy' by the ghost, and the child escapes[46].

The whole story has been compared by M. Husson to the adventure of Vartika, whom the Asvins rescue from the throat of a wolf. Little Red Riding Hood thus becomes the Dawn. Vartika is a bird, the Quail, 'i.e. the returning bird. But as a being delivered by the Asvins, the representatives of Day and Night, Vartika can only be the returning Dawn, delivered from the mouth of the wolf, i. e. the dark night[47].'

It is hard to see why the Night, as one of the Asvins, should deliver the Dawn from the Night, as the Wolf. On the identification of the Asvins with this or that aspect of Light and Darkness, Muir may be consulted. 'This allegorical interpretation seems unlikely to be correct, as it is difficult to suppose that the phenomena in question should have been alluded to under such a variety of names and circumstances.' (Sanskrit Texts, v. 248. Prof. Goldstücker thinks the Asvins are themselves the crepuscular mingling of light and dark, which, in the other theory, is the struggle of quail and wolf, op. cit. v. 257. M. Bergaigne supposes that the Asvins are deities of dawn, La Religion Védique, ii. 431.)

These considerations lead us far enough from Perrault into 'worlds not realised.' Vartika (who, in these theories, answers to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge) has been compared by Mr. Max Müller, not only to the returning Dawn, but to the returning year, Vertumnus. He notes that the Greek word for quail is ortyx, that Apollo and Artemis were born in Ortygia, an old name of Delos, and that 'here is a real traditional chain.' But 'it would be a bold assertion to say that the story of Red Riding Hood was really a metamorphosis of an ancient story of the rosy-fingered Eos, or the Vedic Eos with her red horses, and that the two ends, Ushas and Rothkäppchen, are really held together by an unbroken traditional chain.'

We shall leave the courage of this opinion to M. Husson, merely observing that, as a matter of fact, Dawn is not swallowed by Night. Sunset (which is red) is so swallowed, but then sunset is not 'a young maiden carrying messages,' like Red Riding Hood and Ushas. To be sure, the convenient Wolf is regarded by mythologists as 'a representative of the sun or of the night,' at will. He 'doubles the part,' and 'is the useful Wolf,' as the veteran Blenkinsopp, in Pendennis, was called 'The useful Blenkinsopp.'

La Barbe Bleue.

Blue Beard.

The story of Blue Beard, as told by Perrault, is, of all his collection, the most apt to move pity and terror. It has also least of the supernatural. Here are no talking beasts, no fairies, nor ogres. Only the enchanted key is fée, or wakan as the Algonkins say, that is, possesses magical properties. In all else the story is a drama of daily and even of contemporary life, for Blue Beard has the gilded coaches and embroidered furniture of the seventeenth century, and his wife's brothers hold commissions in the dragoons and musketeers. The story relies for its interest on the curiosity of the wife (the moral motive), on the vision of the slain women, and on the suspense of waiting while Sister Anne watches from the tower. These simple materials, admirably handled, make up the terrible story of Blue Beard.

Attempts have been made to find for Blue Beard an historical foundation. M. Collin de Plancy mentions a theory that the hero was a seigneur of the house of Beaumanoir (Œuvres Choisies de Ch. Perrault, p. 40, Paris, 1826). Others have fancied that Blue Beard was a popular version of the deeds of Gilles de Retz, the too celebrated monster of mediæval history, or of a more or less mythical Breton prince of the sixth century, Cormorus or Comorre, who married Sainte Trophime or Triphime, and killed her, as he had killed his other wives, when she was about to become a mother. She was restored to life by St. Gildas[48]. If there is a trace of the Blue Beard story in the legend of the Saint, it does not follow that the legend is the source of the story. The Märchen of Peau d'Ane has been absorbed into the legend of Sainte Dipne or Dympne, and the names of saints, like the names of gods and heroes in older faiths, had the power of attracting Märchen into their cycle.

