“It was small and dainty, and made of pure gold”

In the third and last fairytale, we take a look at the German version of the Brothers Grimm. In this version, Cinderella wears three different pairs of shoes on the three different nights of the festival. She wears shoes of silk and silver on the first night, shoes of an unknown material on the second night, and shoes made of pure gold on the third night. It is from this last pair on the third night that she actually loses one of those shoes while trying to run away from the prince again. She succeeded in doing so for the first two nights, but the third time the prince came up with a plan: to paint the stairs with tar. Third time’s a charm, he thinks.

However, even this time she manages to escape. Luckily for the prince she loses her golden shoe, which is then used as a tool to find her. A funny detail: the story specifies that she loses her left shoe. In the image above, on a German stamp from 1965, Cinderella’s shoes are also depicted as gold.

It is worth mentioning that the choice of rich and extravagant shoes is not necessarily in line with the time period in which the Brothers Grimm wrote the story: the Biedermeier period. This time period is characterized by the use of wood and an emphasis on sobriety.Marnie Campagnaro, “From Palace to House. The Changing Domestic Settings of Fairy-tales,” Encyclopaideia XXI, vol 49 (2017): 23-24. Maybe this choice could be justified by saying that the reason was to place emphasis on the importance of the shoe in the story; by making it stand out.

Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and the German brothers Grimm: all their stories needed the shoe. The object is the source and the salvation that helps Cinderella escape a miserable situation, and thus it becomes the symbol of her newly gained freedom. Be it golden, with high heels or made of glass; all three versions of this object were needed for the plot twist, and it is the determining reason for the happy ending.