"Cent fois ma nourrice on ma mie
M'ont fait ce beau recit pres des tissons
Je n'ai fait qu'adjouter un peu de broderie."
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.
* * * * *
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
"De Peau d'Ane et de Fier à bras
Et de cent autres vieux fatras,"
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.