 In 1893, Marian Roalfe Coxe created an exhaustive index of Cinderella-type folktales. It's a pioneering work in the field, and as is typical for folktales, some of the stories get weird. One of them that especially stuck with me is “Le Chat Noir” – a story from Brittany, which goes in an almost Puss in Boots-like direction when the heroine gives birth to a kitten.
As the story goes: the beautiful Yvonne is mistreated by her stepmother, who favors her own ugly daughter, Louise. The stepmother has Yvonne’s beloved pet cow slaughtered. Mysteriously, beside the cow’s heart they find two little gold shoes, which the stepmother greedily claims for her own daughter’s troisseau. It so happens that a wealthy prince has heard of Yvonne’s goodness and beauty and comes courting. The stepmother takes advantage of this, gets the wedding set, and then on the wedding day, she locks Yvonne up and substitutes Louise. However, they are forced to cut off Louise’s toes and heels to get the golden shoes to fit her. As soon as the prince gets a good look, he walks out of the wedding in disgust, humiliating the family. The stepmother vows revenge on Yvonne, because clearly this is all Yvonne’s fault. She visits an old friend - a witch - who tells her to kill a black cat, make it into stew and serve it to Yvonne, who will die within the day. The stepmother carries out these instructions. However, Yvonne doesn’t die; she only falls ill and is sick all night, throwing up, which the narrator suggests may have saved her life. The frustrated stepmother turns to harassing Yvonne and her father until they decide to leave the country and sail away; then the stepmother tricks Yvonne’s father and unties the ship, causing it to drift away with Yvonne aboard alone. Yvonne lands on an island, where she makes her home. Fortunately, there’s an abandoned hermitage and plenty of food for her to live on. Less fortunately, after three weeks, she begins to feel ill, and realizes that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a black cat. Although startled, she decides "It was God who gave him to me; I must therefore receive him, without complaint, as coming from him, and treat him as my child, since that is his will." She treats the cat like any other baby and raises him lovingly. After a few months, he begins talking like a man and tells her he's going to cross the sea and get some food from the nearest town. Although she's nervous to let him go alone, she makes a satchel for him and he swims to the nearest town. There, he goes to the house of Monsieur Rio – first to steal food, and then to warn Monsieur Rio of an assassination attempt and rescue him from being framed of murder. In exchange, the cat asks Monsieur Rio to marry his mother. Rio really doesn’t want to marry a cat, but he’s honor-bound – and then absolutely dazzled when the cat brings in the lovely Yvonne. With Yvonne and Rio married, the cat asks that they visit Yvonne’s family. Her father is overjoyed, her stepmother and stepsister less so. At the welcome feast, the cat calls out the witch and has a battle of sorcery with her, before blowing fire and burning both her and the stepmother to ash. He then asks Monsieur Rio to cut him open. Rio of course doesn’t want to, but is finally convinced. When he does so, the cat becomes a handsome prince, who announces himself as the greatest magician ever. Analysis The story leaves many questions. The prince from the first half of the tale vanishes never to be heard from again, with Yvonne marrying Monsieur Rio instead. It’s not clear why the stepmother’s death spell causes pregnancy, although perhaps it is implied to be divine intervention, with Yvonne also happening to find a welcoming home on the island, and specifically relying on God when questioning why she just gave birth to a cat. Divine intervention might also explain why the cat is a wizard. This is actually two tale types stapled together – not uncommon in oral storytelling. The first section is a standard Cinderella type. The second part is an example of ATU 708, “The Wonder-Child.” In "The Wonder-Child," a typical plotline is that the heroine’s stepmother turns to magic and puts a spell on the heroine, so that she gives birth to a monstrous son. In "Le Chat Noir," the pregnancy seems to be a random side effect and Yvonne ends up marooned almost incidentally, but in most versions, it is intentional - the stepmother sets out to have her stepdaughter impregnated out of wedlock and thus disgraced and exiled - or even murdered for dishonoring her family. The stepmother, relying on social norms, intends to destroy the heroine's future, family connections, and social standing. And it almost works. But the heroine's child turns out to have magical powers, which he uses to find his mother a suitable husband and restore her to society, reconcile her with her family, and expose and punish the stepmother. "The