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CHARLES PERRAULT.

Member of the AcadÉmie FranÇaise, and premier commis des batimens du Roi, was born, as he himself tells us in the MÉmoires he left to his children, in Paris, on the 12th of January, 1628; and at eight and a half years of age was sent to the College of Beauvais, where he gave early proof of his literary abilities. He died in 1703. Although the author of many creditable compositions, both in prose and verse, he is indebted for his celebrity to that collection of Fairy tales which, under the title of Histoires, ou Contes du Tems passÉ, were first published in 1697, and speedily obtained a world-wide popularity as Les Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye, known in England as Mother Goose's Fairy Tales.

They were published by Perrault, under the name of his son, Perrault D'Armancour, at that time a child only ten years old, whose name is appended to the dedication of the first edition to "Mademoiselle," i.e., Elizabeth Charlotte d'Orleans, sister of Philippe, Duke of Chartres, and, after the death of Louis XIV., Regent of France. Mademoiselle was born 13th September, 1676. The title, Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye, has given rise to much controversy, and a great deal of paper, not to say learning, has been wasted in the attempt to discover the original source of the stories, and the reason of their being called those of "Ma MÈre l'Oye." The former question I shall reserve for discussion in my notices of the tales themselves. The latter we will dispose of at once. Monsieur Colin de Plancy, in his valuable edition of the Œuvres Choisis de Charles Perrault, 8vo, Paris, 1826; and Baron WalkenaËr in his Lettres sur les Contes des FÉes attribuÉs À Perrault, &c., Paris, 12mo, same date, have pretty well exhausted the subject. The three principal derivations that have been insisted upon, are:—

Firstly. That in an ancient fabliau, "a goose is represented telling stories to her goslings, worthy of them and of her."

Secondly. That in the frontispiece to the first edition of Perrault's Fairy Tales, an old woman is represented spinning, and beside her are three children, one boy and two girls, whom she is apparently amusing by her stories; and that as underneath this are the words Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye,[47] this old woman is no less a personage than Ma MÈre l'Oye in propria persona.

Thirdly. That Ma MÈre l'Oye is one and the same individual with La Reine PÉdauque, the goose or bird-footed Queen, a soubriquet applied by some to a Bertha, Queen of France; and by others to St. Clotilde and the Queen of Saba.

The first is an assertion without proof. The second a mere opinion, which is instantly met by another—namely, that the old woman is repeating to her hearers the stories of Ma MÈre l'Oye. The third is a tangible proposition, and has been dealt with accordingly.

At St. Marie de Nesle, in the diocese of Troyes, at St. BÉnigne de Dijon, at St. Pierre de Nevers, St. Pourcain in Auvergne, and in divers other churches in France, the statue is to be seen of a queen with a web-foot, and therefore called La Reine Pied-d'oie, or PÉdauque.[48] This statue is said by Mabillon, but without giving any authority for his assertion, to represent St. Clotilde.

The AbbÉ Leboeuf believes that the origin of this name is to be found at Toulouse. He quotes a passage in Rabelais, who, speaking of certain large-footed persons, says, "they were splay-footed, like geese, or Queen PÉdauque in her portrait formerly at Toulouse;" "and the AbbÉ concludes," says Monsieur de Plancy, "curiously enough, that the Queen PÉdauque is the Queen of Saba;" supporting his opinion by the following tale in the Targum of Jerusalem:—

"The Queen of Saba was so fond of bathing, that she plunged every day in the sea. When she went to visit Solomon, he received her in an apartment of crystal. The Queen of Saba on entering it, imagined that the Monarch was in the water, and in order to pass through it to him, she lifted her robe. The King then seeing her feet, which were hideous, said to her: 'Your face unites all the charms of the most beautiful women, but your legs and feet correspond but little to it.'"

Even if we could suppose Solomon to have been so ungallant, there does not appear much in this Hebrew story to bear upon the subject; for what possible reason was there for attributing these stories to the Queen of Saba? Bullet, doyen of the University of BesanÇon, goes back to the eleventh century, in France, for the source of this epithet. The Good King Robert had married his relative, Bertha; Gregory V. compelled him to divorce her, and imposed on him a penance of seven years. The King, who loved Bertha, refused obedience, and the Pope excommunicated him. He was deserted by everybody except two servants. In the meanwhile, Bertha was said to have been brought to bed of a monster resembling an ill-formed duck, or, according to others, a goose. Abbon, Abbot of Fleury, brought the supposed offspring to the King, who, horrified at the sight of it, repudiated Bertha, leaving her, however, the title of Queen. The dreadful story was circulated that she had given birth to a goose, and that she had herself become goose-footed, as a punishment for her criminal marriage. Her name of Bertha gave more authority to this story in the eyes of the people. They remembered that Bertha or Bertrade, wife of Pepin-le-bref, was surnamed "Bertha with the Great Foot," because she had one foot larger than the other; and they called the repudiated wife of Robert, "Bertha au pied d'Oie." It is possible also, remarks Mons. de Plancy, that this fable was invented to flatter Queen Constance, who succeeded her, for it was the period of credulity and superstition. Constance went to Toulouse. She was lodged in front of an aqueduct so narrow that a man could not pass through it. To amuse the Princess, they told her it was the bridge of Queen Goose, or of the queen with the goose's foot. This story was afterwards amplified, and it became a saying that Queen PÉdauque was of Toulouse.

In the Contes d'Entrapel, by NoËl Dufail, published during the latter half of the sixteenth century, a man is made to swear by "the spindle of Queen PÉdauque;" and therefore Bullet assumes that she must have been Queen Bertha, because there is an old French saying, "when Queen Bertha spun,"[49] which is applied to any marvellous story of bygone days, or to events that are said to have happened "once upon a time." This is very inconclusive. In the middle ages, spinning was a favourite occupation of queens and princesses, and Queen Bertha was by no means an exception.[50] There is another French saying, similarly applied to an incredible tale—"It is of the time when King Robert sang to the lute," the said King Robert being the husband of Queen Bertha. This is all tantamount only to our old English sayings, "When Adam was a little boy," and "When Adam delved and Eve span," &c. It is also more than probable that the Bertha of the proverb is identical with the Frau Berchta of German superstition. She is said to live in the imaginations of the upper German races in Austria, Bavaria, Swabia, Alsace, Switzerland, and some districts of Thuringia and Franconia. She appears in The Twelve Nights as a woman with shaggy hair, to inspect the spinners, when fish and porridge are to be eaten in honour of her, and all the distaffs must be spun off. This superstition was also common in England:—

That is, the day after Twelfth Day, and is evidently the relic of some pagan rite in honour, most probably, of Freya or Frega, the Venus of the Scandinavians. "Dame Bertha horned," is one of the characters in Les Evangiles des Conoilles (Quenouilles), the joint composition of Jean d'Arras and three other writers, in 1475. It was translated into English, and printed by Winkyn de Worde, with the title of The Gospelles of Distaffs.[51]

A writer who signs himself Philetymus, has acutely pointed out a more probable origin of the title of Contes de ma (or de le) MÈre l'Oye, which it is clear, from passages in Boileau and MoliÈre, was applied to a certain collection of old stories, long before Perrault published his Histoires du Temps PassÉ. This writer refers us to the customs of antiquity and the superstitions of the middle ages. He recals to us that the ancient Romans confided their dwellings to the care of their geese. He alludes to the two hundred thousand Crusaders who, in 1096, directed their march by the flight of a goose from Hungary to Jerusalem; to the guardian fairies of the ChÂteau de Piron in the Contentin, who, at the time of the invasion of the Normans, transformed themselves into wild geese; to the benevolent and protecting dwarfs of the Canton of Berne, who are said to have been all goose-footed; and above all, to Marguerite de Navarre, who, in her Heptameron, calls herself Oisille; and he concludes by saying, "C'est que la bonne dame Oisille, veuve de grand expÉrience y reprÉsente la MÈre l'Oie; c'est que du contÉ le moins discret elle sait tirer toujours une conclusion favorable À la morale.... Contes de la MÈre l'Oie c'est À dire contes de la vieille grand mÈre, jaseuse et criande comme l'Oie mais comme l'Oie, surtout gardienne vigilante de la maison.... J'allais dire de la Vertu."

