Tag Archives: Basile

Magical Cats: “Puss in Boots”

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Fairy Tales, French Literature

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Puss in boots, by Fred Marcellino

Puss in boots by Fred Marcellino

Animals play many roles in literature.  We have seen them in fables, beast epics, bestiaries, and high fantasy literary works, but we haven’t looked at animals inhabiting fairy tales.

By and large, in animal fairy tales, a witch, or a fairy godmother has transformed a prince or a princess into a frog or a toad.  Usually, if three conditions are met, the curse is lifted and there appears a prince or a princess.  There are exceptions to this scenario, yet it remains a common narrative.

Magical cats

However there are other narratives.  For instance, we have magical cats, and our best example is Charles Perrault’s Puss in Boots.  In Puss in Boots, the protagonist, or main character, is the third son of a miller.  One of his brothers has inherited the mill, the other a donkey, but Puss’ master has inherited a mere cat, nothing more.  His fate could be worse. He’s not a prince who has been turned into a frog or toad, but he feels he has been cheated.  However, proud Puss does not consider himself an inferior inheritance and sets about to take his master from rags to riches.

ANTECEDENTS

Puss in Boots has made earlier appearances in Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c. 1480 – c. 1557).  Straparola is considered the father of the literary form of the fairy tale in Europe, but fairy tales constituting Charles Perrault‘s Tales of Mother Goose (1697) are the versions we know and belong to literature.  Between 1550-1555, Straparola wrote Le piacevoli notti or The Facetious nights.  

Charles Perrault also drew his content from Giambattista Basile (c. 1575 – 23 February 1632), the author of Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (Neapolitan for “The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones”), a work also known as the Il Pentamerone, published posthumously in two volumes, in 1634 and 1636.  But this is a story that may date back a thousand years or more and has been transmitted orally.  A fairy tale enters literature, or the “learned tradition,” when it is presented in writing.[i]

Fairy tales and seventeenth-century French salons

To recapitulate, although Puss in Boots may date back thousands of year, the immediate known sources of French 17th-century fairy tales are Italian.  However, these fairy tales could not be told to children, unless they had been translated and  refined to meet the expectations of salonniers and salonnières (see Salons, Wikipedia).

Charles Perrault’s Puss in Boots is a well-written Puss in Boots, a product of late seventeenth-century French salons.  As we know from earlier blogs, Charles Perrault had worked at Versailles, he was an habitué of salons and a member of the French Academy.

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Summary of the story

The third son of a miller is disappointed because all he has received as his inheritance is a cat.  However, he will soon know otherwise. First, Puss asks the third son to provide him with a sack and with boots.

Deep within the human psyche lies the wish to travel quickly and, particularly, to fly.  In Puss in Boots, no one has wings.  But fairy tales also feature magical boots called bottes de sept lieues, or seven-league boots.  They allow extraordinary mobility.  It could be therefore that Puss has been provided with bottes de sept lieues, but I doubt it.  The boots seem a prop befitting the genre, a signature.  Puss does not need them, except to appear human.

The Marquis de Carabas

Yet, Puss does put on the boots, but what he shows is exceptional ingenuity, which is a characteristic of Reynard the Fox who succeeds in talking himself out of a death sentence.  As for Perrault’s Puss in Boots, he starts killing game, putting it in his sack, and offering it to the King on behalf of a his renamed master.

Puss has therefore transformed the third son a miller into the Marquis de Carabas.  But this is not an instance of metamorphism, but one of ingenuity.  It is Puss, a clever cat, and not a fairy godmother, who has turned the third son of a miller into an aristocrat.

Puss in Boots, by Fred Marcellino

The River

Next, when Puss in Boots hears that the King and his daughter will ride along a river, he asks the new Marquis to get into the water. He then screams out that the Marquis is drowning.  So the King stops, the Marquis de Carabas is saved, he is given appropriate clothes, and the King’s daughter falls in love with him.  Clothes make the man.

The Land

Puss then reflects that a Marquis has to be a landowner.  He sees peasants mowing a meadow and does so at the right moment: kairos – explained further down –  and asks them to tell the King, when he passes by, that these fertile fields are the property of the Marquis de Carabas.  Puss uses a ruse worthy of Reynard, the cunning fox.