Wonder-Child" is one of the tales closely related under the umbrella of the "Calumniated Wife" motif, listed right after Type 707, "The Three Golden Children." (So this is another story loosely connected to the Perseus type, which I looked at in a previous post.) In Calumniated Wife stories, the woman is often accused of giving birth to animals or monsters. The implied accusation is infidelity and even bestiality; hence, the harsh punishments placed on her until her true children return to expose the truth. In “The Wonder-Child,” she actually does give birth to an animal or monster through her enemy’s machinations. Her shame is compounded in “The Wonder-Child” because she’s a young, unmarried woman. Other Versions The combo with Cinderella in "Le Chat Noir" is unusual. The common thread seems to be the evil stepmother; I would guess this is why the storyteller connected them, consciously or unconsciously. A more straightforward version of ATU 708, “Le Chat et les Deux Sorcieres,” appears in the same collection as “Le Chat Noir.” This begins more simply with the stepmother consulting the witch. A Roma version, “De Little Fox,” has a fox who at the end transforms into a beautiful angel and flies away. In a South Slavonic story, “Der Sohn der Königstochter,” a jealous queen mixes ground-up bone from a graveyard into her daughter's coffee; this results in the birth of a son who is spotted all over (Krauss, no. 41). And in a Tuscan tale, a wicked stepmother consults a beggar-woman for a pregnancy-causing potion made of the blood of seven wild beasts. The potion works and her daughter is sentenced to death for supposed promiscuity, but the executioners spare her and leave her in the forest, where she gives birth to a seven-headed dragon. She names the dragon Meraviglia (Marvel or Wonder), and he grows up taking good care of her and eventually getting her a king for a husband. At the end, her stepmother is punished and the dragon turns into a man (Archivio, p. 524). Slavic variants I mentioned in my post on Perseus that in types of "The Three Golden Children," there are three routes the story can take. I looked at one popular route, where the children are replaced with animals and thrown into the water, but survive and go on a quest for magical items, then come back to prove their mother’s innocence. In another, the mother and baby are thrown into the water together in a barrel, wash up on an island, and the son later builds a palace to get his father’s attention. This version seems especially widespread in Slavic variants. The most famous version is Alexander Pushkin's 1831 fairy tale "The Tale of Tsar Saltan," where the queen's evil sisters falsely claim that she's given birth to a monster; she's set adrift with her son, who grows swiftly to adulthood. In a repeated motif, he turns into an insect to sting his aunts. (Here is a Soviet cartoon retelling with subtitles. And I had no idea, but the classic "Flight of the Bumblebee" comes from the opera adaptation of this story!!) Again, the sole difference here is that the son is falsely said to be an animal - suggesting a merging into "The Wonder-Child," where he is an animal. And there are examples which hit a middle ground, or where ATU 707 and 708 blend together. Walter Anderson, studying traces of a lost Russian manuscript from 1900, was able to reconstruct summaries of several tales. In one, wicked sisters replace their marvelous nephews with a puppy, a kitten, and an ordinary baby boy. However, when the mother is blinded and thrown into the sea in a barrel with the boy, he turns out to not be so ordinary after all - growing swiftly to adulthood and using his magic powers to will them to land and restore her sight. In some similar stories, like the Siberian “The Tsarevna and her three children” and the Bashkir “The Little Black Dog" (Berezkin) the rescuer role goes to the animals, such as a puppy or kitten, who were exchanged for the kidnapped biological children. This connects to stories where one or two of the queen's children not only remain with her in exile, but rescue their lost older brothers and perhaps free them from a spell by giving them their mother’s milk (Cosquin). It's also the same scenario again of the cat child - the animal used to doom the heroine, which instead ends up saving her and genuinely taking on the role of a beloved child. Analysis In "Le Chat Noir," the animal hero is a child born through black magic and wicked machinations. In "The Little Black Dog," the animal hero is switched for the heroine's real child. The themes blend across versions, but it's always the result of the villain's machinations, and the goal is the humiliation and destruction of the heroine. But the heroine does one thing that the villains don't expect. She accepts and loves her child - whether it's a cat, a dog, or a stranger child substituted for her own baby. Yvonne tenderly cares for her