Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/321

Rh work on Les Fées. The spiritual midwives and prophetesses at the hour of birth are familiar in märchen as Fairies, and Fates, and Mæræ.

(8.) The river carries a tress of the hair of Bitiou's wife to the feet of Pharaoh's washermen; the scent perfumes all the king's linen. Pharaoh falls in love with the woman from whose locks this tress has come. For this incident compare Cinderella. In Santal and Indian märchen a tress of hair takes the place of the glass-slipper, and the amorous prince or princess will only marry the person from whose head the lock has come. Here M. Cosquin himself gives Siamese, Mongol, Bengali (LaL Behar Day, p. 86), and other examples of the lock of hair doing duty for the slipper with which the lover is smitten, and by which he recognises his true love.

(9.) The wife of Bitiou reveals the secret of his heart. The people of Pharaoh cut down the acacia tree.

(10.) His brother reads in the turbid beer the death of Bitiou. He discovers the heart and life in a berry of the acacia.

It is superfluous to give modern parallels to the various transformations of the life of Bitiou. He becomes an Apis bull, and his faithless wife desires his death, and wishes to eat his liver, but his life goes on in other forms. This is merely the familiar situation of the ass in Peau d'Ane (the ass who clearly, before Perrault's time, had been human).

Demandez lui la peau de ce rare animal!

In most traditional versions of Cinderella will be