There is, amidst all this suggestion, one fact to repose upon. It is, that Perrault was not the inventor of the stories he published; that he merely transmitted to writing, no doubt with some touches of his own, tales of the nursery which had descended orally from the earliest ages of the Celtic occupation of Armorica or Bretagne, to the peculiar superstitions of which we shall find, as we proceed, they all have more or less reference, and that the particular stories printed in the first edition of his Histoires du Temps PassÉ, had long been popularly known as Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye. In 1678, at the age of fifty, Perrault retired from his public office to dedicate himself entirely to literature and the education of his children. Some ten years afterwards he composed a novel in verse, founded on a celebrated tale in the Decamerone of Boccaccio, and well known to us as Patient Grizzel, his title being La Marquise de Salusses; ou, la Patience de Griselidis. It was published at Paris, by Jean Baptiste Coignard, in 1691. La Fontaine had, as early as 1678, said, in the fourth Fable of his eighth Book, Le Pouvoir des Fables—

These lines it would seem induced Perrault to versify the old nursery story of Peau d'Ane, with which Louis XIV., when an infant, used to be rocked to sleep; and in 1694, on the publication of the second edition of his Griselidis, he added to it his metrical version of Peau d'Ane, and Les Souhaits Ridicules, known to us as The Three Wishes. The success of these stories led him to publish, in 1697, his collection of Les Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye, under the title of Histoires du Temps PassÉ, and in the name of his son, as before stated. This collection consisted of eight stories only, all in prose: La Belle au Bois Dormant, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Barbe Bleue, Le Chat BottÉ, Les FÉes, Cendrillon, Riquet À la Houpe, and Le Petit Poucet—a proof that Peau d'Ane was not one of the Contes de ma MÈre l'Oie, any more than Griselidis or Les Souhaits Ridicules. The same eight stories alone appear in the second edition in 1707 (four years after the death of Perrault), and in the third edition by Nicolas Gosselin, in 1724. It is not until 1742, when an edition of the Histoires du Temps PassÉ was published at the Hague,[52] that we find any addition to the first eight stories, and then we have for the first time the story of L'Adroite Princesse; ou, Les Aventures de Finette, presented to us, with a dedication to the Countess of Murat, as a story by Perrault, although a story with that title and on that subject was published by Madlle. Lheritier in 1696, in a work entitled, Œuvres MÊlÉes, contenant Nouvelles et autres Ouvrages en Verse et en Prose, in which also appears a letter from the author to the daughter of Perrault. But even in the Hague edition of 1742, there is no Peau d'Ane, and it is only in comparatively modern collections that a prose version of that story, as well as the one in verse actually written by Perrault, is, with L'Adroite Princesse, Griselidis, and Les Souhaits Ridicules, added to the eight original Contes de ma MÈre l'Oie, or Histoires du Temps PassÉ.

From these eight stories I have selected six, omitting only Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, and Les FÉes, so well known in the nursery as Little Red Riding Hood (why "Riding?") and Toads and Diamonds, and for the atmosphere of which they are alone calculated. On the others I shall now offer a few observations in their order of publication, and in the same spirit as those appended to the Fairy Tales of the Countess d'Aulnoy.

BLUE BEARD.

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.

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.

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.

Le Petit Poucet.—This story, under the titles of Hop o' my Thumb, Little Thumb and his Brothers, &c., has been continually reprinted amongst our English nursery tales; and as I have already spoken of ogres and seven-leagued boots, there is little else in it that calls for observation. The latter are said to have been "fÉes"—i.e. enchanted, as the key in Blue Beard. The attempt of the parents to lose the children in the wood is an incident in Madame d'Aulnoy's story of Finette Cendron, drawn, no doubt, from the same source, as Cambry, in his Voyage au Finisterre, bears witness to Le Petit Poucet having been an "ancien contÉ populaire," which has for ages amused "les enfans de la Basse Bretagne." I think it is quite unnecessary for me to go into the question of this story being founded on an episode in Homer's Odyssey, to prove that Perrault was not thinking of Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, or that the pebbles and bread were not suggested by the clue of Ariadne.

In Grimm's Kinder und HausmÄrchen are several stories about Thumbling; and I need scarcely remind the reader that England has her own renowned Thomas Thumb.

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THE COUNTESS DE MURAT.

Henriette Julie de Castelneau, daughter of Michel, second Marquis de Castelnau, Governor of Brest, and granddaughter by the mother's side, to the Count d'Angnon, Marshal of France, was born at Brest in 1670. At the age of sixteen, she came to Paris in the costume worn by the peasants in Brittany, the language of which province she spoke very fluently. Her appearance in this dress caused such a sensation that the Queen desired her to wear it on her presentation at Court. She married Nicholas, Count de Murat, Colonel of Infantry and Brigadier des ArmÉes du Roi, descended from a family established in Auvergne before 1300, and that afterwards passed into DauphinÉ. Being suspected by Madame de Maintenon of having been part author of a libel in which all the persons composing the Court of Louis XIV., in 1694, were caricatured or insulted, she was banished to Auch, Department du Gers. After the death of Louis XIV., the Regent Duke of Orleans, at the request of Madame de Parabere, recalled Madame de Murat in 1715. She did not, however, long enjoy her return to Paris, as she died at her ChÂteau de la Buzardiere in Maine the following year (1716), at the early age of forty-six. She was the author of many works, both in prose and verse,[56] but is best known by her Contes des FÉes, six of the most popular of which are here translated. Four of these (Le Parfait Amour, Anguillette, Jeune et Belle, and Le Palais de la Vengeance) were printed in 1766, and again in 1817, in the collection of Fairy Tales attributed to the Countess d'Aulnoy, of whom Madame de Murat was the contemporary, but certainly not the rival. Her stories have more the character of romances and novels than fairy tales, with a strong infusion of sentiment, such as is to be found in the writings of Madame de Scuderi, Madlle. de La Fayette, the Countess d'Auneuil, and others of that period.

The plots of them were most probably taken from

For to this she is specially invited in the verses at the end of the prose story of L'Adroite Princesse, which is dedicated to her, and attributed to Perrault. It has been shown, however, that if that version of L'Adroite Princesse were really written by him, it was not published till 1742, thirty-nine years after the death of the reputed author, and twenty-six after the death of the lady to whom it is dedicated.

