Cinderella, Humble, Haughty

My father remarried and I was very happy about it all. I’d always dreamed of having a stepmother. But heaven overwhelmed me, giving me two sisters by marriage. They were deliciously cruel. I especially loved the elder, who despised me delightfully: When she saw me always sitting in the cinders by the fireplace, whose warmth penetrated me with delight (sometimes even burning me), did her dear familiar voice not call me Kitchenella? Never was a word so sweet to my ears.

Sadly, they were pretty girls, marriageable maidens; they left us soon, leaving me with my parents, who, devoted to one another, regarded the world with a drunkard’s tenderness—and included me in their superb universal indifference. I will do anything to avoid a marriage like that . . . But how would I do it? I with my loving nature, and so submissive? . . .

Moreover, I was feeling my pleasure diminishing day by day, and my feelings of ecstasy growing weak. I understood the reason for it (being devoted, for lack of anything better, to solitary reveries, I reflected a great deal on it): Such pleasures grow dull from **** of habit. I was too lowly at present, too humiliated, to enjoy, vigorously, my daily humiliation. One has to climb up on the shores, on a high bank, to plunge again into the infinite sea of human pleasures. Daughter of a king, ah! if I were queen! . . . To wed, publicly to wed, the lowliest of my vassals, to make it seem that he **** me to abdicate, he mistreated me, he preferred the chattel of his village to me! . . . How to make such fantasies real?

My very wise godmother, Fairy Godmother, to whom I confessed my desires, came to my rescue. She knew our Prince very well (once upon a time, she’d assisted at his baptism), and revealed to me by which curious particularities one could seduce him: He had a passion for women’s shoes. To touch them; to kiss them; to let himself be trampled underneath their charming heels (pointed heels painted scarlet to look like splashes of blood); it is a modest joy that he has sought since he was a child. On this, though, the ladies of the court have not satisfied him: clumsy and timid, afraid of harming the heir to the throne, they dressed up in slippers. And, fearing he would kiss them in a vulgar manner, with every sign of respect they raised a foot up to his august but bitter mouth with its fixed smile . . . For this royal lover one must be the haughty mistress, the pitiless dominatrix in hard heels, someone I could be—I who understand! . . .

“Godmother, you demand the most terrible sacrifice of me! This man is the opposite of what my heart wants.”

—“I know that very well, my little one. But there’s a reason. Every sacrifice has its own reward: You will feel in playing your part an emotion more profound than those you’ve so far known all too well. But blasé Cinderella, believe me: the most acute sweetness on earth (for you, the most vivid happiness) is to oppose this instinct, to violate and to chastise by turns.”

Persuaded by my good godmother, I accepted her presents: three pairs of gray horses the color of cinders, a carriage, a coachman, six footmen; clothes of velvet and gold, dainty delicate slippers of squirrel fur (he adores fur) that she entrusted specially to me. . . .

She recommended that I be proud and fierce, as mysterious as the ideal, and to flee without fail on the stroke of midnight, the second night losing (but in full view of the Prince, who would be following me), my little left slipper. (I have such small and compact feet, they seem stunted—because I regularly squeeze them into a vise of stiff linen and rigid lace, as the Chinese do. This exquisite, and habitual, **** fills me with pleasure . . . )

I obey. I saw the Prince, yesterday, and he importuned me vociferously. Alas! I guessed only too well his thoughts! and noticed the essential details . . He blushes at the subject of boots. He blushes, he naively told me, if he passes in front of a display of shoes, which seems to him the worst indecency; but a display of flesh does not touch his tolerant and modest soul: It amazes him that anyone could complain about games so silly, and even a little repugnant.

I agree with him. And perhaps I could truly love him if he wanted sometimes to reverse our roles . . . One must not even dream of that: If I destroyed his illusions, he would quite quickly return the cricket to the hearth!—I must deceive him to the grave.

What’s important is to be Princess. When I become Princess, godmother helping it, I know quite well that I will have myself beaten by the least of my manservants.

Then I will don again my garb of the slovenly maid, those precious rags, with their color and smell of cinders, and every day, secretly, I will cover my crazy head; I will go out into the night. I will approach passersby (there’s no lack of poor men or ugly men or even dishonest men), and the better I play my role for the dear Prince, the more marvelously intense for me will be this contrast and these humiliating encounters.