The White Cat - Variants

Variants

This story is closely related to The Frog Princess, wherein a transformed frog, the bride of the youngest son, performs better at three tasks to test the brides than the other sons' human brides.

Madame d'Aulnoy began with tasks, and wrought the tale into a highly ornate and literary story. Her king sets the tasks to his sons to distract them, for fear that he will lose his throne. The prince finds not a frog in a dreary swamp but a fanciful and enchanted castle inhabited by cats, and his sojourn there is richly detailed. The cat does not transform merely because the prince needs a bride, but like the fox in The Golden Bird, asks the prince to cut off her head. The cat tells an elaborate story to explain her transformation: After her mother promised her, before she was born, in return for fairy fruit, the fairies raised her, again using the motif as in Rapunzel. When she fell in love with a human king while they were arranging her marriage to an ugly fairy king, they killed her lover and transformed her into a cat. Instead of the youngest son receiving his father's kingdom, his wife bestowed a kingdom on his father, and one on each of his brothers, and at that, she and he still had three kingdoms to reign over.