Cinderella's slippers: glass or squirrel fur?

I'm a huge fan of Snopes. And Cinderella's "glass slipper" is one of the most striking and absurdly effective details in the whole history of storytelling. So it's with a heavy heart that I must now register some doubt about Snopes' defense of the glass slipper against the claim that it's actually a linguistic mistake for an original fur slipper:

Claim: Cinderella's slippers were made of fur in the original versions of the fairy tale, but they became glass slippers in later versions as the result of a mistranslation. Status: False.

This came up in conversation a few days ago, so I looked into it a bit. And alas, though mistranslation is not the culprit, it seems pretty clear to me that the slippers must originally have been fur, and turned into glass through a misunderstanding.

Snope's discussion of the point is clear and well researched, as usual:

The standard explanation for Cinderella's famous footwear is that it is the result of a mistranslation, someone having mistaken pantoufle de vair, fur slipper, for pantoufle de verre, glass slipper, when making an English version of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralités (1697). (The title of Perrault's collection — in English, Stories or Tales of Olden Times with Morals — also is known as Tales of My Mother Goose, after a line that appears on the frontispiece of the original, Contes de ma mère l'oye.) The principal difficulty with the standard explanation is that pantoufle de verre appears in Perrault's original text, so this is definitely not a question of mistranslation. Nor does it seem to be a case of mishearing, with Perrault writing verre for vair when transcribing an oral account, since vair, a medieval word, was no longer used in his time. (Vair, variegated fur, from the Latin varius, varied, also is a root of miniver, originally menu vair, small vair, which referred initially to the fur — perhaps squirrel — used as trim on medieval robes and later was applied to the prized ermine, or winter weasel fur, on the ceremonial robes of peers.)

Indeed, the original text of Perrault's tale "Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle" does use pantoufles de verre ("glass slippers") not once but three times (see below), so it's clearly neither a mistranslation nor a (simple) misprint. However, the argument against mishearing seems to me to be extremely weak. Though I'm not any sort of expert in the history of French, a bit of poking around on Gallica suggests that vair was still used to describe a glamorous and valuable kind of squirrel fur, in the context of talk about the olden days, quite a bit later than 1697. If the word had indeed gone out of everyday usage, then that creates exactly the sort of context in which a creative mishearing would be likely.

Specifically, in the Analyse raisonnée de l'histoire de France by François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), a discussion of medieval society says that

Les chevaliers prenaient les titres de don , de sire , de messire et de monseigneur . Ils pouvaient manger à la table du roi ; eux seuls avaient le droit de porter la lance, le haubert, la double cotte de mailles, la cotte d'armes, l'or, le vair , l'hermine, le petit-gris, le velours, l'écarlate ; ils mettaient une girouette sur leur donjon ; cette girouette était en pointe comme les pennons pour les simples chevaliers, carrée comme les bannières pour les chevaliers-bannerets.

and a description of Edward's invasion of France explains that

Rien n'échappa, par mer et par terre, aux ravages de ce monarque, qui se disait roi des Français, et qui venait pour régner sur des Français ; par mer, tous les vaisseaux, depuis le plus grand navire jusqu'à la plus petite barque, furent pris et réunis à la flotte anglaise ; par terre, toutes les villes et les villages furent saccagés et brûlés. Barfleur succomba la première, et, quoiqu'elle se fût rendue sans coup férir, elle n'en fut pas moins pillée elle perdit or, arpent et chers joyaux ; il se trouva si grande foison de richesses, que compagnons n'avoient cure de draps fourrés de vair .

Here are the contexts in Perrault where "pantoufles de verre" is used:

(1) ...sa maraine ne fit que la toucher avec sa baguette, et en même tems ses habits furent changez en des habits de drap d' or et d' argent, tout chamarrez de pierreries ; elle luy donna ensuite une paire de pantoufles de verre, les plus jolies du monde. (2) Elle se leva, et s' enfüit aussi legerement qu' auroit fait une biche. Le prince la suivit, mais il ne put l' attraper. Elle laissa tomber une de ses pantoufles de verre, que le prince ramassa bien soigneusement. Cendrillon arriva chez elle, bien essouflée, sans carosse, sans laquais, et avec ses méchans habits, rien ne lui estant resté de toute sa magnificence qu' une de ses petites pantoufles, la pareille de celle qu' elle avoit laissé tomber. (3) Quand les deux soeurs revinrent du bal, Cendrillon leur demanda si elles s' estoient encore bien diverties, et si la belle dame y avoit esté ; elles luy dirent que oüy, mais qu' elle s' estoit enfuye lorsque minuit avoit sonné, et si promptement qu' elle avoit laissé tomber une de ses petites pantoufles de verre, la plus jolie du monde ; que le fils du roy l' avoit ramassée, et qu' il n' avoit fait que la regarder pendant tout le reste du bal, et qu' assurément il estoit fort amoureux de la belle personne à qui appartenoit la petite pantoufle.

