Popular Tales

by Charles Perrault

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

[51] Crane, p. 78.

Le Maistre Chat, ou le Chat Botté.

Puss in Boots.

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

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

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

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

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

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