"De Peau d'Ane et de Fier à bras Et de cent autres vieux fatras,"
he had heard in his own nursery, and with which Louis XIV. had been rocked to sleep when a child, as well as all the rest of the children in his dominions; and that Madame d'Aulnoy, when not indebted to similar recollections, drew upon her own fertile and lively imagination, introducing occasionally an incident from one of the old Trouvères of Languedoc, or some of those Oriental stories which were circulated in manuscript long before their publication by Galland, or picked up by herself during her residence in Spain from the Moorish and Turkish slaves around her, nay, from her own little servant Zayde, who, though she could speak no language but her own at the time her mistress so pleasantly describes her, might have eventually acquired sufficient French or Spanish for such a purpose.
Her account of this child is so interesting that I shall not apologise for quoting it:—
"They have here great numbers of slaves who are bought and sold at high prices. They are Moors and Turks, some of them worth four or five hundred crowns a piece.... You are extremely well served by these unhappy wretches, they are far more diligent, laborious, and humble than other servants.... I have one that is not above nine years old. She is as black as jet, and would be reckoned in her own country a wonderful beauty, for her nose is quite flat, her lips prodigiously thick, her eyes of a red and white colour, and her teeth admirable in Europe as well as in Africa. She understands not a word of any language than her own. Her name is Zayde; we have got her baptized.... Those who sold her to me told me she was a girl of quality; and the poor child will come often and fall down on her knees before me, clasp her hands, cry, and point towards her country. I would willingly send her thither if she could there be a Christian; but this impossibility obliges me to keep her. I would fain understand her, for I believe her to be intelligent—all her actions show it. She dances after her fashion, and so pleasantly that she affords us much entertainment. I make her wear white patches, with which she is mightily taken. She is dressed as they are at Morocco, that is, in a short gown almost without any plaits, large shift sleeves of fine cloth striped with different colours like those of our Bohemians and gipseys. A pair of stays made of merely a strip of crimson velvet on a gold ground, and fastened at the sides with silver buckles and buttons, and a mantle of exceedingly fine woollen stuff, very long and very large, in which she wraps herself, and with one corner of it covers her head.
"This dress is very handsome; her short hair, which looks like wool, is cut in several places, on each side like a half-moon, on the crown in a circle, and in front like a heart. She cost me twenty pistoles. My daughter has made her governess of her Marmoset, the little monkey given to her by the Archbishop of Burgos. I assure you Zayde and the Marmoset are capitally matched, and understand each other extremely well."—Relation du Voyage en Espagne.
With this characteristic and suggestive extract from a book deserving to be better known, I leave a subject to which it is not likely I shall return in print, though it will never cease to interest me in the study.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] In the Cabinet des Fées, 1785, it is printed "de Huber," quite a different name; but the edition of the works of Perrault, 1826, by M. Collin de Plancy, is more carefully printed, and there it is distinctly de Lubert.