Sciolism Rocks

I am certainly dating myself by saying this (for those that know I’m single, you can stop snickering now, I know a double entendre when I write it), but I remember when the first edition of Trivial Pursuit came out. I was really, really good at it, even though I was really, really young.

I can still remember the first question I missed. “What was Cinderella’s first name?” It’s bothered me for some time that I couldn’t get the fact that she was CinderElla, thus meaning her real first name was Ella. Since I’m amidst the study of French contes de fées, contes merveilleux, contes fantastique, and so on, I get to re-read the story in an earlier version: that of the master storyteller Charles Perrault.

I’ll leave aside the discussion of whether “Cendrillon” can be broken into two pieces like its English counterpart (it can). Instead, I’ll ask you to play a word-association game and come up with the element of this story that distinguishes it from other courtly contes de fées. The title of this blog entry is a BIG hint.

It’s funny what Disney can do to a person. To us, the Disney versions of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, to name a few, are the versions. But there were loads of others, including versions by Perraut, and the Grimm brothers (and sketches on The Electric Company with Rita Moreno as the evil stepmother and Judy Graubart as the titular character.)

Can anyone picture Cinderella without glass slippers ? More to the point, can anyone imagine going to a ball wearing glass slippers ? Even if they were open-toe ? We’re not talking slingbacks or mules, folks.

Perraut wrote (of course) in French. “Glass”, as many of you know, is verre, which rhymes (kinda) with the English words “there,” “bear,” and “fair”. Vowels in french are notoriously pure, diphthong-free entities, so homonyms are much more frequent than in English. Verre has a ton of homonyms. Just cursory thought gives me these:

• vers (a preposition, meaning toward, about, at, to, et. al)
• vers (a line of a poem)
• ver (a worm. Plural ? vers)
• vert, verte, verts, vertes (forms to say “green”)
• verre (glass, or crystal)
• vair (the pelt of a small animal, like a squirrel, used as an adornment to royal clothing)

Say it with me: Le ver vert va vers le verre vert. The green worm is going toward the green glass.

Did anyone have an “aha” moment with the last homonym in the list ? If you did, gold stars all round. Loads of people (among them, Honoré de Balzac) think that this very old tale was probably told with a pantoufle en vair instead of a pantoufle en verre. There’s a certain amount of sense to this, since a shoe would more likely be made of leather and adorned with the royal fur rather than being made out of glass.

A quick search of the internet gives a lot of theories against this transposition. Indeed, Perraut wrote verre (as far as we know). Some say that the word was out of use at the time (it wasn’t).

IMHO, this may simply be an example of an artist and storyteller at work. Maybe Perrault heard the story told en vair and thought “You know, that part there at the end where there’s only one person who can fit her foot into the slipper, I think it lacks a certain something. I mean, they don’t make squirrel fur slippers like they used to, and I can imagine a lot of people being able to form their large, matronly feet into a pair of leather shoes, especially when there’s a handsome prince, wealth, courtly love, and so on, involved. What say I make this a little more merveilleux and make those slippers en verre instead of en vair. Hmmm. Yes, I think that fits perfectly.” (Get it? Fits perfectly? See what I did there? Oh, never mind.)

So my conclusion is that the vair story is interesting and might provoke for a lively discussion in French class. But I’ll keep the glass slippers.