Blue Beard is essentially popular and traditional. The elements are found in countries where Gilles de Retz and Comorre and Sainte Triphime were never known. The leading idea, of curiosity punished, of the box or door which may not be opened, and of the prohibition infringed with evil results, is of world-wide distribution. In many countries this notion inspires the myths of the origin of Death[49]. In German Märchen there are several parallels, more or less close, to Blue Beard (Grimm 3, 40, 46). In Our Lady's Child (3) the Virgin entrusts a little girl with keys of thirteen doors, of which she may only open twelve. Behind each door she found an apostle, behind the thirteenth the Trinity, in a glory of flame, like Zeus when he consumed Semele. The girl's finger became golden with the light, as Blue Beard's key was dyed with the blood. The child was banished from heaven, and her later adventures are on the lines of the falsely accused wife, like those of the Belle au Bois Dormant, with the Virgin for mother-in-law and with a repentance for a moral conclusion. In the Robber Bridegroom there is a girl betrothed to a woman-slayer; she detects and denounces him, pretending, as in the old English tale, she is describing a dream. 'Like the old tale, my Lord, it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but indeed God forbid that it should be so[50].' Except for the 'larder' of the Robber, and of Mr. Fox in the English variant, these stories do not closely resemble Blue Beard. In Grimm's Fitcher's Bird (46) the resemblance is closer. A man, apparently a beggar, carries off the eldest of three sisters to a magnificent house, and leaves her with the keys, an egg, and the prohibition to open a certain door. She opens it, finds a block, an axe, a basin of blood, and the egg falling into the blood refuses to be cleansed. The man slays her, her second sister shares her fate, the third leaves the egg behind when she visits the secret room, and miraculously restores her sisters to life by reuniting their limbs. The same idea occurs in the Kaffir tale of the Ox (Callaway, Nursery Tales of the Zulus, p. 230). The rest of the story, with the escape from the monster, has no connection with Blue Beard, except that the wretch is put to death. Indeed, it would have been highly inconvenient for Blue Beard's surviving bride if the dead ladies had been resuscitated. Her legal position would have been ambiguous, and she could not have inherited the gold coaches and embroidered furniture. Grimm originally published another German form of Blue Beard (62 in first edition), but withdrew it, being of opinion that it might have been derived from Perrault. The story of the Third Calender in the Arabian Nights (Night 66) has nothing in common with Blue Beard but the prohibition to open a door.

In Italy[51] the Devil is the wooer, the closed door opens on hell: the rest, the adventures of three sisters, resembles Grimm's Fitcher's Bird, with a touch of humour. The Devil, seeing the resuscitated girls, is daunted by the idea of facing three wives, and decamps. He had no scruple, it will be seen, about marrying his deceased wife's sister. The Russian like the Oriental stories generally make a man indulge the fatal curiosity, and open the forbidden door. Mr. Ralston quotes from Löwe's Esthnische Märchen (No. 20) a tale almost too closely like Perrault's. There is a sister, and the goose boy takes the rôle of rescuer. M. de Gubernatis thinks that the key 'is perhaps the Moon!' (Zoological Mythology, 1. 168). In the Gaelic version the heroine is cleansed of blood by a grateful Cat, whose services her sisters had neglected (Campbell, Tales of West Highlands, No. 41). In the Katha Sarit Sagara (iii. p. 223) a hero, Saktideva, is forbidden to approach a certain palace terrace. He breaks the taboo, and finds three dead maidens in three pavilions. A horse then kicks him into a lake, and, whereas he had been in the Golden City, hard to win, he finds himself at home in Vardhamana. The affair is but an incident in the medley of incidents, some resembling passages in the Odyssey, which make up the story (compare Ralston's note, Russian Fairy Tales, p. 99).

From these brief analyses it will be plain that, in point of art, Perrault's tale has a great advantage over its popular rivals. It is at once more sober and more terrible, and (especially when compared with the confusion of incidents in the Katha Sarit Sagara) possesses an epical unity of idea and action.

In spite of this artistic character, Perrault's tale is clearly of popular origin, as the existence of variants in the folklore of other countries demonstrates. But the details are so fluctuating, that we need not hope to find in them memories of ancient myth, nor is it safe to follow M. André Lefèvre, when he thinks that, in the two avenging brothers, he recognises the Vedic Asvins.

Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botté.

Puss in Boots.

