If the wolf ’s malicious paw must be forgiven just a little, and the listener fooled to however small a degree—just as Puss in Boots plays dead to catch mice—then it would be helpful to look to Perrault first, to read and reread Puss in Boots, and, before saying a word, to carefully mull over the delightful formula:
“Here you are, sire, a cottontail rabbit . . .”
Puss in Boots is not a cat. He would have four boots if he were a cat. Puss in Boots is the author of an adventure, and it may well be that the narrative cat’s got his tongue for the rest of his life.
Let’s sum the story up.
Times are tough, and the setting is a mill in the impoverished countryside. The miller dies, leaving behind three children. The eldest and the middle child band together to secure inheritance of the means of production and trade—the mill and the donkey. But the least fortunate of the three heirs, the youngest, is left to starve, day in, day out.
As each day fails to satiate him, he remembers the previous evening’s brewing hunger; he’s still hungry for the following day, and the day after that, and so on until eternity. Even if he were to skin and eat his whole inheritance, a cat, he would still be hungry. That cat, Puss in Boots, swings a satchel over his shoulder, puts boots on his feet, and sets off on a hunt. He tricks a rabbit into his trap.
. . . pulling the strings immediately, he caught it and killed it
without mercy.
Proud of his catch, he headed to the king’s estate and asked to speak with him. He was brought up to His Majesty’s chamber where, having entered, he bowed graciously to the king and said to him:
“Here you are, sire, a cottontail rabbit [ . . . ]”
At this point, Puss in Boots inverts the “natural” logic of the narrative (the future Carabas is hungry; the rabbit should have gone straight to him), which numerous manipulations of the story—a temptation to which too many pen-pushers and editors have succumbed—rush to modify at this precise point in Perrault’s text. Among the manipulators, many tend to fill in the blanks strategically put in place by Perrault’s use of the ellipsis:
Surely you are thinking that the cat will hurriedly bounce home to his master and bring him his catch. But here, you are completely mistaken. Our hunter had other plans, and it wasn’t toward his master’s little cottage that he was headed.
(Puss in Boots, from Perrault, ed. Hemma, Paris, 1956.)
Here’s a second example among the many appalling modifications:
“I am going to go for a jaunt in the woods. Wait for me, master.” When the cat returns a few moments later: “Look, master. I have caught a beautiful rabbit.” “What shall we do? Eat it?” “Why no, master. I will now bring it to the king.”
(Le Chat Botté, livre-disque, Touret, 1977.)
In this third example, it’s carefully made known that first and foremost the king is a gourmet:
He swung his bag over his shoulder and headed toward the royal castle, for he had heard that the king had a vice for rabbit pâté.
(Le Chat botté, éd. Fernand Nathan, Paris, 1974, images et texte de Jacques Galan.)
All of these dubious manipulations attempt to spare the reader—and the fact that the proverbial reader is a child is no excuse—from a confusing twist that is supposedly beyond his grasp. However, it’s at this precise moment that the story winds through a surprise acceleration, which is the master stroke of a masterpiece. The same narrative craftiness predates Perrault in Facetious Nights by the Italian storyteller Straparola, in which the primordial Puss in Boots can be found.3 But this tale is more diluted on the whole. By contrast, Perrault delivers the story with a brisk, irrefutable stroke of the pen. And here we find what Master Charles masters: insinuation, relaxation, patience, and rhythm.
It’s very clear to me that this subtle jostling of the reader and his lazy habits is one of the secrets behind a beautiful story. Perrault catches up to Pascal on this point: trickery and strategy are more powerful than the cottontail rabbit itself, which is in no way useful in the practical sense (even if it does turn out that the king delights in a dish of rabbit pâté, presumably that’s not a luxury or a rare delicacy for him), but rather which acts as a testimony, from one hunter to another, of an equality of privileges, sets the rise of a future nobleman off to a good start, and leads to a climb in social standing by the main character, which is one of the story’s themes.
Following the advice of his John-the-Baptist cat, the youngest and most miserable of the heirs—you and me, or, in other words, us—who doesn’t even have a Christian name, undresses and dives into the river. As soon as he emerges from its depths, he becomes the newly christened Carabas, who climbs into a carriage, dressed differently, and rides through the countryside collecting fruits and grains, wrenched with the help of repeated blackmail from the mouths of working peasants cowed by Puss in Boots’s warning that he will dice them up into pâté.
In Memoirs of My Life, Charles Perrault boasts about having been instrumental in convincing the gentlemen from Port-Royal to see the importance of directly addressing the public outside the Sorbonne in order to keep them informed of the Jansenist-Jesuit dispute. “The First Letter Written to a Provincial by One of His Friends” came as a result of this advice, and was followed by seventeen others, written by an anonymous, progressive Pascal. Which leads me—straddling seven leagues in a single stride, and this time allowing Pascal to catch up to Perrault—to compare and mix together, as a mortar for my verbal construction site, five-shilling coaches and char-à-bancs.
In this letter, Blaise Pascal, with the help of his childhood friend Artus de Roannez and some others, conceives the democratic vision of a Parisian omnibus, even though he, like everyone else, had always ridden on coaches, the bus rides of the Grand Siècle that covered the expanses of land and water between Clermont and Paris—Pascal, who is unable to extinguish his ambition and inventiveness, who accuses Aristotle and the prophets of double standards in the vast yet confined space where he may contradict authority, who is unmatched as he discovers and fires and forges the sentences of his logical proofs, so many of which have entered into the French language (there are times when it’s appropriate to call Pascal Pascal, and others where it’s more fitting to call him the Master Wordsmith), and to such a degree that he doesn’t know how to finish The Apology under the weight of his own specious reasoning. It’s possible that Pascal’s tendency toward incompletion isn’t as involuntary as I would have thought at first, as the pascal, a noun that represents a unit of pressure in physics, is better than the adjective attached to the lamb of God, anyway this Pascal is for everyone, favoring the transportation of individuals without, theoretically, considering rank (omnibus means everyone’s bus, from the king to the poor miller’s youngster), but the royal privilege excludes “soldiers, pages, lackeys, and other liveries or individuals in uniform, as well as unskilled workers and laborers,” an exclusion of rights already established by the five-shilling fare. It’s clearly stipulated in the Letters Patent that each passenger should pay for a seat at a fixed price, five shillings and never more, whether the vehicle be full or almost empty. Hence on the 21st of March, 1662, Madame Périer, Blaise Pascal’s sister, shares the good news about the success of the coaches with Arnauld de Pomponne: “The thing hath beheld so great a success, that as early as the first morning we witnessed full coaches and even the presence of some ladies [ . . . ] .”
Elsewhere,