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).