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

Now the 'young person,' the cat's master, had shown no 'industry' whatever, except in so far as he was a chevalier d'industrie, thanks to his cat. These obvious truths pained Mr. George Cruikshank when he tried to illustrate Puss in Boots, and found that the romance was quite unfit for the young. 'When I came to look carefully at that story, I felt compelled to rewrite it, and alter the character of it to a certain extent, for, as it stood, the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying, a system of imposture rewarded by the greatest worldly advantages. A useful lesson, truly, to be impressed upon the minds of children.' So Mr. Cruikshank made the tale didactic, showing how the Marquis de Carabas was the real heir, 'kep' out of his own' by the landgrabbing ogre, and how puss was a gamekeeper metamorphosed into a cat as a punishment for his repining disposition. This performance of Mr. Cruikshank was denounced by Mr. Dickens in Household Words as a 'fraud on the fairies,' and 'the intrusion of a whole hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden[52].'

The Master-Cat probably never made any child a rogue, but no doubt his conduct was flagrantly immoral. And this brings us to one of the problems of the science of nursery tales. When we find a story told by some peoples with a moral, and by other peoples without a moral, are we to suppose that the tale was originally narrated for the moral's sake, and that the forms in which there is no moral are degenerate and altered versions? For example, the Zulus, the Germans, the French, and the Hindoos have all a nursery tale in which someone, by a series of lucky accidents and exchanges, goes on making good bargains, and rising from poverty to wealth. In French Flanders this is the tale of Jean Gogué; in Grimm it is The Golden Goose; in Zulu it is part of the adventures of the Hermes of Zulu myth, Uhlakanyana. In two of these the hero possesses some trifling article which is injured, and people give him something better in exchange, till, like Jean Gogué, for example, he marries the king's daughter[53]. Now these tales have no moral. The hero is thought neither better nor worse of because of his series of exchanges. But in modern Hindostan the story has a moral. The rat, whose series of exchanges at last win him a king's daughter, is held up to contempt as a warning to bargain-hunters. He is not happy with his bride, but escapes, leaving his tail, half his hair, and a large piece of his skin behind him, howling with pain, and vowing that 'never, never, never again would he make a bargain[54].' Here then is a tale told with a moral, and for the moral in India, but with no moral in Zululand and France. Are we to suppose that India was the original source of the narrative, that it was a parable invented for the moral's sake, and that it spread, losing its moral (as the rat lost his tail), to Europe and South Africa? Or are we to suppose that originally the narrative was a mere Schwank, or popular piece of humour, and that the mild, reflective Hindoo moralised it into a parable or fable? The question may be argued either way; but the school of Benfey and M. Cosquin, holding that almost all our stories were invented in India, should prefer the former alternative.

Now Puss in Boots has this peculiarity, that out of France, or rather out of the region influenced by Perrault's version of the history, a moral usually does inform the legend of the Master-Cat, or master-fox, or master-gazelle, or master-jackal, or master-dog, for each of these animals is the hero in different countries. Possibly, then, the story had originally what it sadly lacks in its best-known shape, a moral; and possibly Puss in Boots was in its primitive shape (like Toads and Diamonds) a novel with a purpose. But where was the novel first invented?

We are not likely to discover for certain the cradle of the race of the Master-Cat—the 'cat's cradle' of Puss in Boots. But the record of his achievements is so well worth studying, because the possible area from which it may have arisen is comparatively limited.

There are many stories known all the world over, such as the major part of the adventures of Hop o' My Thumb, which might have been invented anywhere, and might have been invented by men in a low state of savagery. The central idea in Hop o' My Thumb, for example, is the conception of a hero who falls into the hands of cannibals, and by a trick makes the cannibal slay, and sometimes eat, his own kinsfolk, mother, or wife, or child, while the hero escapes. This legend is well known in South Africa, in South Siberia, and in Aberdeenshire; and in Greece it made part of the Minyan legend of Athamas and Ino, murder being substituted for cannibalism. Namaquas, in Southern Africa; Eskimo, in Northern America, and Athenians (as Aeschylus shows in the Eumenides, 244), are as familiar as Maoris, or any of us, with the ogre's favourite remark, 'I smell the smell of a mortal man.'