Note that the OED glosses vair as

A fur obtained from a variety of squirrel with grey back and white belly, much used in the 13th and 14th centuries as a trimming or lining for garments.

while the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (Huitième Édition, 1932-35) has

VAIR . n. m. Il se disait autrefois d'une Fourrure blanche et grise. Un manteau, des pantoufles de vair.

Il ne s'emploie aujourd'hui qu'en termes de Blason, pour désigner Une des fourrures de l'écu, figurée par de petites cloches alternées d'azur et d'argent, disposées de telle sorte que la pointe des pièces d'azur est opposée à la pointe des pièces d'argent. Tel porte de vair.

The fr.wikipedia entry for Cendrillon says that

Beaucoup de gens affirment que la pantoufle de Cendrillon était de vair et non pas de verre. L'édition de 1697 des contes de Charles Perrault s'intitule bien "la pantoufle de verre", donnée traditionnelle dans le folklore, puisqu'on retrouve des pantoufles de verre ou cristal dans les contes catalans, écossais, irlandais. Il n'empêche que Balzac et Littré voulaient, au nom de la raison, corriger cette graphie en vair (petit-gris, écureuil). Cendrillon irait alors danser en chaussures fourrées. Cette correction n'apporte cependant pas toute satisfaction, car outre que l'on ne fourra jamais par le passé de petit-gris des chaussures, de tels souliers ne semblent pas adaptés à la danse. Sagement, il faut conserver ces poétiques et merveilleuses pantoufles de verre.

[Update: Chris Waigl argues for a different conclusion:

... this seems to be a case of erudition run wild. Balzac's and Littré's (a nineteenth-century man of letters, author of an important dictionary), to be precise. They stipulated the verre/vair confusion. But "pantouffles de verre" (though in various spellings) are in Perrault's tale, and also in Catalan, Irish and Scottish versions. The Grimm brothers' has golden slippers -- not much better than glass, I'd think, to dance in all night. Wikipedia tells me that there are over 400 versions from all over the world, the oldest from China.

I'm not entirely convinced. The fact that the Grimm bros. have "golden slippers" resonates with de Chateaubriand's observation that only knights "avaient le droit de porter ... l'or, le vair, l'hermine, le petit-gris, le velours, l'écarlate" ("had the right to wear gold, vair, ermine, gray squirrel fur, velvet, scarlet"). Note that "glass" is not on the list (though in fairness, I guess that glass was also a luxury item in medieval times). And I wonder what the collection date of the Catalan, Irish and Scottish versions is. I believe that there has been much more diffusion of folk tale details in recent centuries than is commonly assumed. Unless the other versions are from the era of 1700 -- which seems unlikely, since the collection of such tales was more typically a late 18th or 19th-century activity -- it seems as just as likely that Perrault's invention spread to other cultures as that there was a common pre-Perrault source for the idea of "glass slippers".

I'm sympathetic to fr.wikipedia's conclusions that "il faut conserver ces poétiques et merveilleuses pantoufles de verre": "we need to preserve these poetic and marvelous glass slippers." At this point, though, their survival is guaranteed. The small question in front of us is how they were born. ]

[Update #2: Trevor suggests that the slippers were really amber!

DH Green (Language and History in the Early Germanic World) notes that both Pliny and Tacitus used glaesum/glesum to refer to amber, despite being aware of the difference in manufacture between it and glass. This conscious confusion was based on the transparency of both materials, and in the competition between products manufactured thereof–native beads and Roman glass objects. The relevance of this is to be found a while later in L0pe de Vega’s La Dorotea. Published in 1632, 65 years before Perrault, it recreates the author’s passionate and disastrous fling with actress Elena Osorio in the early 1580s and has the heroine worrying of having to trade in her amber slippers for crudely bound sandals (“Si don Bela quiere, tú verás estos pies que celebrabas trocar las zapatillas de ámbar en groseras sandalias de cordeles”). Similarly, Quevedo in El mundo por de dentro (1612) has amber slippers being used to disguise sweaty feet (“a veces los pies disimulan el sudor con las zapatillas de ámbar”). Amber slippers were still available in Regency England, and are evoked in contemporary advertising for Miss Natasha Perfume (“this princess of perfumes makes her way on Amber slippers and Lily négligés. A warm and slow burning temptress that stands on her own”). I, too, have made my way on lily négligés and hope one day to acquire a pair of amber slippers, which must surely have been what Cinderella aspired to wear. Too bad her fairy godmother skimped and gave her the cheaper, glass alternative.

I'm impressed by the quotations from Pliny, Tacitus, Lope de Vega and Quevado. And I certainly wish Trevor well in his quest to complete his wardrobe. But I wonder whether those Regency slippers had any real connection with the hard translucent fossil resin, rather than being merely amber in color. After all, the same outfit features an "amber crape dress" and a "dami-turban formed of plain amber satin". And I'm I'm just a bit skeptical that slippers carved from actual fossil amber would stand up to dancing with or without foot sweat.]

Posted by Mark Liberman at February 28, 2006 08:37 AM