PERFECT LOVE.

Le Parfait Amour is a story exhibiting considerable talent, although deficient in those lively sallies, those amusing whimsicalities and allusions to the manners and dresses of the period which give so much piquancy to the Fairy Tales of Perrault, and the more elaborate compositions of Madame d'Aulnoy. The interest is entirely of a serious character; but the magic ring, with its power over the four elements—the value of which is destroyed by the too hasty wish of the lover—is an ingenious and dramatic idea, and the fatal lamps a truly affecting situation. This is the first Fairy Tale that gives us a picture of the Gnomes, and their subterraneous magnificence—a superstition existing all over Europe; the Trolls, or underground men of the North; the little people and ground mannikins of Germany; and the Korr or Korred of Brittany.

And accordingly we find them singing the charms of Irolite, and entertaining the lovers with "une musique fort harmonieuse, mais un peu barbare."

ANGUILLETTE.

Anguillette is a story of the same character as Le Parfait Amour. The interest is wholly serious, and the termination tragical, reminding one, by the transformation of the victims into trees, of the catastrophe of the Yellow Dwarf of Madame d'Aulnoy. The inconstancy of Atimir is very naturally drawn; and there is considerable merit in the general conduct of the story.

YOUNG AND HANDSOME.

Jeune et Belle might almost be placed amongst the pastoral romances of D'Urfey and George de Montemayor. It is full of Watteau-like tableaux, many of them suggested, probably, to the writer as to the painter by the FÊtes ChampÊtre so much in vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the Court of Versailles.

The sudden and unexpected introduction of Zephyr at the very close of the story as the Deus ex machinÂ, is quite in accordance with the taste of the period, though much out of place in a fairy tale. It is not, however, for me to find fault with it, as it afforded me a hint for a character which enabled Mr. Robson to display the versatility of his genius in the last of that long series of extravaganzas I have already alluded to.

In the "Collection" above mentioned, this tale was substituted for Madame d'Aulnoy's Serpentin Vert, the dÉnouement of which is also produced by the incongruous introduction of mythological personages.

THE PALACE OF VENGEANCE.

Le Palais de la Vengeance was printed in the "Collection" as Madame d'Aulnoy's, under the title of the Palace of Revenge. It is principally remarkable for its satirical conclusion—a very original one for a fairy tale, as the lovers are married, and do not "live happy ever afterwards."

THE PRINCE OF LEAVES.

Le Prince des Feuilles is, to the best of my knowledge, presented for the first time in an English garb. It is more of a fairy tale than the four preceding it, and appears to me to have been suggested to Madame de Murat by her residence at Auch, where, indeed, it is most likely to have been written.

The natural history of the turquoise had been newly popularized by the publications of Chardin and other Oriental travellers; and more particularly by that of a book by Boethius de Boot, Le Parfait Joallier; Lyons, 1644. The turquoise "de la Vieille Roche," that Madame de Murat speaks of, is a stone found near Nichapour and Carasson, in Persia—the true Oriental turquoise; whilst those called "de la Nouvelle Roche," are not stones, but petrified bones, and are found in Europe, particularly in France, at Auch, (the very place to which Madame de Murat was exiled;) and near Simmorre, in the DÉpartement du Gers; and in the Nivernais, according to the account of Reamur in the MÉmoires de l'AcadÉmie, 1715.

Turquoises were formerly very highly prized, and all kinds of virtues and properties attributed to them, the greater part of which are fabulous, although detailed gravely by de Boot, who was physician to Rodolph II., Emperor of Germany. The jewellers, even in his day, took great pains to distinguish between those that retained their colour and those that turned green. A fine unchanging turquoise, the size of a filbert, sold in that day for two hundred thalers and upwards. "The turquoise possesses such attractions," says de Boot, "that men do not think their hands are well adorned, nor their magnificence sufficiently displayed, if they are not decked with some of the finest." The name is supposed to have been derived from Turkey, the country from which they were probably first imported; but others deduce it from Turchino, a name given by Italians to a particular blue.

Even at this day, the discoloration or loss of a turquoise is considered a prognostication of evil.

THE FORTUNATE PUNISHMENT.

L'Heureuse Peine is also, I believe, new to the English reader. It is an exceedingly graceful story, and the dÉnouement is novel as well as ingenious. The "little animal" into which the unfortunate NaimÉe is transformed, is not specified by the author, but from an allusion to its maniÈre de marcher, I suppose it to be a crayfish, a favourite with the writers of fairy tales.

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MADEMOISELLE DE LA FORCE.

Charlotte Rose de la Force was the daughter of FranÇois de Caumont, Marquis de Castel-Moron, and granddaughter of Jacques de Caumont, Duc de la Force, whose escape from the massacre of St. Bartholomew is celebrated in the Henriade of Voltaire, and who afterwards greatly signalized himself by his exploits during the reign of Henry IV. and Louis XIII. She was born in the Castle of Casenove, near Bazas, in Guienne, about 1650, and died in Paris in 1724. Her mother, Marguerite de Vicof, was Dame de Casenove, and daughter of the Baron de Castelnau. Mademoiselle de la Force would therefore appear to be maternally connected with Madame de Murat. She is said to have been married, in 1687, to Charles de Brion; but that the marriage was declared null and void ten days afterwards. She was the author of several memoirs and romances, and of an Epistle, in verse, to Madame de Maintenon; but is best known by her fairy tales, Contes des Contes, though only one of them has, to my knowledge, appeared previously in English. That one is—

FAIRER THAN A FAIRY.

Plus Belle que FÉe was published, with the usual abridgments and alterations, about twenty years ago, in a collection of nursery tales. The story bears a strong resemblance to the Gracieuse and Percinet of the Countess d'Aulnoy; and though the plot is rendered more intricate by the addition of another pair of lovers, it does not gain in interest as much as it loses in coherence and simplicity. The fair author has, however, appended a note to her story called L'Enchanteur, which forbids us to suppose that she was indebted to any previous writer for the plot of her story. She says—"This story (L'Enchanteur) is taken from an ancient romance ('ancien livre Gothique') named PersÉval, several things being omitted which were not in accordance with our modern tastes, and several others added. Some names are changed. It is the only story that is not entirely the composition of the author. All the others are purely of her invention." After this positive declaration, which we have no right to question, why should we refuse to give credit to the Countess d'Aulnoy for the possession of equal powers of imagination?

I am by no means impugning the originality of Plus Belle que FÉe, in pointing out that the notion of the Fair of Time seems to have been suggested by an old fairy legend of Normandy. "Near the village of Puys, half a league to the north-east of Dieppe, there is a high plateau, surrounded on all sides by high entrenchments, except that over the sea, where the cliffs render it inaccessible. It is named 'La CitÉ de Limes,' or 'Le Camp de CÆsar,' or simply 'Le Catel' or 'Castel.' Tradition tells that the FÉes used to hold a fair there, at which all sorts of magic articles from their secret stores were offered for sale, and the most courteous entreaties and blandishments were employed to induce those who frequented it to become purchasers; but the moment any one did so, and stretched forth his hand to take the article he had selected, the perfidious FÉes seized him, and hurled him down the cliffs."[58] I cannot say that Mademoiselle de la Force has made the most of this tradition, supposing her to have been acquainted with it. Her allusion to the entertainments at Marly, to which alone she says this fair was to be compared, has reference, I think, to a "Fancy Fair," as we should now call it, in which the stalls were attended, as in our days, by the principal personages of the Court. I feel satisfied that I have somewhere seen an account of that entertainment, but unfortunately have no note which would enable me to turn to the authority.