Now it is obvious that these ideas—the trick played by the hero on the cannibal, and the turning of the tables—might occur to the human mind wherever cannibalism was a customary peril: that is, among any low savages. It does not matter whether the cannibal is called a rakshása in India, or an ogre in France, or a weendigo in Labrador, the notion is the same, and the trick played by the hero is simple and obvious[55]. Therefore Hop o' My Thumb may have been invented anywhere, by any people on a low level of civilisation. But Puss in Boots cannot have been invented by savages of a very backward race or in a really 'primitive' age. The very essence of Puss in Boots is the sudden rise of a man, by aid of a cunning animal, from the depths of poverty to the summit of wealth and rank. Undeniably this rise could only occur where there were great differences of social status, where rank was a recognised institution, and where property had been amassed in considerable quantities by some, while others went bare as lackalls.

These things have been of the very essence of civilisation (the more's the pity), therefore Puss in Boots must have been invented by a more or less civilised mind; it could not have been invented by a man in the condition of the Fuegians or the Digger Indians. Nay, when we consider the stress always and everywhere laid in the story on snobbish pride and on magnificence of attire and equipment, and on retinue, we may conclude that Puss in Boots could hardly have been imagined by men in the middle barbarism; in the state, for example, of Iroquois, or Zulus, or Maoris. Nor are we aware that Puss in Boots, in any shape, is found among any of these peoples. Thus the area in which the origin of Puss in Boots has to be looked for is comparatively narrow.

Puss in Boots, again, is a story which, in all its wonderfully varying forms, can only, we may assume, have sprung from one single mind. It is extremely difficult to assert with confidence that any plot can only have been invented once for all. Every new successful plot, from Dr. Jekyl to She, from Vice Versa to Dean Maitland, is at once claimed for half a dozen authors who, unluckily, did not happen to write She or Dr. Jekyl. But if there can be any assurance in these matters, we may feel certain that the idea of a story, wherein a young man is brought from poverty to the throne by aid of a match-making and ingenious beast, could only have been invented once for all. In that case Puss in Boots is a story which spread from one centre, and was invented by one man in a fairly civilised society. True, he used certain hereditary and established formulæ; the notion of a beast that can talk, and surprises nobody (except in the Zanzibar version) by this accomplishment, is a notion derived from the old savage condition of the intellect, in which beasts are on a level with, or superior to, humanity. But we can all use these formulæ now that we possess them. Could memory of past literature be wholly wiped out, while civilisation still endured, there would be no talking and friendly beasts in the children's tales of the next generation, unless the children wrote them for themselves. As Sainte-Beuve says, 'On n'inventerait plus aujourd'hui de ces choses, si elles n'avaient été imaginées dès longtemps[56].'

If we are to get any light on the first home of the tale—and we cannot get very much—it will be necessary to examine its different versions. There is an extraordinary amount of variety in the incidents subordinate to the main idea, and occasionally we find a heroine instead of a hero, a Marquise de Carabas, not a marquis. Perhaps the best plan will be to start with the stories near home, and to pursue puss, if possible, to his distant original tree. First, we all know him in English translations, made as early as 1745, if not earlier, of Perrault's Maître Chat, ou Chat botté, published in 1696-7. Here his motives are simple fun and friendliness. His master, who owns no other property, thinks of killing and skinning puss, but the cat prefers first to make acquaintance with the king, by aid of presents of game from an imaginary Marquis de Carabas; then to pretend his master is drowning and has had his clothes stolen (thereby introducing him to the king in a court suit, borrowed from the monarch himself); next to frighten people into saying that the Marquis is their seigneur; and, finally, to secure a property for the Marquis by swallowing an ogre, whom he has induced to assume the disguise of a mouse. This last trick is as old as Hesiod[57], where Zeus persuades his wife to become a fly, and swallows her.

The next neighbour of the French Puss in Boots in the north is found in Sweden[58] and in Norway[59]. In the Swedish, a girl owns the cat. They wander to a castle gate, where the cat bids the girl strip and hide in a tree; he then goes to the castle and says that his royal mistress has been attacked by robbers. The people of the palace attire the girl splendidly, the prince loses his heart to her, the queen-mother lays traps for her in vain. Nothing is so fine in the castle as in the girl's château of Cattenburg. The prince insists on seeing that palace, the cat frightens the peasants into saying that all the land they pass is the girl's; finally, the cat reaches a troll's house, with pillars of gold. The cat turns himself into a loaf of bread and holds the troll in talk till the sun rises on him and he bursts, as trolls always do if they see the sun. The girl succeeds to the troll's palace, and nothing is said as to what became of the cat.

