Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/503

Rh the sea." 3. "It will be time to estimate how many flagons of salt water there are, when you have begun to count up the flagons of fresh water." Compare with this the German story, No. 152.

Story-collecting in the true sense of the term did not begin in France until the end of the 17th century (later therefore than in Italy), at which period there was a great fancy for it. We pass over the commonly received opinion that the origin of these fictions, which is allowedly obscure, is to be attributed to a knowledge of the Arabian Tales, combined with recollections of the poems of the Trouvères and Troubadours. In opposition to this it is scarcely necessary to say that Galland's translation of The Thousand and one Nights only appeared (in 1704) after Perrault's death. The similarity of the French to the Italian and German stories, and at the same time their manifest independence of these, irrefragably proves—what can also be proved by their own peculiar character—that their contents were derived from oral tradition. The charges of plagiarism brought forward by Dunlop (Liebrecht, p. 408) are all unfounded. Of this, by chance, we have external evidence. Scarron (born 1610, died 1660) mentions the Peau d'âne in the Roman Comique, Paris, 1651, p. 78, and probably before Perrault wrote his. Perrault picked up the story entire, and, with the exception of trifles, added nothing to it; the style is simple and natural, and so far as was allowed by the smooth, polished mode of writing of the period, has caught the tone of childhood. One or two good expressions are preserved, viz., she walked "tant que la terre put la porter;" he comes "de douze mille lieues de là," or there is "Je vais manger ma viande," for I am going to eat; and it is quite certain that the question and answer in Bluebeard, "Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois tu rien venir?" "Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie, et l'herbe qui verdoie," was derived from oral tradition. It is to good things like these that the book owes its prolonged existence.