THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOOD.
The charming fairy tale of La Belle au Bois dormant is the gem of the collection. Its popularity is as great at the present day as it was two hundred years ago. I have called the reader's attention in a marginal note to the first mention probably of seven league boots,[54] but I reserved for the Appendix some observations upon the earliest mention of Ogres and Ogresses. The Baron Walkenaër, in his letters already quoted, has, I think successfully, combated the earlier notion that the word Ogre was derived from a classical source. He deduces it from the Oigours or Igours, a Turkish race mentioned by Procopius in the sixth century. Some tribes of Oigurs established themselves in the Crimea, and their language was called "Lingua Ouguresca" by the Italian merchants who first traded with them. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries all Tartars were confounded under the name of Oigurs. When the Magyars, a Tartar tribe from the banks of the Wolga, overran Dacia and Pannonia, the names of the ancient Huns and of the ferocious Oigurs were united to designate them. They were first called Hunnie-Gours, and their country Hunnic-Gourie, from whence Hongrois and Hungary. The atrocities committed by and attributed to the Oigurs spread horror and alarm throughout Europe. Their cruelties to infants, in which they have been only equalled by the barbarous Sepoys in the recent calamitous events in India, took especial hold of the imaginations of those to whose care children were specially entrusted, and the appellation of Oigur or Ogre became synonymous with that of cannibal, or any other ferocious monster in human form. In Roquefort's Glossaire de la Langue Romaine, Ogre is also derived from the same source. That "l'Huorco" of the Italians, the Orco of Bojardo and Ariosto, may be derived from the Latin Orcus, according to Minucci, as Mr. Keightley imagines, I am not prepared to dispute. Such curious coincidences are common to all who have wandered in the mazes of etymology; but I will merely suggest that it is quite as probable that Orco and Huorco were also derived from Oigur, the name by which the Tartars of the Crimea were known to the Italians as early as the twelfth century, as we have already seen. Florio, however (1598), says, "Orco as Orca, a sea monster," which the Ogre never was.
Spinning with the distaff is the oldest form. A wheel appears in illuminations of the fourteenth century, but the woman hent stood to her work. The more modern spinning-wheel, at which women sit, was invented in 1530, by a citizen of Brunswick, named Jurgen. For illustration of the accident to the Princess, it is perhaps worthy of remark that in the Pyrenees and western provinces of France the spindle is sometimes pointed with iron. "It is thus," says Mr. Akerman (the author of a paper on the Distaff in the Archæologia, vol. xxxvii.), "rendered a stiletto, with which the woman could defend herself." The same antiquary informs us that "the art of spinning in its simplest and most primitive forms is yet pursued in Italy, where the women of Caià still twirl the spindle unrestrained by that 'ancient rustic law which forbade its use without doors.'" So that the father of the Sleeping Beauty had a sort of precedent for his "Must not spin with spindles Act."
The Germans have a version of this story called Briar-Rose: vide Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen.
MASTER CAT; OR PUSS IN BOOTS.
Maître Chat; ou, le Chat Botté.—This capital story is said by Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Keightley to be taken from a collection of stories by Giovan Francesco Straparola, printed at Venice in 1550-54, under the titles of Tredici Piacevole Notte, and translated into French "with considerable embellishments" in 1585. That the first story of the Eleventh Night is derived from the same source as Perrault's there can be little doubt; but I am not by any means prepared to admit that Perrault was indebted to that or any other printed collection for this or any one of those eight stories which it is clear were well known in France as Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye. Straparola, who seems to have borrowed largely from Morlini, and collected stories wherever he could find them, drew upon the traditions of Brittany as well as on the fabliaux of Provence. It is indeed notorious that the Italian novelists were indebted almost entirely to the Trouvères or Troubadours of Languedoc, whilst they themselves admit that the plots of their romances were of Armorican origin.
In Britanie of old time These lays were wrought, so saith this rhyme.
Says the old translator of the Lai le Fraine, the author of which Mr. Dunlop acknowledges "must have been better informed than any modern writer" (History of Fiction, 8vo, 1845, p. 196). In the second edition of the Countess D'Aulnoy's Fairy Tales, I took an opportunity of vindicating that lady from the charge so hastily preferred against her both by Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Keightley, and I now contest as strongly the accuracy of the opinions of the same writers respecting the tales of Charles Perrault. Neither in the story of Straparola, first of the Eleventh Night, nor in the Gagliuso of Signor Basile (whose Pentamerone, published in 1672, is also roundly asserted to have been the "origin" of the French Contes des Fées[55]), do we find Puss in Boots. What would Le Maître Chat be, were he not also Le Chat Botté? Nor is there an Ogre—that especial characteristic of a legend of Brittany—nor consequently the delicious scene between him and Puss, which so dramatically winds up the French story. The same unmistakeable indications of its being a veritable Histoire du Temps Passé, militate against the belief alluded to by M. de Plancy, that the Marquis de Carabas was intended as a portrait of some particular nobleman of the time of Louis XIV.; and therefore that the usurpation of the castle and property of the ogre might be an allusion to the indelicate seizure by D'Aubigné of the domains of a Protestant, an exile in consequence of the religious persecutions at the close of the seventeenth century, "In which case," he adds, "the Cat would be Madame de Maintenon!" What a pity so ingenious an idea should be destitute of foundation. It is more probable that the wits of the day compared the illustrious individuals to the Marquis de Carabas and his Cat.
I have kept the old English title of Puss in Boots, though it is not literally that of the original. It would have been an indictable offence to have altered it.
