The cat with boots

Puss in Boots (Le Maître Chat ou le Chat botté, in French) is a European folk tale collected in 1695, by Charles Perrault and published in 1697 in his book Tales of Old (Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralités ) as Master Cat or the Cat with Boots. It tells the story of a cat who, based on cunning and deceit, gets the fortune and the hand of a princess for his master, totally poor. The 1695 manuscript book is dedicated to Mademoiselle, niece of Louis XIV. Puss in Boots was a success from its first publication and remains popular, despite its ambiguous morals.

The character is inspired by at least two previously written stories: the novel The Pleasant Nights by Gianfrancesco Straparola (1550, the first part and 1553, the second part) and the Pentameron (The Tale of Tales), a collection of short stories by Giambattista Basile published in five volumes, from 1634 to 1636.

Puss in Boots has inspired designers, composers, choreographers and just about every type of artist. He appears in the third act of Tchaikovsky's ballet Sleeping Beauty. In addition, the adaptations of the story have been multiple, from theater to cinema (as in Shrek for example) and comics, through opera and parodies.

Plot

The division of the inheritance of a simple miller leaves his youngest little more than the cat in the barn. Disappointed, the son considers eating it so as not to starve, but the cat turns out to be resourceful, and says, "You need not grieve, sir, you have only to provide me with a bag and a pair of boots to walk through the bushes.", and you will see that your inheritance is not as poor as you think». The miller's son doesn't think much about it and decides to play along. The cat, elegantly shod, with a sack over his shoulder, goes to a nearby preserve and hunts a rabbit, which he offers to the king as a gift from his master, the "Marqués de Carabás". He continues to regularly bring various prey to the king, for a few months.

The Cat with Boots He asks for help to save his master who is drowning, by the Polish illustrator Artur Oppman.

One day, knowing that the king and his daughter were taking a walk along the river, he persuades his master to bathe in the river. When the king is arriving, the cat asks for help because the Marqués de Carabás is drowning. He also explains that his clothes have been stolen, although he had hidden them under a large stone. The king offers him beautiful costumes and he invites them to get on the carriage to continue the ride together. Naturally, the princess falls madly in love.

The cat takes the lead and threatens the peasants, the harvesters and everyone he meets to make them say that the fields and wheat fields belong to the Marqués de Carabás. When the king's carriage passes by the peasants and he asks who those lands belong to, they all replied: "They belong to the Marqués de Carabás." Meanwhile, the cat arrives at the beautiful castle of a very rich ogre, owner of the lands where the king had passed. The ogre is capable of turning into any kind of animal. To test his abilities he transforms into a terrifying lion. The cunning cat challenges him to transform into a really small animal, like a little mouse. When the mouse-ogre starts to run, the cat jumps on top of him and devours him.

The king arrives at the ogre's castle and, impressed by the riches of the Marquis of Carabás, offers his daughter's hand to the miller's son. The cat became a great lord and no longer ran after the mice except for fun.

The story is followed by two morals:

Creation and publication

Background

The ogre listens to the Cat's arguments with Boots. Illustration for The Cat with Boots in the edition made by Artur Oppman.

Charles Perrault is not the inventor of the figure of a joking and mischievous cat, since several centuries before the publication of Perrault's tales, the Kashmiri Brahmin SomaDeva Bhatta assembled a vast collection of Indian fairy tales, Kathá-sarit-ságara (literally The Ocean of Fairytale Rivers) containing many fairy tale characters and magical items such as invincible swords, ships that regenerate their cargo, and useful animals. In addition, in the Panchatantra, a collection of Sanskrit tales from the V century, there is a story describing a cat trying to make a fortune in the royal palace.

In 1553 Constantino Fortunato's Cat, a tale similar to Puss in Boots, was published in Venice in the second part of the book The Pleasant Nights by Gianfrancesco Straparola. However, in Straparola's tale, the poor miller's youngest son is the son of a Bohemian widow, the cat is a fairy disguised as a cat, the princess is called Elisetta, and the castle does not belong to an ogre but to a recently deceased lord.. The protagonist eventually becomes the king of Bohemia.

