“She gave her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the whole world”

One thing that all versions of Cinderella have in common is the lost shoe. I will compare three versions, far apart in both time and space. Two date back to the Baroque period: the 1634 La Gatta Cenerentola by Italian writer Giambattista BasilePart of his Pentamerone and the 1697 Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre by Frenchman Charles Perrault.In Histoires ou contes du temps passé The third version dates back to the Biedermeier period in Germany: the 1812 Aschenputtel by the German brothers Grimm.In Kinder- und Hausmärchen. In 1819, they added a punishment for the stepsisters.

In the version by the Frenchman Perrault, Cinderella loses her slipper while in a hurry, but it doesn’t specify where or how she loses it. However, it is mentioned that she loses the shoe on the second night of the party when she rapidly tries to return home because of the curfew her fairy godmother had given her: midnight, to be exact.

In this version, the shoe is made of glass, just as it was in the Disney animated version from 1950 and the live action adaptation from 2015. But why would glass have been chosen as the luxurious material of the shoe?

The writer of this story, Perrault, has been linked to the court of Versailles of Louis XIV. He was a part of the bourgeoisie, and Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a close friend of his. This could explain the writer's knowledge of the court of Versailles, and it explains why he chose extravagant furnishing and fabrics in his stories. At the time, Louis XIV also used crystal and glass mirrors to construct his Hall of Mirrors.See: Michael Stephen Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930 (Cambridge (Massachusetts)/London (England): Harvard University Press, 2006), 237. Glass would have been a clear choice for Perrault, because the material emphasizes the extravagance and luxury of the Baroque period.Marnie Campagnaro,“From Palace to House. The Changing Domestic Settings of Fairy-tales,” Encyclopaideia XXI, vol 49 (2017): 8-30.