THE GOOD WOMAN.

La Bonne Femme is far superior to Plus Belle que FÉe. It is indeed worthy of Madame d'Aulnoy, and I cannot account for its never having previously met with a translator. It will be recognised by playgoers as the foundation of my Fairy Extravaganza, The Good Woman in the Wood, in which form the dramatic incidents of this charming story were first introduced to a London public. As we are bound, after the author's declaration, to consider it an original story, we need not trouble ourselves to hunt after its source. The other original fairy tales—Percinet, Tourbillon, Vert et Blue, Le Pays des DÉlices, and La Puissance d'Amour—bear no comparison to the two I have selected.

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MADAME DE VILLENEUVE.

Gabrielle Susanne Barbot, "daughter of a gentleman of Rochelle," and widow of Monsieur de Gallon, Seigneur de Villeneuve, Lieutenant-Colonel of Infantry, died at Paris, in the house of Crebillon, the tragic writer, Dec. 29th, 1755. Such is the sum of the information afforded us by editors and biographers, concerning the author of one of the most popular fairy tales ever written.

THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

La Belle et la BÊte.—Thousands of English readers have no doubt been all their lives under the impression that they knew nearly by heart the story of Beauty and the Beast; and though few, alas! may have taken the trouble to inquire who was the author of it, those who have, imagine themselves indebted for it to Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Nay, there are many, no doubt, in France who are under the same belief, for "La Belle et la BÊte, par Madame Leprince de Beaumont," is, without a word of explanation, at this moment circulating as a portion of the French Railway Library, and was published, with various other stories, in a small edition of Contes des FÉes only last year, under her name, by a bookseller on the Quai des Augustins, Paris. It is only those who have read the original story by Madame de Villeneuve, either in the Contes Marins,[59] or in the Cabinet des FÉes, who will not be surprised to find that Madame de Beaumont has merely the merit of having cut this admirable work down to the smallest comprehensible dimensions, and made a pretty little nursery tale of one of the most ingeniously constructed stories in the whole catalogue of fairy chronicles.

The story of the Beast is but alluded to in a few words, and that of the real parents of Beauty altogether omitted. It is no answer to say that the version by Madame de Beaumont is an agreeable story, that the moral is preserved, and that there are portions of the original tale which required alteration or omission. In justice to Madame de Villeneuve, it ought never to be printed without the acknowledgment that it is simply an abridgment of her composition, adapted to the use of juvenile readers, by Madame de Beaumont. I have omitted a dozen lines, and softened one objectionable expression; but, with the exception of this very slight and indispensable alteration, Madame de Villeneuve's story is now placed before the English public in its entirety.

It was published in 1740, and Mr. Dunlop remarks that "it surpasses all that has been produced by the lively and fertile imaginations of France or Arabia;" but in his notice of the tales of Perrault, he says that it is an expansion of and adoption from Riquet À la Houpe. I think this is one of those hasty conclusions of which we are all occasionally guilty. I cannot, for my part, see any resemblance between the two stories. In Riquet, an ugly and deformed prince wins the hand of a lovely princess—the usual triumph of mind over matter; but in Beauty and the Beast, the suitor is not merely a repulsive man, but a monster of the most horrible and tremendous description, and who is specially prohibited from availing himself of those mental powers which might in the slightest degree affect the judgment of the lady. Pity and gratitude are the motives which influence Beauty to sacrifice her own happiness to ensure that of the Beast. In the other case, admiration of the talent of Riquet renders the Princess gradually blind to the defects of his person. Le Mouton of Madame d'Aulnoy offers infinitely more points of resemblance. The transformation of the King into a ram by a jealous and vindictive fairy, and the permission given by him to Merveilleuse to visit her family, on her solemnly promising to return by a stated period, are features too obvious to be overlooked. The despair of the Ram in consequence of her not fulfilling her promise on the last occasion, is also like that of the Monster; but Madame de Villeneuve has avoided the tragical catastrophe; and notwithstanding the similarity I have pointed out, Beauty and the Beast, taken as a whole, deserves all the praise that those who are best acquainted with it have unanimously accorded to it.

It is a curious circumstance that the Gatta Cennerentola of Basile, and the German version of Cinderella, both commence with the departure of the father on a journey, and the requests of his daughters corresponding exactly in their general character with those in Beauty and the Beast, while we find nothing of the sort in Perrault's Cendrillon. I infer from this that the Italian and German writers have mixed two old stories together, and that Madame de Villeneuve's is founded on one of them.

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THE COUNT DE CAYLUS.

Anne Claude de Tubierre, de Grimoad, de Pestils, de Levi, Comte de Caylus, was born in Paris, in 1692, and died the 3rd of September, 1765. He entered the French army early, and distinguished himself in Catalonia and at the siege of Fribourg. After the Peace of Rastadt he visited Italy, and in 1717 went to the Levant in the suite of the Ambassador of France to the Sublime Porte. During this journey he undertook an adventure which proves his courage as well as his love of art. On arriving at Smyrna, he was anxious to profit by the necessary delay of a few days to visit the ruins of Ephesus, which are about twelve hours' journey from that place. The neighbourhood was at that time infested by a band of brigands, the chief of which was the notorious and terrible Caracayoli. The roads were exceedingly unsafe for travellers; but the Count de Caylus was not to be daunted. He provided himself with a dress made simply of sail-cloth, and carrying nothing about him that could tempt the most petty thief, he sought out two of the band of Caracayoli, and bargained with them for a safe conduct from Smyrna to Ephesus and back again, the money to be paid only on his return. It being their interest to take care of him, he found them the most faithful guides in the world. Caracayoli, on learning the object of his journey, politely offered to assist his researches. He informed the Count that in the neighbourhood of his retreat there were some ruins well worthy his inspection, and to expedite his visit to them, he mounted him and one of his guides on two fine Arabian horses. The ruins proved to be those of Colophon. The Count returned to the retreat of Caracayoli, and passed the night there, and the next morning proceeded to the site of the ancient city of Ephesus, from whence he was safely conducted back to Smyrna by the brigands, each party well satisfied with their bargain.

After his return to France, in 1717, he made several other journeys abroad, and paid two visits to London. At Paris he occupied himself with drawing, music, painting, writing, and sculpture. He wrote the lives of the most celebrated painters and sculptors of the Royal Academy, and founded in that Academy an annual prize for the students who were most successful in expressing the passions. In 1742 he was elected an honorary member of "L'AcadÉmie des Inscriptions," in which he founded another prize of five hundred livres for the best essays on the manners and customs of the ancients. He formed a splendid collection of Etruscan, Greek, Roman, and Gaulish antiquities, an account of which was published (seven vols. 4to, the last in 1767) by Monsieur le Beau. He discovered the ancient art of encaustic painting, and of tinging marble, from hints in the works of the elder Pliny. But all this occupation and study did not prevent this eminent scholar and antiquary from indulging in the lighter pursuits of literature. He did not disdain to acknowledge the fascination of a fairy tale, or to contribute to the number of them. I have selected three from his FÉeries Nouvelles, which are in my judgment the best, and display the greatest variety of style and power of imagination. The first,—

PRINCESS MINUTE AND KING FLORIDOR.

