The ball is over, the beautiful stranger has disappeared, nothing remains of her but a glass shoe that the prince in love is holding in his hands: the scene from the French fairy tale "Cendrillon" has long since freed itself from the confines of this fairy tale, she has been retold, transformed, parodied hundreds of times, and the version in the 1950 Disney cartoon Cinderella trumps all others.

Here, too, the shoe is the star, it is the hallmark of the mysterious dancer, much more than the dress or the pretty face of the girl could ever be.

However, the appearance of the glass slipper is nothing compared to that of the slipper in Perrault's original fairy tale in Giambattista Basile's seventeenth-century collection The Pentameron.

The sight of the slipper puts the prince, who presses it to his heart and kisses it, into a torrent of words.

"If the foundation is so beautiful, what will the house look like first," he asks himself, and he gives the shoe along: "Until now you were the prison of a white foot, now you are the chain of an unhappy heart." Also in Basiles In the version the prince lets the girls of the country try the slipper, but for Lucretia, as Cinderella is called here, the shoe try is not necessary - the slipper flies towards her foot as if it were magnetic.

The little escapes of the princesses

This is only logical in fairy tales, where shoes are traditionally the betrayers of all our secrets.

As we are, so are our shoes, and vice versa.

The princesses in the Grimm fairy tale "The Danced Shoes" can tell you a thing or two about it, because their secret nocturnal orgies would have remained undiscovered if they hadn't ruined their shoes in the process, which was noticed the morning after.

In the fairy tale “The Elves” a shoemaker gets free help at work night after night.

When he finds out that two elves are supporting him, he gratefully makes a pair of shoes for each of them.

That is the end of the help, because the helpers, who are suddenly so smart, ask: "Aren't we boys smooth and smart?

How long should we be cobblers?”

Bread shoes are warned of

But if shoes bring our true nature to the fore, then they are also good as punishment: Snow White's evil stepmother gets red-hot iron shoes buckled on, a cleaning-addicted countess from Prague burns in the shoes that she had had made from loaves of bread.

But why is Perrault's shoe made of glass?

Genevieve Warwick, who teaches history in Edinburgh, draws attention in an essay to the author's main profession, who was partly responsible for furnishing Versailles with outrageously expensive mirrors.

In order to lower the cost of the imported goods, he should set up his own French glass industry.

In this reading, Cendrillon's shoe would be an allusion to an immoderate king who wants to glaze the whole world.

And last but not least, he takes the comfort of his subjects into account.