Part 49

_La Barbe Bleue_ is founded, according to Mons. Colin de Plancy, on a tradition of Lower Brittany; and he remarks that Perrault must have heard it from the lips of nurses, or perhaps peasants, to have written with so much _naïveté_ the scene of Sister Anne. He states also that it is pretended that Blue Beard was actually a nobleman of the house of Beaumanoir. He does not, however, seem to have been aware that the original of this terrible portrait is also said to have been Gilles de Laval, Seigneur de Raiz, created Maréchal de France, June 21st, 1429, for his defence of Orleans against the English, but whose infamous conduct in Brittany so exasperated the public against him, that in 1440 he was arrested by order of the Procureur-Général de Bretagne, and having been tried and found guilty, was condemned to be hanged and burnt, and underwent that sentence in a field at Nantes, on the 8th of October (some say 23rd of December) of that same year, after exhibiting, says the chronicler, great signs of repentance; his body was taken out of the flames, and buried in the church of the Carmelites at Nantes. It was, we are told, his taste for luxury and libertinism which plunged him into all the crimes for which he was so fearfully punished. He squandered a revenue of two hundred thousand crowns per annum, an enormous sum in those days, and which he had inherited at the age of twenty. He never travelled without being accompanied by an army of cooks, musicians, dancers of both sexes, packs of hounds, and two hundred saddle horses. Unfortunately for him, he thought it necessary to include in his suite of attendants some fortune-tellers and pretended magicians, which it is possible in those days may have caused the credulous multitude to impute to him some atrocities of which he may have been innocent. The whole _procès_ is said to be still extant: but we are not furnished with any details which would identify him with the gentleman who rejoiced in a blue beard, and expiated his offences by being run through the body with cold iron, instead of being roasted at a stake like the guilty but penitent Marshal.[53] Whether the line of Beaumanoir or of Laval has the best claim to the honour of his relationship, may be still a matter of dispute; but the fact more important to our present inquiry is, that in either case it is a tradition of Bretagne, and therefore strengthens the theory of Mons. de Plancy and the Baron Walkenaër.

There is no fairy in this story, but there is an enchanted key. "La clef," says the author, "etait fée." In the old translations this is rendered "the key was a fairy." "Fée" is, however, in such instances as these, not a noun substantive, but an adjective, now obsolete, but to be found in Cotgrave, spelt with a third e in the feminine. "Fée, m.; éee, f.: Fatall appointed, destined; also, taken, _bewitched_ or forespoken; also, _charmed_, _inchanted_."--EDIT. 1650.

There is another popular passage in this story which requires a word of remark:--"Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie et l'herbe qui verdoie." This has been generally translated, "I see nothing but the sun which makes a dust, and the grass which _looks_ green." Mons. de Plancy appends a note to this passage, as follows:--"1. Poudroyer, darder, éblouir les yeux. 2. Verdoyer, jeter un éclat vert."

With great submission to so high an authority, I must venture to differ with him on this point. "Poudroyer" is an old French verb, signifying to reduce to powder. "Je poudroie, tu poudroies, il poudroie," &c. "Un cheval Espagnol _poudroyant_ tous les champs," J. B. Rouss; and Bescherelle, in his _Dictionnaire National_, remarks, quoting the actual passage from Perrault, "Ce mot sonore poètique, épargnant une périphrase est a regretter." Verdoyer is also a verb active, signifying to grow or become green, and I have therefore taken the liberty to render the above celebrated reply, "I see nothing but the sun making dust" (that is to say, reducing the soil to dust by its heat), "and the grass growing green." It is the flock of sheep that afterwards raise or make _a_ dust. It may be thought I am "making a dust," to use a familiar phrase, about a trifle; but I wished to point out that unless we could say in English, "the sun that _dusts_ and the grass that _greens_," we cannot approach the terse and graphic description of dear Sister Anne.

Mons. de Plancy observes that the incidents of this story (excepting, of course, that of the enchanted key) are not impossible, provided they are supposed to have occurred in the middle ages; but that Perrault has placed them nearer his own times, by saying that Blue Beard's widow employed part of her fortune in purchasing commissions for her two brothers, as the sale of commissions in the French army was not known before the reign of Francis I.; but he does not notice that the mention of dragoons and musqueteers brings them still nearer. Blue Beard has been a favourite subject with the dramatists, both French and English. The celebrated melodrama by George Colman the younger, produced at Drury Lane Theatre, in 1798, in which the scene was transferred to the East, was rendered still more popular by the music of Michael Kelly: the "March in Blue Beard" was perpetrated on every piano alternately with the "Duke of York's March," the "Battle of Prague," and the "Overture to Lodoiska."