cat child; the maiden in the Tuscan tale names her seven-headed dragon son "Wonder." And then this child ends up not just saving his mother, but bringing her happiness and prosperity that she could only have dreamed of. The motif is similar to “Tatterhood.” This fairytale also begins with a woman consulting a mysterious beggar for magical help, leading to a supernatural pregnancy which results in a loud, ugly, chaos-causing child. Despite initial appearances, this child is a protector and sorceress who saves a family member and ensures her marriage to a king, before revealing her true, beautiful form. The motivation here is sisterly rather than motherly love, and the mother isn't all that great, but it's still an interesting parallel. The moral inherent across these stories is that when the unwanted, off-putting child is accepted, they end up saving the family. Sources
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 In most traditional versions, Cinderella’s ball is a multi-night affair. She visits on three nights and dances with the prince three times. Often she wears more elaborate dresses each night, building more and more on the concept. She loses her shoe on the third night. Both Perrault’s Cendrillon and the Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel follow this model.
The rule of three also shows in versions where she has two stepsisters. Cinderella is one of three rivals. Her two stepsisters go to the ball first and try on the shoe first. Cinderella is the triumphant final contestant. The Rule of Three is a common storytelling or rhetorical technique across western literature including folktales. Even in modern times, think how many things come in threes, like the Three Musketeers. The number is also recurrent throughout the Bible (Jonah in the whale for three days) and in Christian teaching (like the Trinity). Three is the smallest possible number that’s still recognizable as a pattern. Patterns of three make the tale feel more satisfying, complete, or amusing, without the repetition becoming boring. In many modern retellings, however, Cinderella goes to one ball only. I think this began with stage adaptations such as pantomimes. Films followed suit, including the 1914 Cinderella film starring Mary Pickford, and the animated Disney film from 1950. In storytelling, it’s easy to skim quickly over the details of the ball. In stage or cinema, three spectacles of a kind might start to drag. These are visual adaptations and the fairytale’s exact repetition is not going to work. You could have three identical ball nights, or try to vary it up and make each occasion different (with all the set or animation costs involved) . . . or you could simply summarize it into one. Does this mean something has been lost? I don’t think so. The formats of the telling are different – a play, movie or a novel is very different from an oral folktale, and the same things won’t necessarily work across different mediums. Movies frequently condense their source material. Also, audiences’ tastes change. In the original, the three-night ball is really the main plot. Cinderella is a heroine completing a series of trials. Can she escape her family’s attention each night? Can she get another dress from her supernatural benefactor? Can she wow the prince each night and then slip away afterwards? In some versions she becomes a trickster, hiding behind a Clark Kent-esque disguise and savoring her own private joke. You can imagine Perrault’s Cinderella winking at the audience as she asks her sisters about the mysterious lady at the ball. The Grimm Cinderella gets up to some hijinks as she evades the lovelorn prince, scaling a tree or hiding in a pigeon coop. But modern retellings typically leave this out. In the fairytale, Cinderella and the prince develop a connection over three nights; initial attraction leads immediately to marriage. He can’t even recognize her through her rags and soot, being only able to identify her by her shoe. Not particularly romantic. Modern versions typically focus on the romance and on giving Cinderella a goal beyond just going to a party and finding a husband. The 1998 film Ever After, Marissa Meyer’s 2012 novel Cinder, and Disney’s 2015 live-action remake all spend the majority of the story building up Cinderella’s relationship with the prince, and her own personality and life goals. Instead of ball attendance being the main plot, the ball is a single dramatic scene. Cinderella gets one shot at wowing her prince, and so the ball is that much more significant. Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted (my favorite Cinderella retelling of all time) goes for three balls. However, Levine – like the other authors mentioned – builds a more unique plot and has Ella fall in love with her prince long before the festival. (I think the movie adaptation reduced the celebrations to a single coronation ball, though I have not watched it). The Grimm-inspired musical Into the Woods features three balls, but at least in the film adaptation, they take place mostly offscreen. The ball is not the focus. Instead, the focus is on Cinderella fleeing on three consecutive nights, and the slightly different events each time. Again, it’s avoiding too much repetition. Another thing: particularly if it’s a contemporary or high-school retelling, one-night events are often more common than multi-night recurring festivals. The 2004 movie A Cinderella Story made it a Halloween dance. Some of these stories still include the secret identity element by making it a masquerade ball, or having Cinderella not realize her beloved is the prince at first. Contemporary versions have an advantage in that the romantic interests can chat online to begin with, preserving their anonymity until it's time for the big finale. So it makes sense for the story to be updated. But the new emphasis on Cinderella having more personality, or more chemistry with the prince, is separate from the fact that many versions just have one ball. A lot of this may be the effect of film. Cinderella has been retold many times, and today a lot of people get their main exposure to fairytales through movie format. Disney is one of the main heavy-hitters, but even earlier versions (like the Mary Pickford film) had just one ball. You don’t see as many versions of Cinderella’s close cousin All-kinds-of-fur or Donkeyskin (which is probably rare because of the incest theme). I’ve seen three versions, and all featured the three balls. This story is a little different because it is an important plot point that the heroine has three different dresses, and of course she has to show them all off. However, I can’t think of any versions where the three dresses are condensed into one. If Disney had been daring enough to adapt this tale, we might have a standardized simplified version as we do with Cinderella. (While we’re on this subject, I would heartily recommend Jim Henson’s TV episode “Sapsorrow” – a combination of Cinderella and Donkeyskin including a dark spin on the glass slipper, where a king is unhappily bound by law to marry whoever his dead wife’s ring fits.) Other Blog Posts .jpg) In 1697, Charles Perrault published the story of "Cendrillon: ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre" (Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper). This is probably the most widespread version of Cinderella, thanks in large part to its adaptation by Walt Disney. I often see people on the Internet insist that "the original Cinderella wore gold slippers and had the stepsisters cut off their toes and get their eyes pecked out by birds!" But that was "Aschenputtel," the version from the Brothers Grimm. Perrault published his work 115 years before the Grimms did. It's impossible to identify an "original" version of Cinderella, but at least in terms of publication, the glass slipper came first.
But was it really a glass slipper? There is a persistent theory that the shoes were originally made of fur - which is about as far from glass as you can get! This theory may have originated with Honore de Balzac, in La Comédie humaine: Sur Catherine de Médicis, published between 1830 and 1842 and finalized in 1846. The word for glass, "verre," sounds the same as "vair" or squirrel fur. This fur was a luxury item which only the upper class was allowed to wear. Therefore, claimed Balzac, Cinderella's slipper was "no doubt" made of fur. Since then, quite a few authors have relied on this alternate origin for Cinderella's origins, usually in order to fit the story into a more "realistic" mold. It has also produced a persistent legend in the English-speaking world that Perrault used fur slippers and was mistranslated. Yes, glass shoes raise questions. How did she dance in them? How did she run in them? Wouldn't they have shattered? Wouldn't they have been super noisy? Fur slippers erase those questions entirely. But Cinderella stories regularly include things like dresses made of sunlight, moonlight and starlight. Forests grow of silver, gold and diamonds. Prisoners are confined atop glass mountains. In Perrault's version alone, mice are transformed into horses and pumpkins into carriages. Glass slippers should not be an issue. In fact, they fit perfectly well with the internal logic of the fairytale. As has been pointed out by others, the whole point of the slippers is that only Cinderella can wear them. Fur slippers are soft and yielding. Glass slippers are rigid and you can see clearly whether they fit a certain foot. Moving into symbolism: they are expensive, delicate, unique, magical. Cinderella must be light and delicate, too, in order to dance in them. They are a contradiction in terms (of course it would be impossible for a woman to dance in glass shoes! That's the whole point!) and that's why they have captured