The Cat Makes the Man (original) (raw)

There are many different stories of intelligent and resourceful animals that manage to elevate otherwise hopeless humans to fame and fortune. I remember an African tale from one of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books in which the animal helper was a gazelle, and Maria Tatar mentions that an Indian story gives this role to a jackal. Thanks to Charles Perrault, however, the most famous example of such an animal is a cat, known as Puss in Boots in English.

Perrault’s appears to be the first written version of the tale that gives the cat boots, but whether the footwear featured in oral versions is unknown. Puss uses trickery and threats to gain money, power, and royal favor for the youngest son of a miller. The archetypal cat of literature is clever and devious, and I can definitely see how that came about. I mean, I’ve lived with cats for over twenty years now, and they often seem like they’re up to something. Of course, the booted cat is also incredibly loyal, and while he does benefit from his master’s good fortune, it’s the miller’s son who really gets the most out of it. To briefly sum up the story, the cat is the only inheritance that the miller’s third son receives, but this feline fools the king into believing that the young man is the Marquis de Carabas, owner of a good amount of land. He then tricks the ogre who actually owns the land into transforming himself into a mouse and kills him, leaving the miller’s son free to take possession of the ogre’s castle and lands.

It’s not clear whether “Marquis de Carabas” was the ogre’s title, or just something the cat made up. According to this page, Carabas was the name of a foolish man in Alexandria who acquired a certain amount of renown, and Jack Zipes proposed that this could have been the source for the name. We also don’t know what happens when the ogre’s lawyer reads his will and it turns out the land was actually bequeathed to the Human Flesh Advisory Board or something. (You know, because that’s what ogres eat? Eh, whatever.) I’ve been reading Les Miserables, so I know that French courts are really strict.

I haven’t seen the Shrek films, so while I do know that Antonio Banderas voices the character in them, I can’t say anything else about his role. The fact that he’s portrayed as a swordsman suggests he’s more like Reepicheep from the Chronicles of Narnia than Perrault’s Puss, however. There was also an anime called Puss in Boots that doesn’t seem to have too much to do with the original story, and which I really only know about because there was a Captain N episode based on the video game based on the anime. Talk about one thing leading to another!

The story of Puss in Boots reminds me of another famous tale of a cat helping to make someone’s fortune, that of Dick Whittington and his cat.

In this story, Richard Whittington is a poor scullery boy who buys a cat, and then manages to sell it to a foreign king whose palace is overrun with mice, thereby becoming rich and going on to serve three terms as Lord Mayor of London. There really was a man with that name was served three terms as Lord Mayor, but unlike the Dick Whittington in the story, he came from money. Since he left most of his fortune to charity, he was widely remembered as a great benefactor for London, which could have something to do with why he was singled out as a Lord Mayor worthy of legendary status. Whittington died in 1423, and the story isn’t known to have appeared until the early seventeenth century. There are, however, earlier known tales of a poor man selling a cat to a king with a rodent problem, most famously the Persian folk tale of Keis of Siraf. Regardless of the origin, there is now a statue of Whittington’s cat on Highgate Hill in London.

This story differs from “Puss in Boots” in that the cat doesn’t actually have to DO anything (well, other than catch mice), but still drives home the point that a cat is always a good investment.