to review the essential components of the plot.

A miller dies and bequeaths his three sons a mill, an ass, and a cat. The youngest son is so dissatisfied with inheriting the cat that he wants to eat it and make a muff of his skin. To save his life, the cat responds, “‘Ne vous affligez point, mon maître, vous n’avez qu’à me donner un Sac, et me faire faire une paire de Bottes pour aller dans les broussailles, et vous verrez que vous n’êtes pas si mal partagé que vous croyez’” [“Don’t trouble yourself, master. Just give me a pouch and a pair of boots to go into the bushes, and you’ll see that you were not left with as bad a share as you think”].²

The extraordinary cat goes into the woods where he proceeds to catch rabbits, partridges, and other game, and he gives them to the king as presents from the Marquis de Carrabas. On a day that the cat knows the king will be taking a drive on the banks of a river with his daughter, he instructs his master to take off his clothes and bathe in the river. When the king comes by, the cat pretends that robbers have taken his master's clothes. Consequently, the king provides the miller's son with royal clothes, and his daughter immediately falls in love with him. The young man gets into the royal coach, while the cat runs ahead and warns peasants, who are mowing and reaping in the fields, that if they do not say that the estate belongs to the Marquis de Carrabas, they will be cut into tiny pieces like minced meat. Of course, the peasants obey, and in the meantime the cat arrives at a beautiful castle owned by an ogre. He flatters the ogre, who can change himself into anything he wants, by asking him to transform himself into a lion. Then he dares him to change himself into a rat or mouse, and when the ogre performs this feat, he is promptly eaten by the cat. When the king, his daughter, and the miller's son arrive at this beautiful castle, they are all overwhelmed by its splendor, and after the king has had five or six cups of wine, he proposes that the marquis become his son-in-law. No fool, the “marquis” accepts, and after he marries the princess, the cat becomes a great lord and never again runs after mice except for his own amusement.

Perrault's version combines elements of the Straparola and Basile tales to forge his own statement that he states in two ironic verse morals at the end of his tale:

Moralité
Quelque grand que soit l’avantage
De jourir d’un riche héritage
Venant à nous de père en fils
Aux jeunes gens pour l’ordinaire,
L’industrie et la savoir-faire
Valent mieux que des biens acquis.
Autre Moralité
Si le fils d’un Meunier, avec tant de vitesse,
Gagne le coeur d’un Princesse,
Et s’en fait regarder avec des yeux mourants,
C’est que l’habit, la mine et la jeunesse,
Pour inspirer de la tendresse,
N’en sont pas de moyens toujours indifférents. (142)
[Moral
Although the advantage may be great
When one inherits a grand estate
From father handed down to son,
Young men will find that industry
Combined with ingenuity,
Will lead to prosperity.
Another Moral
If the miller's son had quick success
In winning such a fair princess,
By turning on the charm,
Then regard his manners, looks, and dress
That inspired her deepest tenderness,
For they can’t do one any harm. (24)]

These morals reflect two of the major themes in Perrault's tales that were also significant in the tales of Straparola and Basile. In the first instance, Perrault asserts that the best means by which one can become a rich nobleman is through brains and industry. In the second instance, he maintains that show and the proper clothes (spectacle and display) can also enable a man from the lower class to move up in society. But Perrault deals with more than just these two themes in his tale. He also demonstrates how speech and writing can be used to attain power within the civilizing process.

In his highly perceptive essay, “Puss in Boots: Power of Signs—Signs of Power,” Louis Marin points out that

the cat is an operator of change: he articulates a spatial continuum that differentiates space by a temporal program or better strategy. The cat as trickster figure in North American Indian myths is always wandering in the different parts of the world. But his trips in our tale cannot be separated from his tricks. I mean his use of language. This use is manifested in the tale by the fact that the cat always anticipates his master's itinerary toward the cultural (social and economic) maximum. Everything occurs as if his master's coming in a place actualizes what his cat says just before. Textually speaking, the cat is the representative of the narrative modalizations (mainly the modality of desire) and his master, the vehicle of narrative assertions (or wish fulfillments).³

It is not only through the manipulation of speech within the tale, however, that we find the outlines for hwo men can succeed in society, but it is in the very writing of the text itself by Perrault that generic prescriptions take hold, assume power, and become established models for reading and writing. If we begin first by examining the text, it becomes evident that Perrault's tale consolidates crucial elements from the Straparola and Basile versions that transform the cat into the master cat, whose story effaces all those before his and determines the project of all those to come. Perrault's Puss demonstrates what it takes for a middle-class administrator to succeed in French society of his time: 1) Loyalty and obedience to one's master, otherwise one will be killed; 2) the proper tools to do one's job; the cat needs a pouch to capture his prey and boots of respectability to gain entrance to the king's castle; 3) gracious speech that is also duplicitous; 4) cunning to take advantage of those who are more powerful; 5) the acquisition of land and wealth by force; 6) the readiness to kill when necessary; 7) the ability to arrange business affairs such as a marriage of convenience that will lead to permanent security.

In the process, it is important to note that women are pushed to the margins in this tale, just as they are in the world of men. They are there as display, as chattel, as bargaining items. They are speechless. The words of the cat that generate the action and mediate everything are crucial for attaining success. The cat knows how to plea, flatter, advise, threaten, dupe, and generate a proposition from the opposing side.

But we must remember that these words are the words of Perrault, manipulating, arranging, and playing with them on a page. Perrault contemplating known literary and oral versions, changing them in his mind, thinking about his own society and literary debates, seeking to endow his words with the power of conviction so that they might become exemplary.

And exemplary they did become. Almost all of the eight tales that he published in Histoires ou contes du temps passé—“Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Little Tom Thumb,” “Blue Beard,” “Riquet with the Tuft,” “The Fairies,” and “Puss in Boots”—have become classics in Western society. In the case of “Puss in Boots,” it was disseminated through chapbooks and broadsides at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, translated into English and German by 1730, and became embedded in the oral tradition as well. Obviously, there were many different versions that continued to be told and spread, but for the most part, the literary tradition of “Puss in Boots” was now mainly that of Perrault. For all intents and purposes, the versions of Straparola and Basile were erased from Western memroy. Indeed, they were no longer necessary, for Perrault's literary text became the standard-bearer of a male civilizing process at a time when French culture was dominant in Europe and setting cultural standards, and at a time when the literary fairy tale itself was being firmly established as a literary institution by Perrault and numerous other French writers.

Notes

1. See Denise Escarpit, Histoire d’un conte: Le Chat Botté en France et en Angleterre, vol. 1 (Paris: Didier, 1985), 88-120.

2. Charles Perrault, Contes, ed. Gilbert Rouger (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 137. Translation is my own, from Jack Zipes, ed., Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (New York: New American Library, 1989), 21. Subsequent quotations are from these editions.

3. Louis Marin, “Puss-in-Boots: Power of Signs—Signs of Power,” Diacritics 7 (June 1977): 57.