In 1634, another story with a tricky cat as the main character, Cagliuso, was published within the collection of stories Pentameron (The Tale of Tales) by Giambattista Basile. Neither the collection nor the story were published in France during Perrault's lifetime. In Basile's version, the young man is a beggar named Cagliuso (or Gagliuso) whose wealth he achieves in a similar way to the Puss in Boots story. However, the story ends differently: to show his gratitude, Cagliuso promises the cat that he will bury him in a golden coffin. Three days later, the cat tests his master by pretending to be dead and is horrified when he hears Cagliuso asking his wife to grab the corpse by the paws and throw it out the window. The cat jumps up, exclaims that this is his reward for helping a beggar get rich, and then runs away, abandoning his master.

The similarities of these two stories with Puss in Boots are striking and, according to some theory, Perrault would have been directly inspired by Cagliuso, eliminating the moral about the young man's ingratitude and adding his own. Scholar Pierre Saintyves highlights these similarities and cites authors who think Perrault was inspired by them for Puss in Boots, but takes no position on any influence. British folklorists Iona and Peter Opie they think that Perrault did not know about El gato de Constantino Fortunato nor Cagliuso, although they were prior to Puss in Boots. On the contrary, the historian and librarian Thierry Delcourt states that Perrault was well acquainted with the literary versions of these two tales, and Armand Langlois cites La gata de Constantino Fortunato as a source of inspiration for Perrault.

19th century19th century French writer Charles Deulin states that there are other tales similar to Puss in Boots : the Danish tale The palace with the golden pillars, the Norwegian tale Master Pedro or the Breton tale The cat and its mother i> because in all three there are cats or cats that help their owner to obtain fortune.

Post

Tales of Old

Frontispt of the manuscript Counts of old delivered to Mademoiselle in 1695.

Perrault wrote Tales of Old (in French, Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralités, with a second title on the back cover of the book: Contes de ma mère l'Oye) which includes Puss in Boots or Master Cat at the time he was a member of the French Academy and the court of Louis XIV. The first version of this tale appears in a richly bound, illustrated, and calligraphed manuscript that circulated through the Parisian literary salons and at the court of Versailles in 1695. It is dedicated to Mademoiselle Isabella Charlotte of Bourbon-Orleans, the king's niece, and contained five stories: Sleeping Forest Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots and Fairies. As the dedication is signed by «P. Darmancour", the so-called "Tales of Old"—among them Puss in Boots—are sometimes attributed to Pierre Darmancour, son of Charles Perrault.

Puss in Boots or Master Cat was first published in January 1697, at the Barbin press, as part of the collection Tales of Old to which three other stories were added: Cinderella or the glass slipper, Riquete the one with the forelock and Thumbnail. The printed version is slightly different from that of the original manuscript, as Perrault develops the style, inserts annotations, adds morals, and adds information that did not appear in the manuscript, for example when he describes the cat as "funny" as if it were a boy, getting in fact an anthropomorphic animal.

The book was a resounding success from the start.

Translations

In 1729, Robert Samber's first English translation of The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots appeared; it was published in London with the publishers J. Pote and R. Montagu in the book entitled Histories, or Tales of Past Times, By M. Perrault. In 1754 the Dutch translation appeared in a bilingual edition. French-Dutch. In 1790 it was published translated into German. The first Portuguese translations were of loose stories by Perrault, beginning in 1819.

