What was cinderellas slipper made of in the original story

Last updated: 12 July Sources: Rawson, Hugh. Devious Derivations. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, Cinderella loses one on the second night of the ball. To underscore its importance, Perrault calls the tale Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre. In French, the archaic word for squirrel fur is vair , which sounds the same as verre.

Delarue in the Garnier edition of Contes de Perrault:. The text is unequivocal. Moreover, a slipper made of fur would stretch, and therefore it would fit a number of feet. The glass slipper is inelastic: it will fit only one person. Near the end of the tale, princesses, duchesses, the whole court, and the two stepsisters cannot force their feet into the slipper.

The heroine is marked by her dainty foot size, like the princess who is bruised by a pea placed under several mattresses. Though Perrault does not say so, those feet are clean and nice to look at through the clear glass. Cinderella does not have bunions, crooked toes, or calluses. As she washes dishes, sweeps the stair, and cleans the bedrooms—the household chores she performs without complaint—does she go barefoot? Does she wear sabots , the wooden clogs of a peasant?

To speculate further, is she beautiful from head to toe because she is natural? Glass in the context of is rare and costly. The French word for shoe is chaussure or soulier. A century later, dancers donned pumps made of thin, soft leather, flimsy things that a single night of dancing could wear to pieces.

Ballet dancers today wear satin slippers, equally perishable. Yet a proper appreciation for historical costume allows Cinderella to dance in style. The king cannot take his eyes off her. How can the glass slipper be at one and the same time a fashionable shoe, a sloppy slip-on meant for comfort at home, and a rigid object that snugly fits the smallest foot in the land? She pronounces no spells, and the verb for her marvelous transmutations is only changer.

Perrault employs a simple vocabulary and grammar not far removed from everyday speech. His characters do the same. They and the settings they inhabit are almost nondescript. It would be over a century before the Brothers Grimm published their version, called Aschenputtel.

Other scholars argue that Perrault purposefully changed the slipper to glass for very specific reasons. Glass slippers would also be incredibly difficult to walk in without shattering the brittle substance, so only a true princess like Cinderella could walk and dance ever so lightly on her feet.

In the new live-action Cinderella , evil stepmother Lady Tremaine Cate Blanchett smashes one of the glass slippers to bits. In the German version of Cinderella, the evil stepsisters cut off their toes and heels in an attempt to fit into the slipper, leaving the shoe bloody. The glass slippers worn by Lily James in the new film are adorned with butterflies, taking the metaphor even further. Or did he intend to write vair, a French word for … well, for vair.

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 two colors of fur were often alternated and sewn into a coat or cape as lining. Vair comes from the Latin varius, meaning varied.

The point is that verre and vair are exact homonyms in French, or homophones if you prefer. And to me, glass slippers have way more pizzazz than fur ever could. Who would wear fur slippers with a fancy, jeweled ball gown anyway?