so many imaginations. The fact is that Perrault wrote about "pantoufles de verre," glass slippers. He used those words multiple times. There is no question that he was talking about glass. No one mistranslated Perrault. However, did he misunderstand an oral tale which mentioned slippers of vair? It's important to note that "vair" was popular in the Middle Ages. By Perrault's time, this medieval word was long out of use! It is still possible that Perrault could have heard a version with vair slippers - but is it probable? What stories might Perrault have heard? In her extensive work on Cinderella, Marian Roalfe Cox found only six versions with glass shoes. She found many that were not described, many that were small or tiny, and many that were silver, silk, covered in jewels or pearls, or embroidered with gold. A Venetian story had diamond shoes, and an Irish tale had blue glass shoes. Cox believed that other versions with glass slippers were based on Perrault's Cendrillon. Paul Delarue, on the other hand, thought these versions were too far away in origin, which would make them independent sources - which means Perrault could have drawn on an older tradition of Cinderella in glass shoes. Gold shoes are perhaps significant. Ye Xian or Yeh-hsien, a Chinese tale, was first published about 850, and its heroine's shoes are gold. Centuries later, the Grimms' Aschenputtel takes off her heavy wooden clogs to wear slippers “embroidered with silk and silver,” but her final slippers - the ones which identify her - are simply “pure gold.” It’s not clear whether this means gold fabric or solid metal. As for other early Cinderellas: Madame D'Aulnoy published her story "Finette Cendron" (Cunning Cinders) in 1697, the same year as Perrault's Cendrillon. Her heroine wears red velvet slippers braided with pearls. Realistic enough. The Pentamerone (1634) has "La Gatta Cenerenterola" (Cat Cinderella). It's not said what the heroine's shoes are made of, but she does ride in a golden coach. Note that shoes are not always the object that identifies the heroine. In many tales, it's a ring - something likely to be made of gold or studded with gems. What if, at some pivotal point, far back in history, a storyteller combined the tiny shoe and the golden ring into a single object? On the other hand, I have never found a Cinderella who wears fur slippers to a ball. Fur clothing appears in Cinderella stories such as "All-Kinds-of-Fur," but it's used as a hideous disguise. Rebecca-Anne do Rozario points out that "Finette Cendron" (which, again, came out the same year as Perrault's "Cendrillon") has Finette instruct an ogress to cast off her unfashionable bear-pelts. Fur clothing was not a symbol of wealth or status, but of wildness and ugliness. Glass slippers were most likely Perrault's own invention dating from when he retold his folktales in literary format. No translation error, no misheard "vair" - just a really good idea and his own storytelling touch. If anything, he probably heard stories where the slippers were made of gold, or where their material was not mentioned. It was only later writers like Honore de Balzac who added the confusion of the squirrel-fur slippers, and folklorists and linguists have been arguing against it ever since. James Planché wrote in 1858, "I thank the stars that I have not been able to discover any foundation for this alarming report." That was twelve years after Balzac's book was officially completed. Heidi Anne Heiner at SurLaLune points out that the vair slipper theory dismisses Perrault's "adept literacy," and "negates [his] interest in the fantastic and magical, discounting his brilliant creativity." Unfortunately, as shown by Alan Dundes, the vair/verre theory made it into influential sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and thus has been fed as fact to successive generations of readers. Who's going to question the Encyclopaedia Britannica? And so this rumor remains persistent. As a final bit of trivia: there is one mention of glass shoes in the Brothers Grimm's tales. “Okerlo” appeared only in their 1812 manuscript and was quickly removed. (This is perhaps because it is clearly a retelling of a French literary tale, “The Bee and the Orange Tree.” Not unusual for the Grimms, but in this case it may have been just too blatant.) In the final lines, the narrator is asked what they wore to a wedding. They describe ridiculous clothes, with hair made of butter that melts, a dress of cobwebs that tears, and finally: “My slippers were made of glass, and as I stepped on a stone, they broke in two.” Here, the destruction of the fairytale clothing points out how impossible the magical tale is, and signals the end of the story and a return to reality. Sources
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Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
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