The first translation into Spanish comes from the printing press of I. Smith in Paris in 1821. Shortly after, in 1829, Barba Azul or the Enchanted Key is printed in Valencia. Collection of wonderful stories; It is about the Tales of yesteryears published by the Cabrerizo Bookstore. More than twenty years later, the Universal Library (in Madrid) publishes Cuentos de Carlos Perrault; the later edition of Perrault's Tales of the Universal Library (Madrid, 1890), volume CXXXI of the «Collection of best ancient and modern authors» translates this story as Micifuz el de las botas. In 1863, the publisher Abel Ledoux (in Paris) published Perault's tales translated by Federico de la Vega and with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Practically, from the initial translations, the first part of the title of the story «Master Gato» was eliminated to leave it as it is currently known Puss in Boots. However, Alfonso Nadal (1888-1943), in his translation of Arthur Rackham's Fairy Book: Old Tales with New Illustrations, during the story refers to the cat as « Messer Miz". Among many other editions, the one made by Editorial Calleja in 1920 with illustrations by Rafael de Penagos stands out, which was reissued in 1941.

Illustrations

Engraving by Antoine Clouzier for the first edition of Barbin, in 1697, Counts of old; made on leather and preserved in the National Library of France.

The first illustration of Puss in Boots in the 1695 manuscript is done in ink and colored in gouache; It represents a cat that threatens the peasants, it is standing with its front paws forward to tell them: "Good people that you mow, if you do not tell the king that these meadows belong to the Marquis of Carabás, I will make mincemeat of you." The cat appears as big as the farmer himself. According to a study by Marc Soriano, this image highlights the anthropomorphism and aggressiveness of Puss in Boots and has played a very important role in the perception of the character to this day. The author of the drawing is unknown, it could be Perrault himself or someone following his instructions.

The engraver Antoine Clouzier used the same image for the first edition of the stories in 1697. The diffusion of this image is impressive, due to the number of editions of the story since 1697 that reuse it, throughout Europe. British engravers even added claws to the cat to heighten the impression of menace.

The frontispiece of the first edition shows an old woman telling stories to a group of three children and a young man under a banner reading «Contes de ma mère L'oye [sic] » (Tales of Mother Goose or also Tales of Mother Goose). The English edition translates the poster as: Mother Goose Tales.

In 1862, Gustave Doré illustrated a complete edition of Tales of Old. of Perrault. These illustrations continued to be included in language editions throughout the XX century.

Within the fashion for illustrated books for children, the version of Puss in Boots stands out, which, in 1900, was translated into English in verse and illustrated by the British Walter Crane. This artist had the idea that the cat was black. The illustrations can be enjoyed in the Gallery.

Years later, in 1922, the Irishman Harry Clarke illustrated another collection of stories by Perrault, in a modernist style.

Analysis

Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification

Illustration of Harry Clarke for a British edition of 1922.

According to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification, the themes of this tale are widely spread across many regions of the world with the same "type". First is the subject of the cat, type 545B, "The cat as helper." The passage of the cat devouring the ogre is a mixture of two other themes: on the one hand, type 325, as in the tale of The magician and his apprentice, in which the apprentice eats the converted magician into grain when he himself has become a fox; on the other hand, type 331, as in the story The Genie in the Bottle, where the protagonist challenges his opponent to shrink into a bottle.

Comments and criticism

Despite its popularity, the dubious morality of the story, or indeed the lack of it, has traditionally made the tale less interesting to analyze than other stories of the time. Compared to the rich material provided in Sleeping Beauty or Bluebeard, Puss in Boots is considerably more cheerful in tone. Perrault was certainly known for his self-righteous tendencies, but if there really is a lesson to be learned in Puss in Boots, it seems that deceit and lies pay off more quickly and generously than hard work and fraud. talent.

For some current readers, the ethically jarring note is when the cat threatens the peasants who work for the ogre, forcing them to say that they work for the Marqués de Carabás. In a modern version, Puss in Boots makes an agreement with the peasants whereby if they claim to be servants of the Marquis de Carabás then he will free them from the cruel ogre's tyranny. This raises the moral tone of the story considerably.

