Pentamerone – The Young Slave

Let’s return to the Burton version of the Pentamerone. His summary of “The Young Slave” is “Lisa is born from a rose-leaf, and dieth through a fairy’s curse; her mother layeth her in a chamber and biddeth her brother not to open the door. But his wife being very jealous, wishing to see what is shut therein, openeth the door, and findeth Lisa well and alive, and attiring her in slave raiments, treateth her with cruelty. Lisa being at last recognised by her uncle, he sendeth his wife home to her relations, and giveth his niece in marriage. ” Remember, Burton loves this faux-Jacobean style of writing.

The Baron has a sister called Cilla, and she’s playing in the garden with her ladies. They have a wager about who can jump over a rosebush with a single beautiful flower upon it. Cilla wins by cheating – she knocks a leaf (or perhaps a petal) loose, and so she eats it before the other girls see.

Three days later, she’s pregnant. A sign saying “Don’t eat this Creo vis or use it in longevity potions.” would save a lot of trouble. She goes to the faeries for help, and in my personal canon, they were responsible for this. They tell her that she’s pregnant by the leaf, and she gives birth secretly. She names the baby Lisa and gives it to the faeries to raise.

The faeries probably give each other high fives. Each also gives the child a magical blessing, except the last. It was running so fast to see the child it stood on a thorn and so cursed the child instead. That faeries do this sort of thing is precisely the reason people should not give babies to them to raise. The curse is that Lisa will die when she is seven, when her mother would accidentally stick a comb into her head while doing the child’s hair. The queen, who apparently does not know what short hair is, or what brushes are, actually does this, and there are many tears. The queen puts the child within seven crystal chests, and locks her in a distant part of the palace. Oddly, putting corpses in crystal coffins to keep them fresh turns up in Herodotus, and is a mystery initiation of one path of House Criamon.

Cilla’s health fails, so she calls her brother and basically says “I am giving you all my stuff, on one condition. Never open the final chamber in the palace which is unlocked by this particular key, and which you must keep in your desk.” So, the brother agrees, and a year passes, and the he marries.

He is going off for a hunting party with the lads, and he leaves his wife in charge of the castle. This being one of the earliest collections of faerie stories, him saying “Hey, please don’t open the most distant chamber using the key in my desk, OK? Love you, bye!” is not yet a trope. His wife opens the door and sees the beautiful child inside. The story notes the child has grown as if still alive, and that the crystal coffins had lengthened to suit her. That being said, she sounds a lot older than eight in the rest of the story.

There may be a metaphor here I’m not seeing, but the wife says that this is a “Mohammed” her husband was worshipping. There is an odd tradition of Christian folklore about Muslims with weird effigies they worship (like the Templars) but it might be that the girl is more of a metaphorical idol. Either way the woman opens the coffins and tries to pull the girl’s hair out, which dislodges the comb.

Lisa awakes and cries out for her mother, but the other woman cuts off her hair and gives her a beating. Then she beats her daily and scratches her face until she has black eyes (swollen like eggplants in the Penguin edition) and her mouth bleeds as if she has eaten raw pigeons. The lord comes back from whatever the Venetian equivalent is to a trip to Vegas is and asks her why she’s doing this, but she answers that Lisa is a recalcitrant slave girl sent by her aunt, and that sort of explanation is perfectly normal in Venice in period.

Later, the lord is going to the market, and because he’s got some noblesse oblige, but not a lot, he gets caught out by a magic effect that phases him far less than it should. He asks everyone in his household, including the cats, what they would like from the market. Despite his wife’s protestations he even asks the slave girl. She asks for a doll, a knife and a pumice stone, and curses him so that if he forgets, he won’t be able to cross rivers until he goes back for her swag. He forgets, and the river floods, throws up boulder and trees, and generally terrifies him until he makes good his mistake. . In some versions of the story it does it three times, once for each gift, but not in the version we are working with.

Lisa goes ot the kitchen and cries out her life story to the doll. When the doll doesn’t answer, she picks up the knife, sharpens it on the pumice stone, and tells the doll that unless it answers, she’s going to stab herself. The doll tells her it is not deaf, presumably because the faeries freak out when their toy is about to opt out of the game permanently. She does this for several days until the baron overhears her, realises hat’s gone on, and sends her to the house of a relative to recuperate. After a few months, she becomes “as beautiful as a goddess” and her uncle throws her a banquet. During this, he asks her to recite her troubled history. The guests all weep and the baron tells his wife to go home to her family. He then gives her a good husband. and, since he doesn’t have any kids and has sent his wife away, we must assume the right to inherit his estate.