La Princesse Minutie et le Roi Floridor is written in a spirit of playful satire, which reminds one of those sprightly caricatures of fairy tales which flowed so pleasantly from the pen of Count Hamilton; but, unlike Le Belier and Fleur d'Epine of that accomplished satirist, Princess Minute and King Floridor presents us with a sound and serious moral, which at this moment, when the sacrifice of important interests to routine and etiquette has caused so much animadversion, is singularly apropos. It also reads a pleasant lesson to those who neglect or misuse the great means and opportunities which it has pleased Providence to bestow upon them, and amidst all its whimsical extravagances, never ceases to whisper in the words of Solomon—

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.

Floridor was the name of a celebrated French actor of the seventeenth century. In Le Temple du Destin, written by Le Sage, and acted at the Fair of St. Laurent in 1715, the High Priest of Destiny observes upon the vanity of an actor—

THE IMPOSSIBLE ENCHANTMENT.

L'Enchantement Impossible is an amusing story with one blemish, which I have ventured to correct by the omission of half a dozen lines, and the suppression of an unnecessary indelicacy. Unlike the last, this is a mere work of fancy, without any particular object—a sort of illustration of the old song and saying, Love will find out the way. The Mer-man and his sister would seem to point out a Breton origin for this story, as the belief in these marine marvels is strong upon the coast of Brittany, where the females are called Morgan (sea-women), or Morver'de (sea-daughters), and are supposed to draw down to their palaces of gold and crystal, at the bottom of the ocean, those who venture imprudently too near the edge of the water; but the Count de Caylus was too well acquainted with the classical Tritons and Syrens to render it necessary for him to draw upon the legends of Armorica for such materials, and it is probable the story is entirely of his own invention.

The absurd fashions in hair-dressing, glanced at in this story, by the introduction of a fairy with her hair dressed en chien fou, are commented upon in a little volume called Histoires des Modes FranÇaise; Amsterdam and Paris, 1773. "The number of these frisures," says the writer, "is almost infinite. Every year, every month, produces new ones. We have seen, in succession, hair dressed en bequille (crutch fashion), en graine d'epinards (spinach fashion!), en baton rompu (broken stick!); yesterday it was en aile de pigeon, to-day it is en dÉbacle."

BLEUETTE AND COQUELICOT.

Bleuette et Coquelicot is a charming fairy tale of the pastoral order, unexceptionable in its style, and salutary in its instruction. I have only to add, in further illustration of the head-dress of Arganto (p. 360), that "Foreign Marshalle Powder" was advertised in 1781 at sixteen shillings per pound, by R. Langwine, at the sign of the "Rose," opposite New Round Court, Strand; and that receipts for making it occur as late as in Gray's Supplement to the Pharmacopoeia, in 1836. The author of L'Histoire des Modes FranÇaise, quoted above, says he does not "despair of one day seeing rose-coloured hair powder, blue heads," &c.; and in Plocacosmos (1781), we actually find receipts for making yellow, rose-pink, and black hair powder; while Goldsmith, in his Citizen of the World, Letter III., mentions both black and blue.

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MADEMOISELLE DE LUBERT.

Of this lady we have but very meagre information. She was born about the year 1710, and is said by some writers to have been the daughter of a President; and by others, of a "TrÉsorier de Marine." She appears to have led a studious and retired life, her love of literature indisposing her to marriage. Her Contes des FÉes were commenced about 1740; and several have been attributed to her pen which she disavowed. Those she acknowledged were:—Terserion, La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico, Le Prince GlacÉ et la Princesse Etincelante, La Princesse Couleur de Rose et le Prince Celadon, La Princesse Camion, and La Nouvelle LÉonille. She was also the author of a translation of Amadis des Gaules, Les Hauts Faits d'Esplandian, and Anecdotes Africaines, published in 1752. Voltaire and Fontenelle called her "Muse et grace." She was living in 1772, and died before 1779. She had disappeared from society for some time previously, and was presumed to be still living at that date; but a letter written by some one who knew of her decease, inserted in the Journal de Paris of that year (No. 69), addressed to the author of L'Almanach des Dames Illustres, by "l'Ombre de Mademoiselle de Lubert," and dated from the "Mille et uniÈme Bosquet des Champs ElisÉes," seems to have been considered sufficient authority; though as no precise time or place is mentioned, the letter might have been written by the lady herself had she wished to deceive the public. She had, however, reached a very respectable age, and it is probable that she was dead at that period.

"Her Contes des FÉes," remarks one of her critics, "are not nearly equal to those of Mademoiselle de Murat and other ladies who have written in that style. They have less of moral purpose and allegorical allusion." This is quite true; and my object in publishing the two I have selected is to illustrate, as I have mentioned in my preface, the decline of the Fairy tale. Mademoiselle de Lubert is one of the latest of her class. Her stories are only designed to amuse. The publication of The Thousand and One Nights, by Galland, and the immense popularity that work immediately obtained, evidently affected the composition of fairy tales. Wild, extravagant adventures, unconnected incidents, transformations without point or object, a straining after the merely marvellous, and a total abandonment of the laughing philosophy and the unaffected morality which distinguish and immortalize the stories of Perrault and d'Aulnoy, were the first effects of the circulation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. The next was the Orientalizing of every tale of enchantment. Dull Caliphs and Sultans deposed the merry old Kings who "once upon a time" ruled in Fairyland. The amours of the seraglio and the harem were substituted for the innocent courtships of princes or shepherds. The manners and dresses of the time, those delicious anachronisms which impart so much pleasantry—ay, and instruction—to the fairy tale, were carefully avoided; and the characters, arrayed in what the writers flattered themselves were Eastern costumes, were seriously placed in situations compared to which that of MoliÈre's Monsieur Jourdain as Mamamonchi was a nearer approach to reality. Even those that had some claim to Oriental origin were so altered and "manufactured for the European market" that they were said to appear—

Le Mercure Galant was flooded with these productions. Almanzor et Zehra, Conte Arabe; Almerine et Zelima, Conte Oriental; Balky, Conte Oriental; Zaman, Histoire Oriental, &c. Then we have Contes Mogol, Contes Turcs, Contes Chinois, Contes Tartares, Contes Persans, &c.; but we are forgetting Mademoiselle de Lubert and her

PRINCESS CAMION.

A translation of La Princesse Camion, much abridged and altered, was published in the Child's Fairy Library some twenty years ago, under the title of Princess Minikin. The plot of this story is intricate without being ingenious. The persecution of Camion by Marmotte is purely capricious, and her contrivances are of the clumsiest description. In the original, Zirphil is commanded to "take off, one by one, the scales of the whale;" but a whale has no scales that it could feel the deprivation of. It is skinning the fish alive that would be a cruel operation, and I have therefore rendered "Écorcher" in that sense, and not to scale, as it had been previously translated, in accordance with the specific direction quoted above. The transformation of the unfortunate Princess into a crayfish, and her being shelled instead of pounded as Marmotte had decreed, is all of the same character. The long story told by her in that state to the other crayfish in the plantation is a lame way of enlightening either Zirphil or the reader, and has to be continued in as lame a manner by Citronette. The pounding the crayfish for the King's soup, and the disappearance of them in flames when they are put into the mortar, seems to point to an Eastern origin. The latter portion reminds us of the black man flinging the fish into the fire, in the story of "The Fisherman and the Genius," in the Arabian Nights, where there is also a city changed into a lake, and all its inhabitants into fishes, and re-transformed in the end and restored to the rightful monarch, the young King of the Black Island. The crayfish broth may be an allusion to the well-known Bisque d'EcrÉvisse, but it is also an Oriental dish; for while this book was passing through the press, a morning journal announced that "the eldest royal son of his Majesty the First King of Siam," on his arrival at Claridge's Hotel, "after satisfying himself that due provision had been made for the comfort of his staff, retired to rest, having first partaken of a frugal repast, prepared by his own chef-de-cuisine, consisting of crabfish pounded with various Eastern condiments."—Morning Post, October 31st, 1857.

The eagerness with which the nobles of the Court sought for the servile office of filling the King of the Whiting's bowl with sea-water, is the only stroke of satire in the story, and evidently levelled at the candle-holding and similar ceremonies of "le grand et le petit coucher." To stand and hold a "bougeoir allumÉ," while Louis XIV. undressed himself, was, says St. Simon, "une distinction et une faveur qui se comptait, tant le Roi avait l'art de donner l'Être À des riens."

In a note to the expression, "shrieks like Melusine's," page 398, I have suggested that some portion of Princess Camion might have been founded on the romance of Melusine. This romance was composed towards the end of the fourteenth century, by Jean d'Arras, at the desire of the Duke de Berri, son of John, King of France, and was founded on an incident recorded in the archives of the family of Lusignan, which were in possession of the Duke. It is briefly as follows:—

THE LEGEND OF MELUSINE.

A King of Albania, named Elinas, had married the beautiful Fay Pressine, by whom he had three daughters at a birth, Melusine, Melior, and Palatine. Fay had stipulated that he should never enter her chamber during the period of her confinement; but the King having broken his promise in his anxiety to embrace his newly-born children, the Queen cried out that she was compelled to leave him, and immediately disappeared with her three daughters. She retired to the Court of her sister, the Queen of the "Isle Perdue," and as her children grew up, instructed them in the art of sorcery. Melusine having learned from her mother the conduct of her father, determined to be revenged on him, and proceeding to Albania, by means of her newly-acquired art carried off the King and shut him up in a mountain called Brandelois. The Queen, who still retained some affection for her husband, on becoming acquainted with this unnatural act, punished Melusine by sentencing her to become every Saturday a serpent from the waist downwards, till she should meet with a lover who would marry her on condition of never intruding on her during the time of her transformation, when she was ordered to bathe; with a promise that if she strictly attended to this injunction, she might eventually be relieved from her weekly disgrace and punishment. Melusine was excessively beautiful, and Raimondin, son of the Count de Forez, having met with her in the forest of Colombiers,[61] fell in love with her so deeply that he married her without hesitation on the prescribed conditions. She built for him, near the spot where they had met, the Castle of Lusignan, and bore him several children; but her husband's jealousy being excited by a cousin, who suggested to him that Melusine had a criminal object in secreting herself on a Saturday, he made a hole with his sword in the door of the chamber to which she was wont to retire, and perceived her in her state of transformation. The various versions of this legend differ in the details of the consequences; but all agree in stating that Melusine, reproaching him with the breach of his word, disappeared, and left him to end his days as a hermit on Montserrat. The popular belief was, that she appeared on what was called the Tower of Melusine when any of the lords of Lusignan were about to die; and Mezeray assures us, on the faith "of people who were not by any means credulous," that previous to the death of a Lusignan, or of a king of France, she was seen on this tower in a mourning dress, and uttered for a long time the most heart-piercing lamentations. The Duke de Montpensier destroyed the castle in 1574, on account of the resistance made to his arms in it by the Huguenots; but the family of Lusignan, till it merged in that of Montmorency-Luxembourg, continued to bear for its crest a woman bathing, in allusion to the story of Melusine.

Ange par la figure, et serpent par la reste.—Delisle.

PRINCESS LIONETTE AND PRINCE COQUERICO.

La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico is an infinitely better story than La Princesse Camion: but, like that, its aim is no higher than to excite the interest and awaken the wonder of its readers. As a work of fancy, however, it is one of the best of its class, and I believe is now for the first time translated into English.

I do not recollect any story on which it could be said to be founded; but at the end of La Tyranine des FÉes dÉtruite, by the Countess d'Anneuil, is a story, entitled La Princesse Lionne, in which a princess is changed into a lioness, and persecuted by a fairy called La Rancune; but there the similarity ends. Mademoiselle de Lubert edited an edition of the Nouveaux Contes des FÉes of the Countess d'Anneuil, and may have taken an idea from that particular incident.

The model of the globe in which Prince Coquerico saw and heard all that passed in the universe, and witnessed the opera, the play, and the orations at the AcadÉmie FranÇaise, reminds one of the room in the Palace of the Beast, the various windows of which afforded Beauty similar entertainment.

The Fairy Tigreline's employments of spinning and threading pearls, is in strict accordance with the manners of the sixteenth century. "Passons avec les dames," says Rabelais, "nostres vie et nostres temps À enfiler les perles ou À filer, comme Sardanapalus."—Livre i. chap. 33. I have mentioned (p. 438) that the opera of Armide was considered the chef-d'oeuvre of Quinnault. The music was composed by Lulli, and it is reported that he made Quinnault write the last act over again five times, which so disgusted the poet that he ceased to write for the stage from that period. The incident of the shield is that in which Ubaldo holds before Rinaldo his adamant or diamond shield, in which the latter sees himself reflected in his effeminate attire, is awakened to a sense of his degraded situation, and abandons the enchanted gardens of Armida.—Book xvi.

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MADAME LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT.

Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont was born at Rouen, in 1711, and commenced her literary career in 1748, by the production of a romance, called La Triomphe de la VÉritÉ; shortly after which she came to England, and resided in London for a considerable time, occupying herself as a governess, and in writing works for the instruction as well as the amusement of youth. That which acquired the most popularity was Le Magazin des Enfans, in which appeared her abridgment of Beauty and the Beast, and her original Fairy Tales. She was twice married. Her first was an unfortunate union, annulled almost immediately afterwards. Her second marriage took place in England, but to a Frenchman; and in 1762 she returned to France for the benefit of her native air. In 1768, she purchased a small estate, called Chenavoi, and died in 1780. Her miscellaneous works amount to seventy volumes; but even Le Magazin des Enfans is scarcely remembered in the present day, and the four short fairy tales which terminate this volume are, with the abridgment of Beauty and the Beast, the only effusions by which she is popularly known in England. The best of them is

PRINCE DÉSIR AND PRINCESS MIGNONE.

