88. Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault

The salient detail here is the glass slipper, and perhaps my French-speaking readers will correct me if I make any blunders!

The version of Cinderella that most readers will be familiar with first appeared as ‘Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre’, one of the stories in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Tales) in 1697. His immediate written source was ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ from Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone of 1634. ‘Cenerentola’ comes ultimately from cinis, ash, and tollere, to carry: thus the heroine is an ash-carrier, or ash-girl. In Perrault the sisters refer to her unkindly as ‘Cucendron’ — ash-bottom, or ash-arse: this found its way into the first English translation as ‘Cinder-breech’. Perrault has all the paraphernalia we recognize from Disney: the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, the glass slippers, the rat coachman, and so on.

It is the detail of the little glass slipper that brings Perrault’s title into an area of controversy. The glass slipper was his own addition (it does not appear in Basile, where the shoe is merely ‘the richest and prettiest patten you could imagine’), and he gives it star billing — ‘Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper’. Before modern industrial toughening, glass would have been an entirely impractical, not to say lethal, material for slippers, and appears in very few other Cinderella stories (which go back at least to dynastic Egypt). It has been suggested that Perrault drew on oral sources in which the slipper was made of vair, an archaic French word for an ermine-like fur, and changed it to verre, or glass, either because he liked the sound of it or out of a genuine error, and thus the tale was altered forever. One of the earliest champions of this theory was Balzac, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur Catherine de Medicis (1836), but its spread was guaranteed when it was taken up by encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among the most recent encyclopedias to cite the theory uncritically is the fourth edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of 1996, in front of me as I write. Folklorists still occasionally cite the vair/verre hypothesis as fact. But it is almost certainly false.

The reasons were pointed out by the folklorist Paul Delarue in a short essay in Le Monde in 1951. Essentially, the vair/verre hypothesis depends on the idea that glass is very uncommon as a slipper-material in other tales of the Cinderella cycle. Perrault invented it through this tiny slip or misunderstanding, the hypothesis runs. Any other Cinderella tales with glass slippers must therefore derive from Perrault. Certainly there are none published which pre-date Perrault. But Delarue pointed out that in other Cinderella tales with glass slippers, motif-analysis does not bear out the assertion that they are necessarily derivative of, and post-date, Perrault. A Scottish version of Cinderella, for example, which includes glass shoes, also includes the ‘helpful animal motif’, which, for folklorists, sets heads nodding. Animals helping the heroine in Cinderella stories — frogs (Africa), fish (China) and giant crabs (Java) — indicate antiquity, and in the Scottish tale it is a little black lamb, not a fairy, who dispenses the rich raiment that enables Cinderella to attract the prince.

Delarue deals his knock-out blow by finding this dangerous item of footwear in other antique tales. In a Gaelic story a heroine who desires to climb a glass mountain in order to find her husband must wear glass shoes. In an Irish tale it is the hero who wears glass shoes when rescuing a princess from a sea-serpent. The point here is that glass is a magical material, on a par with diamond and gold (all of which are materials for objects, including shoes, in fairy-tales). Thus in various stories we have a glass mountain, a boat of glass, a castle of glass, a tree with leaves of glass; there is even a story of a giant with a beard of glass (as well as a giant with a beard of copper and a giant with a beard of gold). Impossible things are permissible in the magical world, and a beard of glass is as impractical as shoes of glass. The fact that glass is likely to shatter, and that fur would be more sensible, is an absurd attempt to judge the fairytale world by the standards of our own mundane one.

Perhaps the debate will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but the fact remains that the original story with the fur has never been located, and that Perrault wrote verre, and meant verre.

Rather a shame, because the verre/vair hypothesis is useful as a story to tell at dinner-parties, and Balzac is on your side if anyone disagrees.

Consulted:
Perrault, Charles: Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose with Morals (Fortune Press, 1928)
Barchilon, Jacques and Flinders, Peter: Charles Perrault (Twayne, 1981)
Dundes, Alan, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (University of Winconsin Press, 1982)