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOOD.

The charming fairy tale of _La Belle au Bois dormant_ is the gem of the collection. Its popularity is as great at the present day as it was two hundred years ago. I have called the reader's attention in a marginal note to the first mention probably of seven league boots,[54] but I reserved for the Appendix some observations upon the earliest mention of Ogres and Ogresses. The Baron Walkenaër, in his letters already quoted, has, I think successfully, combated the earlier notion that the word Ogre was derived from a classical source. He deduces it from the Oigours or Igours, a Turkish race mentioned by Procopius in the sixth century. Some tribes of Oigurs established themselves in the Crimea, and their language was called "Lingua _Ouguresca_" by the Italian merchants who first traded with them. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries all Tartars were confounded under the name of Oigurs. When the Magyars, a Tartar tribe from the banks of the Wolga, overran Dacia and Pannonia, the names of the ancient Huns and of the ferocious Oigurs were united to designate them. They were first called Hunnie-Gours, and their country Hunnic-Gourie, from whence Hongrois and Hungary. The atrocities committed by and attributed to the Oigurs spread horror and alarm throughout Europe. Their cruelties to infants, in which they have been only equalled by the barbarous Sepoys in the recent calamitous events in India, took especial hold of the imaginations of those to whose care children were specially entrusted, and the appellation of Oigur or Ogre became synonymous with that of cannibal, or any other ferocious monster in human form. In Roquefort's _Glossaire de la Langue Romaine_, Ogre is also derived from the same source. That "l'Huorco" of the Italians, the Orco of Bojardo and Ariosto, may be derived from the Latin Orcus, according to Minucci, as Mr. Keightley imagines, I am not prepared to dispute. Such curious coincidences are common to all who have wandered in the mazes of etymology; but I will merely suggest that it is quite as probable that Orco and Huorco were also derived from Oigur, the name by which the Tartars of the Crimea were known to the Italians as early as the twelfth century, as we have already seen. Florio, however (1598), says, "Orco as Orca, a _sea_ monster," which the Ogre never was.

Spinning with the distaff is the oldest form. A wheel appears in illuminations of the fourteenth century, but the woman hent stood to her work. The more modern spinning-wheel, at which women sit, was invented in 1530, by a citizen of Brunswick, named Jurgen. For illustration of the accident to the Princess, it is perhaps worthy of remark that in the Pyrenees and western provinces of France the spindle is sometimes pointed with iron. "It is thus," says Mr. Akerman (the author of a paper on the Distaff in the _Archæologia_, vol. xxxvii.), "rendered a stiletto, with which the woman could defend herself." The same antiquary informs us that "the art of spinning in its simplest and most primitive forms is yet pursued in Italy, where the women of Caià still twirl the spindle unrestrained by that '_ancient rustic law which forbade its use without doors_.'" So that the father of the Sleeping Beauty had a sort of precedent for his "Must not spin with spindles Act."

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_).

[49] The Italians have the same proverb--"Nel tempo ove Bertha filava."

[50] In the coffin of Jeanne de Bourgogne, the first wife of Philip de Valois, were found the Queen's ring of silver, her _distaff_ and _spindle_. The tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon, Queen of Charles V. of France, also contained part of her crown, her golden ring, and her distaff of gilt wood (_vide_ Lenoir, _Notes Historiques sur les Exhumations faites en 1793 dans l'Abbaye de St. Denis_).

[51] See a learned and interesting paper on the Distaff and Spindle, by J. Y. Akerman, Esq., Sec. F.S.A., _Archæologia_, vol. xxxvii.

[52] There was another edition, in French and English, published at the Hague three years afterwards:--_Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, en Français et en Anglais_. Par Perrault, avec des figures gravées par Fokke. La Haye: Neaulme, 1745. 12mo. It was a rare book in 1784, when it was sold, at the sale of the library of the Duc de la Vallière, for twenty-three livres nineteen sous.

[53] Mr. Dunlop, who alludes to this story, speaks of the murder of his wives. The author of _L'Art de Vérifier des Dates_, gives him but one wife, Catharine de Thouars, daughter and heiress of Mille de Thouars, Seigneur de Chabanais et Confolent, whom he married December 31st, 1420, and who survived him, and was re-married to Jean de Vendôme, Vidame d'Amiens. She therefore lived with him for twenty years, and bore him one daughter, Marie de Laval, Dame de Raiz, who married twice, and died the 1st of November, 1458. Père Anselme says he was contracted in 1416 to Jeanne Paynel, daughter and co-heiress of Fouques, Seigneur de Hambye; but that she died previous to the celebration of the marriage.

[54] In the marginal note I have mentioned _Jack and the Bean-stalk_. This is an error. There are no seven league boots in that story. It is _Jack the Giant Killer_ only who is the fortunate proprietor of the "shoes of swiftness," which either suggested, or were suggested by, the boots aforesaid.

[55] "Of the _ten_ stories in the _Mother Goose's Fairy Tales_ of Perrault, _seven_ are to be found in the _Pentamerone_," says Mr. Keightley, in his _Tales and Fictions_, p. 184. I have already shown that there were only eight stories in the _Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_, and in the _Pentamerone_ I find but two that have any similitude to the tales of Perrault--viz., _Gagliuso_ and _La Gatta Cenerentola_, both differing widely in many points from the ancient Breton traditions.

CINDERELLA; OR THE LITTLE GLASS SLIPPER.

_Cendrillon; ou, la Petite Pantoufle de Verre_. Here, again, could it enter the heart of an Englishman to call this anything but _Cinderella_? I am proud to say I was not equal to such a sacrifice to principle. I should have been afraid to meet the eyes of my grandchildren. There are persons, however, who have been cruel enough to tamper with the second title, to destroy "the little glass slipper," and tell us that in the original story it was not a pantoufle "de _verre_," but "de _vair_"--_i.e._, a fur much worn in the middle ages, and from which the charge of vair in heraldry was taken. I thank the stars that I have not been able to discover any foundation for this alarming report. Even should it be unfortunately the fact, it would not affect the _Conte de ma Mère l'Oye_, as handed down to us by Perrault. In that, it is an undeniable "pantoufle de _verre_," and has been said to represent allegorically the extreme fragility of woman's reputation, and the prudence of flight before it is _too late_. There appears to be no doubt that this story is founded on an old Armorican tradition, as in 1826 an alteration of an ancient Breton chronicle was published by Madame Piette, entitled _Laurette de Karnabas; ou, la Nouvelle Cendrillon_, which is taken from the same source, but divested of its fairy agency; and the Countess d'Aulnoy had previously availed herself of some portions of the tale of _Cendrillon_ in her story of _Finette Cendron_.

The trial of the slipper is like that of the ring in the story of _Peau d'Ane_, and a "little glass shoe" is the subject of a German fairy tale. The Germans have also a version of _Cinderella_, in which the slipper is of "pure gold."

At the banquet it will be remembered that the Prince is said to have given Cinderella both oranges and citrons. These do not appear to us at present as particularly suggestive of the magnificence of a royal collation; but in the seventeenth century, Portugal oranges were considered a present worthy princes of the blood. "Monsieur, me vint voir," says the Duchesse de Montpensier, in her _Memoirs_, "il me donne des oranges de Portugal." Molière, in his description of the comedy which formed a portion of the famous fêtes given at Versailles, in 1668, by Louis XIV., tells us that "d'abord on vit sur le théâtre une colation magnifique d'oranges de Portugal;" and in his own comedy, _L'Avare_, when Harpagon apologises to his mistress for not having prepared a collation for her, his son replies, "J'y ai pourvu, mon père, et j'ai fait apporter ici quelques bassins _d'oranges de la Chine, de citrons doux_, et de confitures." Also, according to L'Emery (_Traités des Aliments_, 1705), the citron was supposed to give a better colour to the lips, and the ladies of the Court in the 17th century, therefore, "portoient en main _des citrons doux_, quelles mordoient de tems en tems pour avoir les livres vermeilles."--Le Grand D'Aussi.--_Vie Privée des Français_, tom. i. p. 251.

RIQUET WITH THE TUFT.

_Riquet à la Houpe_ is perhaps the least known of the eight _Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_; but although it has not the attractive qualities which have occasioned the popularity of the others, it is an excellent story, with a valuable moral, though, strangely enough, the _moralité_ with which it concludes takes no notice of it. The object of the story is evidently to show the superiority of mental to personal qualifications, and the power of the former not only to compensate for ugliness and deformity, but even to make one forget them. The concluding verses, however, point only to the fact that love can embellish its object, and turn even defects into beauties, passing over the more important one of the cause of the love itself.