The Ogre’s Castle

Puss in Boots and the Marquis de Carabas then come to a castle, kairos as opposed to chronos.  In this castle, resides the landowner: an Ogre.  This Ogre claims he can transform himself into other animals and, to prove it, he turns himself into a lion.  Puss being very clever quickly asks the Ogre to turn himself into a mouse.  The Ogre, who is not very clever, does as he is asked and Puss in Boots eats him up.

The Banquet

Just then, at the opportune moment, kairos, the King happens to come to the beautiful castle.  The moment is in fact all the more opportune since the Ogre has a banquet ready for guests.  When the Ogre’s guests arrive and see the King’s carriage, they flee.  Consequently, a banquet is ready for the King.  The King is so delighted with the events of the day that he tells the Marquis de Carabas that if he, the Marquis, says the word, he, the King, will take him for his son-in-law.

So, after renaming his master and three ruses: the river, the land, the castle, the third son of the miller has become a rich landowner who lives in a beautiful castle, and will marry the King’s daughter.  Fairy tales end as comedies do.  There is a marriage.  The banquet is the dénouement or outcome.

A few comments

Note that the number three is important.  The miller has three sons.  As for events, the first could be the river, the second, the ruse concerning ownership of the land, and the third, the acquisition of the castle.  But the first could also be renaming the third son of the miller, except that renaming his master perhaps encompasses the three events, or the name of the strategy.

Moreover, it should be pointed out that, in Ancient Greece, time was seen in both its vertical, kairos, and chronological, chronos, dimensions.  Æon (Latin for the Greek word koine) was time eternal, which was sometimes represented by the same figure as chronos.  In Buss in Boots, as in most fairy tales, things are there when they are needed and events happen at the opportune moment.  That is kairos, time in its vertical dimension and time which could be called magical.  We have finally shed light on the word kairos.

It is also true that the Ogre can transform himself, which is the stuff of fairy tales.  But Puss in boots can’t.  Puss is not an Ogre, he is simply very smart and resourceful.  And it is because of these qualities that Puss can be considered a magic wand or fairy godmother, which gives this one fairy tale a lovely new twist.

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[i] I am using Malcolm Arthur’s translation of Le Chat botté, illustrated by Fred Marcellino (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990).

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Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757)
Sonata L.366/K.1  
Ivo Pogorelić (born 20 October 1958)
 
Puss in boots, by Fred Marcellino

Puss in boots by Fred Marcellino

© Micheline Walker
9 November 2011
Revised on 21 March 2013
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The Tales of Mother Goose

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Literature

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Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let us return to the salons where we will meet a genuine honnête homme, Charles Perrault (1628-1703).  Charles Perrault was born to an affluent upper-bourgeoisie family, but although he worked at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun-King, he was not an aristocrat.  By then, the middle to late seventeenth century, préciosité was no longer ridicule, but salonniers and salonnières were still writing.  They preferred short, ingenuous and witty poems:  épigrammes, madrigals (poems not songs), impromptus, compliments, portraits…

We may have left the country of Tendre, but fantasy remains and, by the end of the century, Charles Perrault is publishing fairy tales.  He was a regular at his niece’s salon, Mademoiselle Lhéritier’s salon.  But he was also a regular at the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s salons.  The Comtesse d’Aulnoy was a prolific writer of fairy tales.

Charles Perrault was no ordinary writer.  He was in fact a member of the French Academy, which places him among the best writers of his century.  He wrote abundantly, but we will not go beyond a late book, completed in 1697, his Contes du Temps passé or Contes de ma mère l’Oye:  The Tales of Mother Goose.

Linguists may argue, perhaps successfully, that “ma mère l’Oye” is “ma mère Louyse,” or Louise.  That would make perfect sense, were it not that tradition has its own imperatives.  Perrault’s collection contains Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant), Bluebeard (La Barbe bleue), Cinderella (Cendrillon), The Little Red Riding Hood (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge), Riquet with the Tuft (Riquet à la Houppe), Puss in Boots (Le Chat maître ou Le Chat botté), Little Tom Thumb (Le Petit Poucet) and the lesser known The Fairies (Les Fées).