It is more like one of the good old Breton stories—pleasant, short, and with a sound moral.

PRINCE CHÉRI,

Corrupted into "Prince Cherry" in our children's books, exhibits the influence of the importations from the East. But that it has so manifest a moral, it might pass for a French alteration of an Oriental tale. The names of Suliman and ZÉlie would encourage the suspicion.

THE WIDOW AND HER TWO DAUGHTERS.

La Veuve et ses Deux Filles is better known by the title of Blanche and Vermillion, under which it has been frequently printed, and was also produced on the French stage by Mons. Florian, in March, 1781. The moral of the story is declared by the Fairy to be that excessively trite and common-place axiom, that happiness consists in content, or, in the words of the author, the possession of things only that are necessary without wishing for more; but the author forgot to show us that Blanche was discontented. It does not appear that she wished for superfluities, or to be a "great Queen," or that such an idea ever entered her head till the Fairy promised her she should become one, "not to reward," but "to punish," her for begrudging to give away her plums. Poor Blanche is therefore made an unhappy queen; her low birth renders her an object of contempt at Court; the King is a worthless person, who neglects the innocent girl his passion induced him to place upon his throne, and who is the mother of his children; and at length the miserable wife exclaims that "happiness is not to be found in magnificent palaces but in the innocent occupations of the country." Now this is foolish—it is worse, for it is false and injurious. There is as much happiness in palaces and on thrones, thank God, as there is in cottages. The occupations of a virtuous sovereign are as innocent as those of a husbandman, while the power to do good, existing with the will, must make the balance of happiness greatly in favour of the former. The cares of State are burdensome enough, no doubt, and the more conscientious the monarch, the weightier the sense of responsibility; but has the countryman no cares, no sorrows, no vices? The legal occupations of all classes are "innocent." Is it only kings and nobles who yield to temptations or indulge in the evil propensities of our common nature? There has been too much of this fallacy infused into what are called moral stories, and at the risk of being accused of breaking a butterfly on the wheel, I have singled out this particular instance, as Blanche and Vermillion is to be found in almost every child's story-book. That the author's intention was laudable, I do not doubt; but to read a wholesome lesson, she should have shown Blanche to have been discontented with the lot assigned to her by Providence, pining to mix in society for which she was neither fitted by birth nor education, and dreaming that happiness consisted solely in rank, wealth, and luxury. The moral should have been, not that such possessions were incompatible with virtue and happiness, but that their owners were not exempted from the frailties and sufferings of humanity, and that unequal marriages were rarely fortunate ones. All this, it will be said, she might mean, but it is not evident; and the only impression made upon a child's mind by this story, if any impression can be made by it whatever, is the very absurd and objectionable one, that all kings and queens are wicked and unhappy, and all farmers and dairy-maids virtuous and contented.

PRINCE FATAL AND PRINCE FORTUNÉ.

This is another of the moral Fairy Tales of Madame de Beaumont, and, as Fatal and FortunÉ, a great favourite with the compilers of children's story-books. It is healthier in tone than the preceding: the value of adversity is difficult to impress on a young mind, and it is pointed out in this little tale as well, perhaps, as it could be; but there is one observation I must venture to make in reference to a point of taste. The writers of the old Fairy Tales never mix up the Almighty with fairies and enchanters. The superior powers are invariably the mythological divinities of ancient Greece and Rome. Their heroes and heroines pray to "the gods," not to "God." The introduction of the sacred name is, I am well aware, too frequent in familiar French conversation, to render it a matter of criticism in the original language; and I fully acquit Madame de Beaumont of any intentional irreverence; but it is a fact worthy of remark, that in an age and at a Court which are described as particularly licentious, the writers for youth or entertainment carefully abstained from an unnecessary profanity of which they had examples enough in the older fabliaux and romances, not only of their own country, but throughout Europe; and that although the majority of these authors were in the highest ranks of society—members of the circle that surrounded the throne of one of the most despotic monarchs in the civilized world—they never spared the foibles or the crimes of princes, or the hypocrisy and treachery of their parasites.

The fearless frankness, indeed, with which they satirized the follies and inveighed against the vices of the great, is as honourable to them as their perfect freedom from that questionable morality which would deny in any class the existence of virtue and the enjoyment of happiness founded upon it. Madame de Beaumont's admission that such may be the case concludes her story of Fatal and FortunÉ more satisfactorily than her insinuation to the contrary does that of The Widow and her Two Daughters.

So much has been said in this Appendix about Peau d'Ane and L'Adroite Princesse, that although, as in the case of Prince Marcassin and Le Dauphin, in my former volume, I have not included them in the body of the work, I think it may be as well, as in the above instance, to give in this place an analysis of their plots, they being undoubtedly two of the oldest fairy tales of their class on record.

PEAU D'ANE.

A Princess, in order to escape the persecution of the King, her father, on a point of conscience, consults a fairy, who is her godmother, and by her advice successively requests her father to give her three dresses—the first of the colour of the sky, the second of the colour of the moon, and the third of the colour of the sun, believing he will be unable to fulfil his promises. He succeeds, however, in procuring for her the three dresses; and she is then instructed to ask him for the skin of a marvellous ass in the royal stables, which supplies the King daily with an ample quantity of gold coin, under the impression that his Majesty will never consent to such a sacrifice. The infatuated Monarch, however, does cause the ass to be killed and flayed, and the Princess, on the receipt of the skin she has requested, is reduced to flight. The Fairy tells her to put the three fine dresses and all her jewellery, &c. in a large trunk, which by magical power is to follow her underground, and appear whenever she needs it; and begriming her face and hands, and wrapping herself up in the ass's skin, the Princess escapes from the palace, and travels into the dominions of a neighbouring monarch. She there obtains employment in a farm as a scullion and keeper of the pigs and poultry, her only pleasure consisting in occasionally locking herself up in her miserable room, and putting on her fine dresses and jewellery, which appear at her wish, as the Fairy promised her.

The son of the King of this country happens to visit this farm occasionally as he returns from hunting, and one day peeps through the keyhole of the door, and sees Peau d'Ane (as the Princess is called, from the only dress she wears in public) arrayed in one of her richest robes. He is dazzled with her beauty, and believing her to be some divinity, he is afraid to burst open the door, and returns to the palace, where he falls perfectly love-sick, refusing to eat, drink, or take any amusement. He inquires who lives in that wretched room at the farm, and is told an ugly, dirty, kitchen wench, called Peau d'Ane, for the reason aforesaid. He declares that nothing can cure him but a cake made by her hands. After all sorts of expostulations, they yield to his wishes, and Peau d'Ane is ordered to make a cake for the Prince. She has seen him on his visits to the farm, and is equally in love with him. She makes the cake, and drops, by accident or design, a magnificent emerald ring into it. The Prince devours the cake, and finds the ring. He immediately declares that he will marry no one but the woman who owns that ring. On this determination being made public, all the unmarried ladies in the Court and kingdom endeavour to fit on the ring, but it is too small for any one to pretend to the ownership. At length Peau d'Ane is sent for at the Prince's wish, and dropping her hideous ass's skin, appears in magnificent attire, and places the ring easily on her finger. Everybody is astonished, the Prince and his parents delighted, and the nuptials take place, being honoured by the presence of Kings and Fairies from all quarters, and specially by the father of the Princess, who has recovered from his infatuation.

