every stranger could be the wolf who will eat you up. Cinderella compels you to distrust stepmothers and stepsisters. But the character who most effectively teaches obedience and spreads fear is the Ogre.
The child-eating Ogre in Perrault’s stories was based on an illustrious gentleman, Gilles de Retz, who fought alongside Joan of Arc at Orléans and in other battles.
This lord of several castles, the youngest marshal in France, was accused of torturing, raping, and killing wayward children caught wandering about his estates in search of bread or perhaps a job in one of the choruses that sang to the glory of his accomplishments.
Under torture, Gilles confessed to hundreds of infanticides, and gave detailed accounts of his carnal delights.
He ended up on the gallows.
Five and a half centuries later, he was absolved. A tribunal in the French Senate reviewed the trial, decreed it was a travesty, and revoked the sentence.
He was unable to celebrate the good news.
THE TATAR OGRE
Genghis Khan, the Antichrist who led the Mongolian hordes sent by Satan, was the Ogre of the stories that for many years terrorized Europe’s adults.
“They aren’t men! They are demons!” shrieked Frederick II, king of Sicily and of Prussia.
In reality, Europe was offended because Genghis Khan thought the continent not worth invading. He scorned it as backward, and stuck to Asia. Using rather indelicate methods, he conquered an enormous empire that stretched from the Mongolian plateau to the Russian steppes, encompassing China, Afghanistan, and Persia.
His reputation rubbed off on the entire Khan clan.
Yet Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan did not devour raw the Europeans who turned up from time to time before his throne in Beijing. He feted them, listened to them, hired them.
Marco Polo worked for him.
MARCO POLO
He was in prison in Genoa when he dictated the book of his travels. His fellow inmates believed every word. While they listened to the adventures of Marco Polo, twenty-seven years wandering on the roads of the Orient, each and every prisoner escaped and traveled with him.
Three years later, the former prisoner from Venice published his book. “Published” is a manner of speaking, because the printing press had yet to appear in Europe. Several handmade copies circulated. The few readers Marco Polo found did not believe a thing.
He must have been hallucinating: how could glasses of wine float up untouched to the lips of the great Khan? How could a melon from Afghanistan cost as much as a woman? The most generous among them said the merchant writer was not well in the head.
By the Caspian Sea, on the road from Mount Ararat, this delirious raver had seen burning oils, then in the mountains of China he’d seen flaming rocks. Ridiculous at best were his claims about the Chinese having paper money bearing the seal of the Mongolian emperor, and ships that carried over a thousand people. The unicorn from Sumatra and the singing sands of the Gobi Desert evoked guffaws, and those textiles that laughed at fire, which Marco Polo found beyond Taklamakan, were simply unbelievable.
Centuries later it all came out:
the oils that burned were petroleum,
the stone that burned was coal,
the Chinese had been using paper money for five hundred years,
and their ships, ten times the size of European ones, had gardens that
provided sailors with fresh vegetables to prevent scurvy,
the unicorn was a rhinoceros,
the wind made the tops of the dunes in the desert whine,
and the fire-resistant fabric was made of asbestos.
At the time of Marco Polo, Europe knew nothing of petroleum, coal, paper money, large ships, rhinoceroses, high dunes, or asbestos.
WHAT DID THE CHINESE NOT INVENT?
When I was a child, I knew China as the country on the other side of the world from Uruguay. You could get there if you had the patience to dig a hole deep enough.
Later on, I learned something about world history, but world history was the history of Europe and
The child-eating Ogre in Perrault’s stories was based on an illustrious gentleman, Gilles de Retz, who fought alongside Joan of Arc at Orléans and in other battles.
This lord of several castles, the youngest marshal in France, was accused of torturing, raping, and killing wayward children caught wandering about his estates in search of bread or perhaps a job in one of the choruses that sang to the glory of his accomplishments.
Under torture, Gilles confessed to hundreds of infanticides, and gave detailed accounts of his carnal delights.
He ended up on the gallows.
Five and a half centuries later, he was absolved. A tribunal in the French Senate reviewed the trial, decreed it was a travesty, and revoked the sentence.
He was unable to celebrate the good news.
THE TATAR OGRE
Genghis Khan, the Antichrist who led the Mongolian hordes sent by Satan, was the Ogre of the stories that for many years terrorized Europe’s adults.
“They aren’t men! They are demons!” shrieked Frederick II, king of Sicily and of Prussia.
In reality, Europe was offended because Genghis Khan thought the continent not worth invading. He scorned it as backward, and stuck to Asia. Using rather indelicate methods, he conquered an enormous empire that stretched from the Mongolian plateau to the Russian steppes, encompassing China, Afghanistan, and Persia.
His reputation rubbed off on the entire Khan clan.
Yet Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan did not devour raw the Europeans who turned up from time to time before his throne in Beijing. He feted them, listened to them, hired them.
Marco Polo worked for him.
MARCO POLO
He was in prison in Genoa when he dictated the book of his travels. His fellow inmates believed every word. While they listened to the adventures of Marco Polo, twenty-seven years wandering on the roads of the Orient, each and every prisoner escaped and traveled with him.
Three years later, the former prisoner from Venice published his book. “Published” is a manner of speaking, because the printing press had yet to appear in Europe. Several handmade copies circulated. The few readers Marco Polo found did not believe a thing.
He must have been hallucinating: how could glasses of wine float up untouched to the lips of the great Khan? How could a melon from Afghanistan cost as much as a woman? The most generous among them said the merchant writer was not well in the head.
By the Caspian Sea, on the road from Mount Ararat, this delirious raver had seen burning oils, then in the mountains of China he’d seen flaming rocks. Ridiculous at best were his claims about the Chinese having paper money bearing the seal of the Mongolian emperor, and ships that carried over a thousand people. The unicorn from Sumatra and the singing sands of the Gobi Desert evoked guffaws, and those textiles that laughed at fire, which Marco Polo found beyond Taklamakan, were simply unbelievable.
Centuries later it all came out:
the oils that burned were petroleum,
the stone that burned was coal,
the Chinese had been using paper money for five hundred years,
and their ships, ten times the size of European ones, had gardens that
provided sailors with fresh vegetables to prevent scurvy,
the unicorn was a rhinoceros,
the wind made the tops of the dunes in the desert whine,
and the fire-resistant fabric was made of asbestos.
At the time of Marco Polo, Europe knew nothing of petroleum, coal, paper money, large ships, rhinoceroses, high dunes, or asbestos.
WHAT DID THE CHINESE NOT INVENT?
When I was a child, I knew China as the country on the other side of the world from Uruguay. You could get there if you had the patience to dig a hole deep enough.
Later on, I learned something about world history, but world history was the history of Europe and
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