Some writers have fancied the hero of this story to have been a person of distinction at the Court of Louis XIV., forgetting that, like the rest in the collection, it is a "histoire du tems passé." But, as Monsieur de Plancy remarks, "On voit souvent des allusions ou il n'y en a point;" and, as in the case of _Le Chat Botté_, the application may have been made to the man from the story.

The reader has been referred to this Appendix by a marginal note at page 32, respecting the _Queue de Renard_. The explanation offered by the editor of the French edition of 1826 is, that "les cuisiniers élégans se coiffaient dans leur négligé de travail de la peau de quelqu' animal, dont ils laissaient pendre la queue;" and he adds, "on voit encore, dans certaines provinces, des _chasseurs_ coîffé ainsi." That a huntsman should sport a fox's brush, or wear a cap made of the fur of any animal, is not in the least remarkable or uncommon; but I do not see how it can be taken as a fact in support of the assertion that cooks did so either in the time of Louis XIV. or at present; and the Editor does not give us any authority for that assertion. Of all animals, a fox would be the last I should imagine a French cook would select to furnish him with a trophy or a sign of company, and that "twenty or thirty rôtisseurs" should _all_ have "_la_ lardoire à la main et _la_ queue de renard _sur l'oreille_," appears to me, if we are to consider the author to have meant actually the tail of a fox, a very remarkable circumstance, as the use of the definitive article in both cases shows the "queue de renard" must have been as much the mark of a cook as the "lardoire," or larding-pin. I confess I am not satisfied with this explanation; and all my own researches and those kindly made for me by friends both in Paris and London, have hitherto failed in throwing any light upon this curious passage. "Queue de Renard" is the name of a plant known by us as foxtail, and it is also applied to a particular family of flowers; but it is likewise the name of an implement. "Outil a deux biseaux ou chanfreins par le bout dont on se _sert pour percer_."--Bescherelle. This description looks vastly like some accessory to the larding-pin.

The same authority has also: "Queue de renard à étouper. Le queue de cet animal dont se servent les doreurs pour appliquer les feuilles d'or ou d'argent." This, as we know, is not the entire brush, but a portion of the hair. In default of any positive information, I will merely make three suggestions: 1. A portion of the herb foxtail, dried, which might be used as a whisk. 2. A small instrument for piercing or skewering. 3. A portion of the brush, as used by gilders of wood or metal, and probably by the _rôtisseurs_ of that day, as we find it was customary to gild the beaks and legs of the game and poultry served up at the royal banquets. Favin, amongst other writers, tells us of a grand banquet in which "le quatrième service fut d'oyseaux tans grands que petits, et _tous le service fut doré_."

In the Form of Cury there is a receipt for making "Viande Riall" (royal), in which the cook is told, after he has dressed it in "dysshes plate," to "take _a barre of golde foyle_ and another of _silver foyle_, and lay hom (them) on, Saint Andrew's cross wyse, above the potage, and then take sugre plate, or gynger plate, or paste royale, and kutte hom of lozenges, and plante hom in the voide places between the barres, and serve hit forthe." The peacock served in his "hakell,"--_i.e._, neck feathers, or in his "pride"--_i.e._ with tail displayed, &c.--had always his bill gilt.

Whatever, in fine, the "queue de renard" may have been, I cannot doubt that, worn "sur l'oreille," it was a distinctive mark of a _rôtisseur_ of that day, as a pen behind the ear has been of a clerk in ours; and the probability is in favour of the third interpretation, as _rôtisseurs_ were, as their name implies, those cooks who prepared the roasted dishes only, and in all the old accounts it is especially the "rotie" that is "doré."

_Riquet à la Houpe_ is supposed to have inspired Madame de Villeneuve with the idea of the _Beauty and the Beast_. In my notice of that story, I shall have a word to say in refutation of that supposition. _Riquet with the Tuft_ was the first of those fairy extravaganzas which the public have so kindly received during twenty years, at the Olympic, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Haymarket, and the Lyceum. It was written in conjunction with Mr. Charles Dance, and produced at the Olympic under Madame Vestris's management, December 26th, 1836.

LITTLE THUMBLING.