Méliès himself plays the Prince's messenger who searches for the owner of the glass slipper. The film was made in the summer and autumn of 1912. The 1913 Cinderella can be considered a remake of the earlier film, but both are derived from the original Perrault tale. Méliès had previously adapted Cinderella thirteen years earlier, in an 1899 film which had been his first big success. I may not find the key to unlock the mystery of the glass slipper, but who cares.Cinderella or the Glass Slipper ( French: Cendrillon ou la Pantoufle merveilleuse) is a 1913 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. Oddly, I found no mention anywhere else of this illustration.īut on my next visit to Paris, I plan to scour the rare book sections of bookshops as well as the famous bookstalls along the Seine. Actually there is an illustration featuring Cinderella’s shoe, which apparently accompanied the original text in the first listed website below however, it’s impossible to tell what the shoe is made of. Unless an early illustrated edition of his story can be found clearly showing what the darned slippers were made of, we’ll probably have to live with uncertainty. Long story short, we will probably never know for certain whether Perrault intended to tell a tale of a glass slipper or a fur slipper. For my money, glass is a shoe-in (groan). Who would wear fur slippers with a fancy, jeweled ball gown anyway? Squirrel mukluks? I don’t think so. And to me, glass slippers have way more pizzazz than fur ever could. We simply have no text of Perrault’s story where fur slippers appear, only glass ones. My comment is that it’s a slippery slope to try to divine an author’s intention - in other words, to read his mind. As far as I can tell, it was Honoré de Balzac, a 19th century French writer, who first raised the issue of a mistranscription and he did so in 1841, approximately a century and a half after Cendrillon was first published. Other folks argue that the idea of glass slippers could simply have been a fairy tale-like innovation on Perrault’s part and even consider them to have been a stroke of genius, given the storied place the glass slippers occupy today in the public imagination. So some people contend that Perrault meant to write slippers of fur, but either didn’t know the correct spelling of vair (since even in his day the word was no longer common), or he did know the spelling but didn’t catch the misspelling presumably made by an incompetent transcriptionist (perish the thought!) before his story went to press. The point is that verre and vair are exact homonyms in French, or homophones if you prefer. (Vair comes from the Latin varius, meaning varied.) But if vair was sometimes used as a material for slippers, I’ve been unable to find a specific historical reference to verify this. The two colors of fur were often alternated and sewn into a coat or cape as lining. The backside of the squirrel’s fur was gray colored, the underside white. (I was surprised to find that vair is a perfectly good, if little used, English word.) In either language, vair refers to a type of rare squirrel fur used in the Middle Ages in clothing worn by royalty and high nobility. The question is: Did Perrault intend to write about a glass slipper or did he slip? That is, did he intend to write verre, the French word for glass? Or did he intend to write vair, a French word for … well, for vair. This is the first known mention of a glass slipper in the long history of the Cinderella fairy tale. So from what source did Disney’s version borrow the idea of glass slippers? It had to be from Charles Perrault, who in 1697 published a French version of Cinderella called Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre (Cinderella, or the little glass slipper). In subsequent tellings of the tale around the world, the slippers are made of a myriad of other materials: some are silver, some bedecked with jewels or pearls, some are silk. The slippers are referred to as golden in the Chinese tale. Interestingly, the prominence of a lady’s slipper in the Chinese story can possibly be traced to a south coast of China custom of a hand-sewn shoe being a sort of love token given by a young girl to her intended one. And probably a century earlier in Egypt, although that story of a girl named Rhodopis was apparently more of a stub, as Wikipedia would call it, than a well-developed plot. It seems a Cinderellaesque folk tale has existed in written form in China since 850 A.D. Walt Disney’s Cinderella is merely the version most well known to present-day American audiences. Everybody loves a good Cinderella story, right? I pointedly say a Cinderella story because, in fact, there are hundreds of variations on the Cinderella theme that have sprung from cultures around the globe stretching back over the centuries.
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