Cinderella dances with the prince he will have no other partner, and when she is ready to leave, he follows her. On the second day of the festival, she again asks for a silver and gold dress, to which the bird throws down a more beautiful dress than before. The father and stepmother and stepsisters find her at home, seated near the ashes in her grey gown. She has jumped from the pigeon house and run to the hazel-tree where she takes off her silver and gold gown and lays them on her mother’s grave, and the white bird takes them away. At the prince’s request the father destroys the pigeon house to see if Cinderella is there. When she tells the prince she wants to go home, the prince wishes to accompany her, but Cinderella, quick footed, runs into the pigeon house. No one recognizes the beautiful Cinderella, neither the father nor the stepmother nor the stepsisters. Again, Cinderella calls her friends to help her, and she shows the two bowls to her stepmother, to which the stepmother responds: “All this will not help you cannot go with us, for you have no clothes and can not dance we should be ashamed of you.”Ĭinderella, despondent, visits her mother’s grave and asks the white bird to throw a silver and gold gown over her, as well as “slippers embroidered with silk and silver.” Cinderella walks to the party in her new finery, and at the festival, the prince will dance only with her: “This is my partner,” he says. They succeed, but the stepmother places a second obstacle in Cinderella’s path: Cinderella must pick two bowls of lentils out of the ashes in less than an hour. Cinderella calls on “tame pigeons, turtledoves, and all you birds beneath the sky” to help her pick the lentils out of the ashes. Cinderella also wants to attend, but her stepmother, dumping a dish of lentils into the ashes, tells Cinderella to pick them out in two hours and only then can she go.
When the King of the land invites all the beautiful young maidens to a three-day festival at which his son will choose a bride, the two stepsisters demand that Cinderella help them prepare for the festival. Although birds are sometimes miraculous creatures in fairy tales, in this fairy tale they are instrumental in Cinderella’s finding her way out of the burdensome life in which she finds herself. Cinderella plants the hazel branch on top of her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears, and it grows into a “handsome tree” on which a white bird alights and gives Cinderella whatever she wishes for. When her father asks the three daughters what they would like from the fair, the stepsisters request beautiful dresses and jewelry, but Cinderella asks her father to bring back “the first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home.” The father returns with the gifts for the stepsisters and a hazel twig for Cinderella. At night she sleeps near the cinders because she has no bed her stepsisters call her Cinderella because she is always dusty and dirty. They mock her, call her a kitchen-wench and a stupid goose, and cause her every “imaginable injury,” emptying her peas and lentils into the ashes and forcing her to pick them out. In “Cinderella,” as told in the Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1974) first published in Germany in 1817 as “Aschenputtel,” Cinderella’s mother dies, her father remarries, and her two new stepsisters-“beautiful but black of heart”-make her give up her pretty clothes and put on an old grey bedgown and wooden shoes, and they force her to work all day at servile chores.
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