The tricks of the cat to catch the rats are described almost in the words of Lafontaine, in his fable of Le Chat et le Vieux Rat, in which Maître Mitis, "l'Alexandre des chats," a second Rodillard, "se pend la tête en bas" and "s'enfarine" for the same purpose.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] "Ce qui nous indique que ce receuil contenait les contes vulgairement connus sous ce titre."—B. W.
[48] Oie being derived from the Low Latin word Auca (Du Cange in voce).
[49] The Italians have the same proverb—"Nel tempo ove Bertha filava."
[50] In the coffin of Jeanne de Bourgogne, the first wife of Philip de Valois, were found the Queen's ring of silver, her distaff and spindle. The tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon, Queen of Charles V. of France, also contained part of her crown, her golden ring, and her distaff of gilt wood (vide Lenoir, Notes Historiques sur les Exhumations faites en 1793 dans l'Abbaye de St. Denis).
[51] See a learned and interesting paper on the Distaff and Spindle, by J. Y. Akerman, Esq., Sec. F.S.A., Archæologia, vol. xxxvii.
[52] There was another edition, in French and English, published at the Hague three years afterwards:—Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, en Français et en Anglais. Par Perrault, avec des figures gravées par Fokke. La Haye: Neaulme, 1745. 12mo. It was a rare book in 1784, when it was sold, at the sale of the library of the Duc de la Vallière, for twenty-three livres nineteen sous.
[53] Mr. Dunlop, who alludes to this story, speaks of the murder of his wives. The author of L'Art de Vérifier des Dates, gives him but one wife, Catharine de Thouars, daughter and heiress of Mille de Thouars, Seigneur de Chabanais et Confolent, whom he married December 31st, 1420, and who survived him, and was re-married to Jean de Vendôme, Vidame d'Amiens. She therefore lived with him for twenty years, and bore him one daughter, Marie de Laval, Dame de Raiz, who married twice, and died the 1st of November, 1458. Père Anselme says he was contracted in 1416 to Jeanne Paynel, daughter and co-heiress of Fouques, Seigneur de Hambye; but that she died previous to the celebration of the marriage.
[54] In the marginal note I have mentioned Jack and the Bean-stalk. This is an error. There are no seven league boots in that story. It is Jack the Giant Killer only who is the fortunate proprietor of the "shoes of swiftness," which either suggested, or were suggested by, the boots aforesaid.
[55] "Of the ten stories in the Mother Goose's Fairy Tales of Perrault, seven are to be found in the Pentamerone," says Mr. Keightley, in his Tales and Fictions, p. 184. I have already shown that there were only eight stories in the Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, and in the Pentamerone I find but two that have any similitude to the tales of Perrault—viz., Gagliuso and La Gatta Cenerentola, both differing widely in many points from the ancient Breton traditions.
CINDERELLA; OR THE LITTLE GLASS SLIPPER.
Cendrillon; ou, la Petite Pantoufle de Verre. Here, again, could it enter the heart of an Englishman to call this anything but Cinderella? I am proud to say I was not equal to such a sacrifice to principle. I should have been afraid to meet the eyes of my grandchildren. There are persons, however, who have been cruel enough to tamper with the second title, to destroy "the little glass slipper," and tell us that in the original story it was not a pantoufle "de verre," but "de vair"—i.e., a fur much worn in the middle ages, and from which the charge of vair in heraldry was taken. I thank the stars that I have not been able to discover any foundation for this alarming report. Even should it be unfortunately the fact, it would not affect the Conte de ma Mère l'Oye, as handed down to us by Perrault. In that, it is an undeniable "pantoufle de verre," and has been said to represent allegorically the extreme fragility of woman's reputation, and the prudence of flight before it is too late. There appears to be no doubt that this story is founded on an old Armorican tradition, as in 1826 an alteration of an ancient Breton chronicle was published by Madame Piette, entitled Laurette de Karnabas; ou, la Nouvelle Cendrillon, which is taken from the same source, but divested of its fairy agency; and the Countess d'Aulnoy had previously availed herself of some portions of the tale of Cendrillon in her story of Finette Cendron.
The trial of the slipper is like that of the ring in the story of Peau d'Ane, and a "little glass shoe" is the subject of a German fairy tale. The Germans have also a version of Cinderella, in which the slipper is of "pure gold."
At the banquet it will be remembered that the Prince is said to have given Cinderella both oranges and citrons. These do not appear to us at present as particularly suggestive of the magnificence of a royal collation; but in the seventeenth century, Portugal oranges were considered a present worthy princes of the blood. "Monsieur, me vint voir," says the Duchesse de Montpensier, in her Memoirs, "il me donne des oranges de Portugal." Molière, in his description of the comedy which formed a portion of the famous fêtes given at Versailles, in 1668, by Louis XIV., tells us that "d'abord on vit sur le théâtre une colation magnifique d'oranges de Portugal;" and in his own comedy, L'Avare, when Harpagon apologises to his mistress for not having prepared a collation for her, his son replies, "J'y ai pourvu, mon père, et j'ai fait apporter ici quelques bassins d'oranges de la Chine, de citrons doux, et de confitures." Also, according to L'Emery (Traités des Aliments, 1705), the citron was supposed to give a better colour to the lips, and the ladies of the Court in the 17th century, therefore, "portoient en main des citrons doux, quelles mordoient de tems en tems pour avoir les livres vermeilles."—Le Grand D'Aussi.—Vie Privée des Français, tom. i. p. 251.