Here is even less moral than in Puss in Boots, for the Marquis of Carabas, as M. Deulin says, merely lets the cat do all the tricks, whereas the Swedish girl is his active accomplice. The change of the cat into bread (which can talk), and the bursting of the ogre at dawn, are very ancient ideas, whether they have been tacked later on to the conte or not. In Lord Peter the heroine gives place to a hero, while the cat drives deer to the palace, saying that they come from Lord Peter. The cat, we are not told how, dresses Lord Peter in splendid attire, kills a troll for him, and then, as in Madame d'Aulnoy's White Cat, has its head cut off and becomes a princess. Behold how fancies jump! All the ogre's wealth had been the princess's, before the ogre changed her into a cat, and took her lands. Thus George Cruikshank's moral conclusion is anticipated, while puss acts as a match-maker indeed, but acts for herself. This form of the legend, if not immoral, has no moral, and has been mixed up either with Madame d'Aulnoy's Chatte Blanche, or with the popular traditions from which she borrowed.

Moving south, but still keeping near France, we find Puss in Boots in Italy. The tale is told by Straparola[60]. A youngest son owns nothing but a cat which, by presents of game, wins the favour of a king of Bohemia. The drowning trick is then played, and the king gives the cat's master his daughter, with plenty of money. On the bride's journey to her new home, the cat frightens the peasants into saying all the land belongs to his master, for whom he secures the castle of a knight dead without heirs.

Here, once more, there is no moral.

In a popular version from Sicily[61], a fox takes the cat's place, from motives of gratitude, because the man found it robbing and did not kill it. The fox then plays the usual trick with the game, and another familiar trick, that of leaving a few coins in a borrowed bushel measure to give the impression that his master does not count, but measures out his money. The trick of frightening the peasants follows, and finally, an ogress who owns a castle is thrown down a well by the fox. Then comes in the new feature: the man is ungrateful and kills the fox; nevertheless he lives happy ever after.

Now, at last, we have reached the moral. A beggar on horseback will forget his first friend: a man will be less grateful than a beast.

This moral declares itself, with a difference (for the ingrate is coerced into decent behaviour), in a popular French version, taken down from oral recitation[62].

Here, then, even among the peasantry of Perrault's own country, and as near France as Sicily, too, we have Puss in Boots with a moral: that of human ingratitude contrasted with the gratitude of a beast. May we conclude, then, that Puss in Boots was originally invented as a kind of parable by which this moral might be inculcated? And, if we may draw that conclusion, where is this particular moral most likely to have been invented, and enforced in an apologue?

As to the first of these two questions, it may be observed that the story with the moral, and with a fox in place of a cat, is found among the Avars, a Mongolian people of Mussulman faith, on the northern slopes of the Caucasus. Here the man is ungrateful, but the fox, as in Sicily, coerces him, in this case by threatening to let out the story of his rise in life[63]. In Russia, too, a fox takes the cat's rôle, and the part of the ogre is entrusted to the Serpent Uhlan, a supernatural snake, who is burned to ashes[64].

It is now plain that the tale with the moral, whether that was the original motive or not, is more common than the tale without the moral. We find the moral among French, Italians, Avars, Russians; among people of Mahommedan, Greek, and Catholic religion. Now M. Emmanuel Cosquin is inclined to believe that the moral—the ingratitude of man contrasted with the gratitude of beasts,—is Buddhistic. If that be so, then India is undeniably the original cradle of Puss in Boots. But M. Cosquin has been unable to find any Puss in Boots in India; at least he knew none in 1876, when he wrote on the subject in Le Français (June 29, 1876). Nor did the learned Benfey, with all his prodigious erudition, know an Indian Puss in Boots[65]. Therefore the proof of this theory, that Buddhistic India may be the real cat's cradle, is incomplete; nor does it become more probable when we actually do discover Puss in Boots in India. For in the Indian Puss in Boots, just as in Perrault's, there is no moral at all, and the notion of gratitude, on either the man's side or the beast's, is not even suggested.