This story, founded originally on the legend of St. Dipne, was a favourite in France from an exceedingly early period, and was versified by Perrault, and published with Les Souhaits Ridicules, as I have already stated, in 1694. He alludes to the original nursery tale in his Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes, 1689, in which he makes the partisan of the ancients say, "Les fables Milesiennes sont si puÉriles, que c'est leur faire assez d'honneur que de leur opposer nos Contes de Peau d'Ane et de la MÈre l'Oye." The prose version of this tale was not published until many years after his death, and is supposed by Baron WalkenÄer not to have been his composition; and I think there is a point unnoticed by the Baron which supports that opinion. The story is dedicated to Mademoiselle Eleanore de Lubert.[62] Now, if this be Mademoiselle de Lubert, author of La Princesse Camion, &c., she was not born till some years after the death of Perrault; and as in the dedication we find the lines

the dedication itself could not have been written much before 1720, Mademoiselle de Lubert having been born about 1710.

There is another story in the Contes ou Joyeux Devises de Bonaventure Desperiers, Novel 130, of a young girl named "Peau d'Ane," and "how she got married by the means furnished her by the Ants." A gentleman fell in love with a merchant's daughter, named Pernette. The father and mother, not daring flatly to refuse their consent, attached to it what they considered an impossible condition—namely, that for a given period previous to her marriage the girl should wear no other apparel than the skin of an ass. Pernette, returning the gentleman's affection, was not to be discouraged by this obstacle, and cheerfully wore the skin of an ass for the appointed time. Foiled in this matter, they set their wits to work to invent something more impracticable. They insisted that she should lick up, grain by grain, a bushel of barley, which they spilt for that purpose on the ground. Nothing daunted, she applied herself to this task; but the ants repaired to the same spot, and took away all the barley by degrees, without being noticed, so that it appeared as if Pernette had done it; and her parents considering further opposition useless, the girl obtained her husband. The story concludes with the assertion that "Vray est que tant quelle vesquit le sobriquet de Peau d'Ane lui demeura."

There is nothing whatever in this story to remind one of the last, beyond the simple circumstance of the skin; nor have we any clue as to which may be the oldest: but both were called Peau d'Ane, and it may be just possible that one furnished a hint for the other, or, indeed, that there was a collection of stories so entitled; for La Porte, the valet of Louis XIV., tells us, in his MÉmoires, that when that monarch was still a child, but had passed from the hands of females into those of men, he could not go to sleep "parcequ'on ne lui contait plus les contes de Peau d'Ane ainsi que les femmes qui le gardaient avaient coutume de le faire."

L'ADROITE PRINCESSE; OU, LES AVENTURES DE FINETTE.

A King departing for the Crusades commits to a Fairy the charge of his three daughters—Nonchalante, Babillarde, and Finette, names descriptive of their characters. They are shut up in a tower without a door, and furnished with three enchanted distaffs of glass, which they are told will break on the commission of any indiscretion. They were to be provided with everything they might properly require by means of a basket let up and down by a crane and pulley fixed on the top of the tower. The two eldest Princesses soon become weary of solitude, and one day pull up in the basket an old beggar woman, Nonchalante hoping she will be her servant, and Babillarde being anxious to have somebody else to talk to. The beggar woman proves to be a Prince disguised, the son of a neighbouring King who is a bitter enemy of the father of the three Princesses, and who has had recourse to this expedient in order to revenge himself for some insult or injury he has sustained. By flattering the foibles of the two Princesses who introduced him into the tower, he succeeds in causing them to break both their distaffs, but all his artifices are foiled by Finette (L'Adroite Princesse), who gets rid of him by making him fall through a trap door into the ditch under the tower. Enraged at his defeat, he has recourse to another scheme, and succeeds in inducing Finette to descend in the basket to procure assistance for her sisters, who are suffering from the consequences of their indiscretions. He seizes Finette, and is about to have her rolled down a precipice in a tub filled with spikes, when she adroitly flings him into it, and he suffers the fate he had projected for the Princess. Mortally hurt, he bequeaths his vengeance to his brother, who swears to him that he will marry Finette, and murder her on the night of his nuptials. She, however, places a figure of straw in the bed, which the Prince unwillingly stabs, and is only too delighted to find he is not guilty of murdering a woman he loves, and who becomes his happy Queen.

This story was not published till 1742, when it was printed as Perrault's, although it was well known that Mademoiselle Lheritier, who had read Perrault's Histoires du Temps PassÉ in manuscript, had conceived from them the idea of trying her hand at the same sort of composition, and had actually published, in 1695-6, this very story, under the title of Les Aventures de Finette in her Œuvres MeslÉes, with a letter to the daughter of Perrault.

Speaking of that very story she says—"vous savez que dans le Conte de Finette, les deux soeurs sont trÈs eloignÉes d'Être aussi vertueuses que je les fais, on ne parle point de mariage: ce sont deux indignÉs personnes de qui on raconte des faiblesses odieuses avec les circonstances choquantes;" and she also observes, "j'ai pour moi la tradition qui met ce Conte de Finette; au Temps des Croisades."

There cannot surely be more evidence required to refute the assertion of Mr. Dunlop, that L'Adroite Princesse (be it written by Perrault or Mademoiselle Lheritier) is taken from the Pentamerone, with little variation of machinery or incident. The story he alludes to is the fourth of the third day, and is entitled Sapia Liccarda. There is no such name as Finette in it, and it is well known, independently of Mademoiselle Lheritier's declaration, that Le Conte de Finette was one of the oldest of the French nursery tales.

Nor can we desire clearer evidence of the way in which these stories were written than that which is afforded to us by the repeated acknowledgments of Mademoiselle Lheritier:—

And, again,—

Let any one compare these lines with those of the concluding portion of the story of L'Adroite Princesse commencing "Voila Madame," &c., and they must be struck by the singular resemblance.

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There will be many general readers, and perhaps some critics, who may think I have been unnecessarily minute in my notes and humble attempts at illustration; but whilst I feel that the fairy tales I have selected contain in themselves nothing that may not afford innocent entertainment to children, I certainly hope that the little information I have been able to collect respecting some hitherto obscure and disputed points may give both this and the book that preceded it an interest in the eyes of elder readers, who may meet, where they least expect it, some fact or suggestion, trifling in itself, but furnishing a clue to more important matter.

My principal object has been, however, in this volume, to disabuse the minds of those who have taken for granted the assertions of our historians of fiction concerning the original sources from whence Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy in particular derived the plots of their fairy tales—assertions which I confess I had not thought necessary to notice until, in a kind and complimentary review of my former volume, it was publicly regretted as an omission. I trust I have now made it perfectly clear that whether or not the writers of those tales were cognizant of the existence in the collections of Straparola and Basile of some half-dozen meagre and garbled versions of stories told for ages in all the tongues of Europe and Asia, that the real foundation of those of Perrault were the old Breton Contes de ma MÈre l'Oye, which in company

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.

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