These are the classics of the magical land of fairy tales, where a cat wearing boots can turn his master, the third son of a miller, into a prince, and where a fairy godmother can tranform a child from a previous marriage, who now sweeps the chimney, into a princess: Cinderella.  The shoe fits.  All the tales begin with an evocation of the past:  Once upon a time.  Things magical or le merveilleux are best told using a past tense.  In fact, the formulaic “[o]nce upon a time,” helps take the reader or listener away from the here and now.

Consequently, literally speaking, Charles Perrault, did not invent the fairy tale.  His tales and other tales find their origin in extremely old stories, including the Sanskrit Pañcatantra.  Many have also belonged to an ageless oral tradition, before entering the realm of literature (learned tradition).  Finally, they had already left the oral tradition in Italy.

Perrault’s Italian sources are Giambattista Basile, Straparola and Boccaccio.       Basile (1575-1632) is the author of Lo cunto de li cunti overo la trattenemiento de peccerile, The Tale of Tales or Entertainment for Little Ones, also known as the Il Pentamerone (1634). As for Gionvanni Francesco Straparola (c.1480-c.1557), he is the author of Le piacevoli notti (The Facetious Nights), a work modeled on Giovanni Boccacio’s (1313-1375) Decameron. 

Yet, although the stories were known, they could be compared to a canvas.  One had to fill in the plot and fill it in a refined manner.  Lewdness had to be removed from the canvases Perrault inherited or imported.  Moreover, Basile’s Italian was not easily read, even by Italians.  So much so that re-telling conferred a degree of authorship on the re-teller.

In the Preface to his edition of Perrault’s Contes, Gilbert Rouget quotes four lines of a poem by Charles Perrault, quoted by M. Loeffler-Delachaux:

…c’est la manière/ Dont quelque chose est inventé/ Qui beaucoup plus que la matière/ De tout récit fait la beauté.[1]

(It is the manner in which something is invented [written], rather than the subject-matter, that makes a narrative beautiful [my translation]).

Using such a criterion, yes, Charles Perrault did invent the fairy tale.  And using such a criterion, La Fontaine is the author of his Fables.  In the French language, no one has matched the extraordinary beauty of La Fontaine rendition of Æsop or Pilpay’s fables.  I doubt that anyone would even try to improve on La Fontaine.

In the seventeenth-century, originality was not demanded of writers.  The goal of writers was to re-tell a comedy, a tragedy, or some other literary work, in as eloquent a manner as the original author.  Molière and Racine were, to a large extent, authors and copyists.  The seventeenth century is aptly called “the age of eloquence.”   In fact, in the area of fables and fairy tales, copyists are re-telling the story rather substantially.

Perrault Contes were an immense success.  But Perrault is also the author of verse tales: Grisélidis (1691), The Foolish Wishes (Les Souhaits ridicules, 1693) , and Donkey-Skin (Peau d’Âne, 1694).  Interestingly, he also wrote an Apologie des femmes (In Defence of Women, 1694) and numerous texts that are not salon literature.  Perrault who loved salons developed a great deal of admiration for women.  Had he not been an habitué of salons, he would not have played so immense a role in literature.

At one point, précieux and précieuses went too far, as depicted in Molière’s Précieuses ridicules (1659), in their attempt to make French a more refined language, but the salons were nevertheless an ideal milieu for those who wanted to write better and discuss writing.  Moreover, salonniers were honnêtes hommes.  Honnêteté became an aristocracy of its own.  In fact, aristocrats sought to become honnêtes hommes.  In this respect, we have mentioned La Rochefoucauld.

Charles Perrault was a member of Paris’s upper middle class, as was Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of Finance.  But, since most of you know the contes, you will have noticed that they feature upward mobility.  The genre invited a major, not to say magical, improvement in a character’s life.  But it just may be that salonniers and salonnières were attempting to live up to a nobler inner-self than could be bestowed by a mere accident of birth.

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October 9, 2011

[1] M. Loeffler-Delachaux, Le Symbolisme des contes de fée, 1949, p.7, quoted by Gilbert Rouger in the Préface of his edition of Perrault’s Contes (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1967), p. XXXI.