There could scarcely be a more disappointing discovery than this for the school of Benfey which derives our fairy tales from Buddhism and India. First, the tale which we are discussing certainly did not find a place in the Pantschatantra, the Hitopadesa, or any other of the early Indian literary collections of Märchen which were translated into so many Western languages. Next, the story does not present itself, for long, to European students of living Indian folklore. Finally, when puss is found in India, where the moral element (if it was the original element, and if its origin was in Buddhist fancy) should be particularly well preserved, there is not any moral whatever.

The Indian Puss in Boots is called The Match-making Jackal, and was published, seven years after M. Cosquin had failed to find it, in the Rev. Lal Behari Day's Folk Tales of Bengal (Macmillan). Mr. Day, of the Hooghly College, is a native gentleman well acquainted with European folklore. Some of the stories in his collection were told by a Bengali Christian woman, two by an old Brahman, three by an old barber, two by a servant of Mr. Day's, and the rest by another old Brahman. Unluckily, the editor does not say which tales he got from each contributor. It might therefore be argued that The Match-making Jackal was perhaps told by the Christian woman, and that she adapted it from Puss in Boots, which she might have heard told by Christians. Mr. Day will be able to settle this question; but it must be plain to any reader of The Match-making Jackal that the story, as reported, is too essentially Hindoo to have been 'adapted' in one generation. It is not impossible that a literary Scandinavian might have introduced the typically Norse touches into the Norse Puss in Boots, but no illiterate woman of Bengal could have made Perrault's puss such a thoroughly Oriental jackal as the beast in the story we are about to relate.

There was once a poor weaver whose ancestors had been wealthy men. The weaver was all alone in the world, but a neighbouring jackal, 'remembering the grandeur of the weaver's forefathers, had compassion on him.' This was pure sentiment on the jackal's part; his life had not been spared, as in some European versions, by the weaver. There was no gratitude in the case. 'I'll try to marry you,' said the jackal, off-hand, 'to the daughter of the king of this country.' The weaver said, 'Yes, when the sun rises in the west.' But the jackal had his plan. He trotted off to the palace, many miles away, and on the road he plucked quantities of the leaves of the betel plant. Then he lay down at the entrance of the tank where the princess bathed twice a day, and began ostentatiously chewing betel-leaves. 'Why,' said the princess, 'what a rich land this jackal must have come from. Here he is chewing betel, a luxury that thousands of men and women among us cannot afford.' The princess asked the jackal whence he came, and he said he was the native of a wealthy country. 'As for our king, his palace is like the heaven of Indra; your palace here is a miserable hovel compared to it.' So the princess told the queen, who at once, and most naturally, asked the jackal if his king were a bachelor. 'Certainly,' said the jackal, 'he has rejected princesses from all parts.' So the queen said she had a pretty daughter, still zu haben, and the jackal promised to try to persuade his master to think of the princess. The jackal returned on his confidential mission, telling the weaver to follow his instructions closely. He went back to court, and suggested that his master should come in a private manner, not in state, as his retinue would eat up the substance of his future father-in-law. He returned and made the weaver borrow a decent suit of clothes from the washermen. Then he made interest with the king of the jackals, the paddy-birds, and the crows, each of whom lent a contingent of a thousand beasts or birds of their species. When they had all arrived within two miles of the palace, the jackal bade them yell and cry, which they did so furiously that the king supposed an innumerable company of people were attending his son-in-law. He therefore implored the jackal to ask his master to come quite alone. 'My master will come alone in undress,' said the jackal; 'send a horse for him.' This was done, and the jackal explained that his master arrived in mean clothes that he might not abash the king by his glory and splendour. The weaver held his tongue as commanded, but at night his talk was of looms and beams, and the princess detected him. The jackal explained that his philanthropic prince was establishing a colony of weavers, and that his mind ran a good deal on this benevolent project.

Here the Puss in Boots character of the tale disappears. The weaver and the princess go home, but the jackal does not cajole anyone out of a castle and lands. He has made the match, and there he leaves it. The princess, however, has fortunately a magical method of making gold, by virtue of which she builds the weaver a splendid palace, and 'hospitals were established for diseased, sick, and infirm animals,' a very Indian touch. The king visits his daughter, is astonished at her wealth, and the jackal says, 'Did I not tell you so?'

