[33] In popular French versions the Ogre is often called Le Sarrasin to this day (Sébillot in Mélusine, May 5, 1887).
NOTES ON THE
SEVERAL TALES BY PERRAULT,
AND THEIR VARIANTS.
Les Trois Souhaits.
The Three Wishes.
The story of The Three Wishes is very valuable as an illustration of the difficulties which baffle, and perhaps will never cease to baffle, the student of popular Tales and their diffusion. The fundamental idea is that a supernatural being of one sort or another can grant to a mortal the fulfilment of a wish, or wishes, and that the mortal can waste the boon. Now probably this idea might occur to any human mind which entertained the belief in communication between men, and powerful persons of any sort, Gods, Saints, Tree-spirits, fairies, follets or the like. The mere habit of prayer, universally human as it is, contains the germs of the conception. But the notion, as we find it in story, branches out into a vast variety of shapes, and the problem is to determine which of these, or whether any one of these is the original type, and whether the others have been adapted or burlesqued from that first form, and whether these processes have been the result of literary transmission, and literary handling, or of oral traditions and popular fancy. Perhaps a compact statement of some (by no means all) of the shapes of The Three Wishes may here be serviceable.
1. The granters of the Wishes are gods. The gift is accepted in a pious spirit, and the desires are noble, and worthy of the donors.
This tale occurs in Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii. 610-724. Baucis and Philemon entertain the gods, who convert their hut into a Temple. They wish (the man is the speaker) to serve the gods in this fane, and that neither may outlive the other: