Basile, who’s an early riser, is at last prepared for all the eventualities imaginable in his line of work, he attends to his vehicle. In the garage, the bucket sits in its place under the faucet, and the rags sit in theirs, as well as the paper towels and the sprinkler head, which is attached to a hollow metal broom handle . . . The parts of the bus that Basile cleans: the windshield, the headlights, the taillights, the mirrors, the luggage compartment handles, and the passenger windows. What Basile polishes: the steering wheel. What Basile changes from time to time: the headrest covers.
The tires—the air pressure and wear—and the brakes are checked regularly . . . Basile takes to his job with the required sense of responsibility. He doesn’t abandon his role as a link between citizens. He doesn’t talk about things he doesn’t know about.
A driver who doesn’t reach beyond his pedals!
When I first started dealing with Basile and the beautiful bus, I was discouraged because I wasn’t sure what to make them dream about, as if I hadn’t consulted Perrault: no matter how it looks, we shouldn’t move from the story toward morals, nor should we sneak from morals toward the story, rather, we should progress from openly self-conscious reflection toward the invented story, with provocation as its only end: a story is unique, it generally has nothing to show, nothing to represent, other than what could potentially be real.
The word, the world . . .
When you speak of the wolf, you see its tail . . . In this case, language affirms its power to pull the hood off something, and affirms its skill in uncovering what convention has inadvertently stashed away, enhancing the meaning with warmth and sarcasm, if we’re dealing with literature. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that in certain highly contradictory hotels, boiling hot water won’t come out of the faucet unless you turn the blue knob, a cold color. It shouldn’t be forgotten that in the reader’s apartment, which the author has asked to enter, the author believes that he wields all the power (including the power to gain the complicity of the reader, for which the latter isn’t even awarded a discount on the visit and the thin volume left behind). In the majority of cases, the author takes this power for granted.
If the wolf ’s malicious paw must be forgiven just a little, and the listener fooled to however small a degree—just as Puss in Boots plays dead to catch mice—then it would be helpful to look to Perrault first, to read and reread Puss in Boots, and, before saying a word, to carefully mull over the delightful formula:
“Here you are, sire, a cottontail rabbit . . .”
Puss in Boots is not a cat. He would have four boots if he were a cat. Puss in Boots is the author of an adventure, and it may well be that the narrative cat’s got his tongue for the rest of his life.
Let’s sum the story up.
Times are tough, and the setting is a mill in the impoverished countryside. The miller dies, leaving behind three children. The eldest and the middle child band together to secure inheritance of the means of production and trade—the mill and the donkey. But the least fortunate of the three heirs, the youngest, is left to starve, day in, day out.
As each day fails to satiate him, he remembers the previous evening’s brewing hunger; he’s still hungry for the following day, and the day after that, and so on until eternity. Even if he were to skin and eat his whole inheritance, a cat, he would still be hungry. That cat, Puss in Boots, swings a satchel over his shoulder, puts boots on his feet, and sets off on a hunt. He tricks a rabbit into his trap.
. . . pulling the strings immediately, he caught it and killed it
without mercy.
Proud of his catch, he headed to the king’s estate and asked to speak with him. He was brought up to His Majesty’s chamber where, having entered, he bowed graciously to the king and said to him:
“Here you are, sire, a cottontail rabbit [ . . . ]”
At this point, Puss in Boots inverts the “natural” logic of the narrative (the future Carabas is hungry; the rabbit should have gone straight to him), which numerous manipulations of the story—a temptation to which too many pen-pushers and editors have succumbed—rush to modify at this precise point in Perrault’s text. Among the manipulators, many tend to fill in the blanks strategically put in place by Perrault’s use of the ellipsis:
Surely you are thinking that the cat will hurriedly bounce home to his master and bring him his catch. But here, you are completely mistaken. Our hunter had other plans, and it wasn’t toward his master’s little cottage that he was headed.
(Puss in Boots, from Perrault, ed. Hemma, Paris, 1956.)
Here’s a second example among the many appalling modifications:
“I am going to go for a jaunt in the woods. Wait for me, master.” When the cat returns a few moments later: “Look, master. I have caught a beautiful rabbit.” “What shall we do? Eat it?” “Why no, master. I will now bring it to the king.”
(Le Chat Botté, livre-disque, Touret, 1977.)
In this third example, it’s carefully made known that first and foremost the king is a gourmet:
He swung his bag over his shoulder and headed toward the royal castle, for he had heard that the king had a vice for rabbit pâté.
(Le Chat botté, éd. Fernand Nathan, Paris, 1974, images et texte de Jacques Galan.)
All of these dubious manipulations attempt to spare the reader—and the fact that the proverbial reader is a child is no excuse—from a confusing twist that is supposedly beyond his grasp. However, it’s at this precise moment that the story winds through a surprise acceleration, which is the master stroke of a masterpiece. The same narrative craftiness predates Perrault in Facetious Nights by the Italian storyteller Straparola, in which the primordial Puss in Boots can be found.3 But this tale is more diluted on the whole. By contrast, Perrault delivers the story with a brisk, irrefutable stroke of the pen. And here we find what Master Charles masters: insinuation, relaxation, patience, and rhythm.
It’s very clear to me that this subtle jostling of the reader and his lazy habits is one of the secrets behind a beautiful story. Perrault catches up to Pascal on this point: trickery and strategy are more powerful than the cottontail rabbit itself, which is in no way useful in the practical sense (even if it does turn out that the king delights in a dish of rabbit pâté, presumably that’s not a luxury or a rare delicacy for him), but rather which acts as a testimony, from one hunter to another, of an equality of privileges, sets the rise of a future nobleman off to a good start, and leads to a climb in social standing by the main character, which is one of the story’s themes.
Following the advice of his John-the-Baptist cat, the youngest and most miserable of the heirs—you and me, or, in other words, us—who doesn’t even have a Christian name, undresses and dives into the river. As soon as he emerges from its depths, he becomes the newly christened Carabas, who climbs into a carriage, dressed differently, and rides through the countryside collecting fruits and grains, wrenched with the help of repeated blackmail from the mouths of working peasants cowed by Puss in Boots’s warning that he will dice them up into pâté.
In Memoirs of My Life, Charles Perrault boasts about having been instrumental in convincing the gentlemen from Port-Royal to see the importance of directly addressing the public outside the Sorbonne in