This story can also be considered for didactic purposes of business administration, every boss or manager at some point must trust or delegate work to a subordinate. Giving someone the opportunity to help us can be the key in our life that makes us prosper.

In other interpretations, Puss in Boots represents the game of rational and animal nature in the destiny of man. The cat is a humanized animal, it not only walks upright but also speaks, it is an animal that reasons and releases its instincts when necessary, in the story when it threatens the peasants or eats the ogre transformed into a rodent.

Accommodations

German writer Ludwig Tieck is the author of the satirical comedy Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots), 1797, based on this tale.

There is a "magic opera", Puss in Boots, from 1948, with music by Montsalvatge and a libretto by Néstor Luján.

In addition, there is a short opera, for children, in three acts, Puss in Boots, with music by the Russian César Cui and a libretto written by a teacher, Marina Stanislavovna Pol'. Composed in 1913, it premiered in Rome in 1915 under the title Il gato con gli stivali.

In the comic Xanadu, —like furry fandom— the main male hero, Tabbe Le Fauve, is a cat similar to Puss in Boots; a kind of gentleman-thief determined to challenge the caste system of the fantasy world he hails from, he shows a strong influence of the typical swordsman played by Errol Flynn in the movies of the 1930s.

Movies and TV series

Boot for the 2011 film The Cat with Boots.

The character of Puss in Boots has been revived on countless occasions, some of the most notable being:

• In 1903, a film was released The Cat with Boots (Le Chat botté), muda, black and white, directed by French filmmakers Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet.
• In 1922, animation studies Laugh-O-Gram, founded by Walt Disney in Kansas City (Misuri), produced a short film Puss in Boots (The Cat with BootsNine minutes, it was the sixth in a series of seven stories. It is based on Perrault's story, but it does not follow the plot of it.
• In the Japanese animated film of 1969, The Cat with Boots (.の., Nagagutsu or haita neko), produced by Toei Animation. The Boot Cat is rejected for helping a mouse. When he escaped his persecutors, he met Peter, a young orphan with whom he would run various adventures.
• An animated film entitled The Cat with Boots was released directly on video in 1999 by Plaza Entertainment.
• In the anime Pokémon appears Meowth, a creature with a flashing cat appearance, which makes reference to the Cat with Boots.
• «The Cat with Boots» appears as a secondary character in the 2004 animation film Shrek 2 played by Antonio Banderas, both in the original English-speaking version and in the Spanish double. The cat is hired to kill Shrek, who is an ogre. However, it does not try any trick this time; its tactic to make the enemy come down guard is to adopt an innocent aspect of desolate kitten and is extremely effective. This cat with boots is Spanish, instead of French: "The Cat with Boots" instead of "Le Chat Botté". It is inspired by the Zorro, a character that Banderas also played.
• «The Cat with Boots» appears again in the following two saga films: Shrek third (2007) and Shrek Forever After (2010).
• In The True Story of the Cat with Boots (The véritable histoire du Chat Botté), of 2009, it became a quite free version of the story, which has little to do with that of Perrault. It was carried out jointly by directors Jérôme Deschamps, Pascal Hérold and Macha Makeïeff, with production of France, Belgium and Switzerland. The film, in general terms, resulted in a failure of box office and criticism.
• The movie The Cat with Boots (Puss in Boots) of 2011, produced by Dreamworks, is a kind of prequel derived from Shrek. This new production is especially dedicated to an adventure in the past of the "Gato con Botas" that appears in those films. In the Shrek saga, the character appears from the second delivery to the fourth and last in brief participations. The same company has created a lively short with the character.
• In El Gato with Boots: the last desire of 2022, produced by DreamWorks, the character becomes the protagonist, which is still played by Antonio Banderas. This film continues the feline adventures within the Shrek saga universe.

Gallery

Black and white illustrations by Gustave Doré, 19th century:

Color illustrations by Walter Crane, 19th century, for the edition prepared by himself with the translation of the story into English in verse, as from comic: