Marquis de Carabas

The marquis de Carabas is the imaginary name of one of the characters of the tale the Master cat or the Cat boot of Charles Perrault, published for the first time in 1697 with the Tales of my mother Oye.

Presentation

The marquis de Carabas is not Marquis as its name lets it suppose. This usurped title and the exotic name of Carabas is invented by the Cat boot for its Master (which one is unaware of the real name), third wire of a miller without fortune which left him for any heritage only this cat. While making become its Master pauper for a marquis, the Cat boot hopes to draw to him, thanks to various tricks, the attention and the favors of the king.

In one of the first versions of the tale, the pseudo marquis changes title in an unexplained way during the account and becomes “count”:

“the girl of the King extremely found it with his liking, and the Count de Carabas to him had not thrown two or three extremely respectful, and a little tender glances, that it became in love about it with the madness”.

One can suppose that it is about a promotion given by the princess in love. Thus, the young man passes from the wire statute of miller without heritage to that of count de Carabas and son-in-law of the king, without never being a marquis. Its fulgurating social rise can appear all the more unjust as it did not do anything of other for that but to let itself guide by its cat, which itself resorts to the lie and the trick for better handling the various protagonists of the tale.

The social advancement is the topic of another tale of Perrault, that of the Tom Thumb, kid who arrives, thanks to his intelligence and its courage, to put to me at the service of the king after having triumphed over the Ogre while seizing his Bottes seven miles.

Origin

G. Rouger proposes two explanations at the origin of this name:

Carabas was the name of insane, that the inhabitants of Alexandria treated with the regards due to a king to make fun of Hérode Agrippa Ier, king de Judée, of passage in their city
Carabag is a Turkish word which indicates the “mountains (…) in which it was formerly necessary of delights where the Mongolian sultans and other princes made their stay during the summer”, according to the definition given in the Eastern Dictionnaire of Barthélemy d' Herbelot de Molainville. Perrault could discover this term before the publication of this dictionary.

Name of the characters of Perrault

Generally, the heroes of the Tales of my mother Oye draw their name from a physical characteristic: Tom Thumb, Riquet with the bunch, Sleeping Beauty), of a clothing (Skin of Ass, the Little Red Riding Hood, the Cat boot), or of their activity (Cinderella).

But many are the supporting characters who remain in a certain anonymity, confined with their social and narrative function: the king, the queen, the prince, the Godmother-fairy, the grandmother, the Ogre, the logger, or their animal quality: the Wolf

If Perrault equips some with a name (as the Sœur Anne of the wife of the blue Beard), it is noted, when one has two versions of the same tale, that the author aims to the diagram: the Master of hotel of the queen in Sleeping Beauty loses his first name of Simon thus and is brought back to his operational function.

Perrault however sometimes yielded to the sound magic of the Kingdom of Mataquin and the Cantalabutte Emperor ( Sleeping Beauty ) or of the marquis de Carabas, moving away a little more the reader of the real-world before final morals does not renew it there.

Random links: