The attention of mythologists has long been fixed on the slipper of Cinderella. There seems no great mystery in the Prince's proposal to marry the woman who could wear the tiny mule. It corresponds to the advantages which, when the hero is a man, attend him who can bend the bow, lift the stone, draw the sword, or the like. In a woman's case it is beauty, in a man's strength, that is to be tested. Whether the slipper were of verre or of vair is a matter of no moment. The slipper is of red satin in Madame d'Aulnoy's Finette Cendron, and of satin in Rashin Coatie. The Egyptian king, in Strabo and Ælian, merely concluded that the loser of the slipper must be a pretty woman, because she certainly had a pretty foot. The test of fitting the owner recurs in Peau d'Ane, where a ring, not a slipper, is the object, as in the Finnish Wonderful Birch tree.
M. de Gubernatis takes a different view of Cinderella's slipper. The Dawn, it appears, in the Rig Veda is said to leave no footsteps behind her (apad). This naturally identifies her with Cinderella, who not only leaves footsteps, probably, but one of her slippers. M. de Gubernatis reasons that apad 'may mean, not only she who has no feet, but also she who has no footsteps ... or again, she who has no slippers, the aurora having, as it appears, lost them.... The legend of the lost slipper ... seems to me to repose entirely upon the double meaning of the word apad, i.e. who has no foot, or what is the measure of the foot, which may be either the footstep or the slipper....' (Zoolog. Myth. i. 31). M. de Gubernatis adds that 'Cinderella, when she loses the slipper, is overtaken by the prince bridegroom.' The point of the whole story lies in this, of course, that she is not overtaken. Had she been overtaken, there would have been no need for the trial with the slipper (op. cit. i. 161). M. de Gubernatis, in this passage, makes the overtaking of Cinderella serve his purpose as proof; on p. 31 he derives part of his proof from the statement (correct this time) that Cinderella is not overtaken, 'because a chariot bears her away.' Another argument is that the dusky Cinderella is only brilliantly clad 'in the Prince's ball-room, or in church, in candle-light, and near the Prince,—the aurora is beautiful only when the sun is near.' Is the sun the candle-light, and is the Prince also the sun? If a lady is only belle à la chandelle, what has the Dawn to do with that?
M. André Lefèvre calls M. de Gubernatis's theory quelque peu aventureuse (Les Contes de Charles Perrault, p. lxxiv), and this cannot be thought a severe criticism. If we supposed the story to have arisen out of an epithet of Dawn, in Sanskrit, the other incidents of the tale, and their combination into a fairly definite plot, and the wide diffusion of that plot among peoples whose ancestors assuredly never spoke Sanskrit, would all need explanation.
In Perrault's Cinderella, we have not the adventure of the False or Substituted Bride, which usually swells out this and many other contes, and which, indeed, is apparently brought in by popular conteurs, whenever the tale is a little short. Thus it frequently winds up the story which Perrault gives so briefly as Les Fées. Among the Zulus[89], the Birds of the Thorn country warn the bridegroom that he has the wrong girl,—she is a beast (mbulu) in Zululand. The birds give the warning in Rashin Coatie[90], and birds take the same part in Swedish, Russian, German, but a dog plays the rôle in Breton (Reinhold Köhler, op. cit. p. 373). In a song of Fauriel's Chansons Romaiques the birds warn the girl that she is riding with a corpse. Birds give the warning in Gaelic (Campbell, No. 14).
Perrault did more than suppress the formula of the False Bride. By an artistic use of his Fairy Godmother he gave Cinderella her excellent reason for leaving the ball, not because cupit ipsa videri, but in obedience to the fairy dame. He made Cinderella forgive her stepsisters, and get them good marriages, in place of punishing them, as even Psyche does so treacherously in Apuleius, and as the wild justice of folk tales usually determines their doom. An Italian Cinderella breaks her stepmother's neck with the lid of a chest. But Cendrillon 'douce et bonne au début reste jusqu'à la fin douce et bonne' (Deulin, Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, p. 286). These are examples of Perrault's refined way of treating the old tales. But in his own country there survives a version of Cendrillon in which a Blue Bull, not a Fairy Godmother, helps the heroine. From the ear of the Bull, as from his horn in Kaffir lore, the heroine draws her supplies. She is Jaquette de Bois, and reminds us of Katie Wooden cloak. Her mother is dead, but the Bull is not said to have been the mother in bestial form. (Sébillot, Contes Pop. de la Haute Bretagne, Charpentier, Paris, 1880, p. 15). In these versions the formula of Cendrillon shifts into that of The Black Bull o' Norroway.
[68] H. H. Risley, Asiatic Quarterly, Number III. 'Primitive Marriage in Bengal.'
[69] Demosth. De Corona, 313, Harpocration, ἀπομάττειν. Theal, Kaffir Folk Lore, p. 22.
[70] Izinganekwane, p. 1.
[71] Theal, p. 158.
[72] Indian Evangelical Review, Oct. 1886. The collector is Mr. A. Campbell.