Here, as we said, there is no moral, or if any moral, it is the gratitude of man, as displayed in founding hospitals for beasts, not, as M. Cosquin says, 'l'idée toute bouddhique de l'ingratitude de l'homme opposée à la bonté native de l'animal.' Plainly, if any moral was really intended, it was a satire on people who seek great marriages, just as in the story of The Rat's Wedding, the moral is a censure on bargain-hunters.

The failure of the only Indian Puss in Boots we know to establish a theory of an Indian origin, does not, of course, prove a negative. We can only say that puss certainly did not come from India to Europe by the ordinary literary vehicles, and that, when he is found in India, he does not preach what is called the essentially Buddhist doctrine of the ingratitude of man and the gratitude of beasts.

There remains, however, an Eastern form of the tale, an African version, which is of morality all compact. This is the Swahili version from Zanzibar, and it is printed as Sultan Darai, in Dr. Steere's Swahili Tales, as told by Natives of Zanzibar (Bell and Daldy, London, 1870). If a tale first arose where it is now found to exist with most moral, with most didactic purpose, then Puss in Boots is either Arab or Negro, or a piece in which Negroes and Arabs have collaborated. For nowhere is the conte so purposeful as among the Swahilis, who are by definition 'men of mixed Negro and Arab origin.' There may be Central African elements in the Swahili tales, for most of them have 'sung parts,' almost unintelligible even to the singers. 'I suppose,' says Dr. Steere, 'they have been brought down from the interior by the slaves, and perhaps corrupted by them as they gradually forgot their own language.' Thus Central Africa may have contributed to the Swahili stories, but the Swahili Puss in Boots, as it at present exists, has been deeply modified by Mussulman ideas.

Sultan Darai, the Swahili Puss in Boots, really contains two tales. The first is about a wicked step-mother; the second begins when the hero, losing his wife and other kinsfolk, takes to vicious courses, and becomes so poor that he passes his time scratching for grains of millet on the common dustheap. While thus scratching he finds a piece of money, with which he buys a gazelle. The gazelle has pity on him, and startles him by saying so: 'Almighty God is able to do all things, to make me to speak, and others more than I.' The story comes, therefore, through narrators who marvel, as in the fairy world nobody does marvel, at the miracle of a speaking beast.

The gazelle, intent on helping the man, finds a splendid diamond, which he takes to the sultan, just as puss took the game, as 'a present from Sultan Darai.' The sultan is much pleased; the gazelle proposes that he shall give his daughter to Sultan Darai, and then comes the old trick of pretending the master has been stripped by robbers, 'even to his loin-cloth.' The gazelle carries fine raiment to his master, and, as in the French popular and traditional form, bids him speak as little as may be. The marriage is celebrated, and the gazelle goes off, and kills a great seven-headed snake, which, as in Russia, is the owner of a rich house. The snake, as he travels, is accompanied (as in the Kaffir story of Five Heads) by a storm of wind, like that which used to shake the 'medicine lodges' of the North American Indians, puzzling the missionaries. The snake, like the ogre in all Hop o' My Thumb tales, smells out the gazelle, but is defeated by that victorious animal. The gazelle brings home his master, Sultan Darai, and the Princess to the snake's house, where they live in great wealth and comfort.

Now comes in the moral: the gazelle falls sick, Sultan Darai refuses to see it, orders coarse food to be offered it; treats his poor benefactor, in short, with all the arrogant contempt of an ungrateful beggar suddenly enriched. As the ill-used cat says in the Pentamerone—

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-Moghâwir,' says Prof. Robertson-Smith, in Kinship in Early Arabia (p. 195), 'speaks of a South Arab tribe called Beni Hârith or Acârib, 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 Zabyân.' 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].

Les Fées.

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 Fées. 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 Fées 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.

Cendrillon.

Cinderella.

The story of Cinderella (Cendrillon, Cucendron, Cendreusette, Sainte Rosette) is one of the most curious in the history of Märchen. 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 rôles which are filled by beasts in savage Märchen 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 Märchen 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 (ἀναγνὠρισις) makes a great part of the interest. There is no ἀναγνὠρισις 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 ἀναγνὠρισις, 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 ἀναγνὠρισις, 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 dénouement, 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 Märchen.

From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow Märchen 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 Lönnrot, 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.