The Milkmaid and Her Pail
Encyclopedia
The Milkmaid and Her Pail is a folktale of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1430 about interrupted daydreams of wealth and fame. Ancient tales of this type exist in the East but Western variants are not found before the Middle Ages
. It was only in the 19th century that the story about the daydream
ing milkmaid
began to be attributed to Aesop
and it does not appear in the Perry Index
.
as "The brahman who built air-castles". There a man speculates about the wealth that will flow from selling a pot of grain that he has been given, progressing through a series of sales of animals until he has enough to support a wife and family. The child misbehaves, his wife takes no heed, so he kicks her and in doing so upsets the pot that was to make his fortune. Other variants include Bidpai's "The Poorman and the Flask of Oil", "The Barber's Tale of his Fifth Brother" from The 1001 Nights and the Jewish story of "The Dervish and the Honey Jar".
From its earliest appearance in the 14th century, the story of the daydreaming milkmaid has been told as a cautionary fable illustrating the lesson that you should 'Confine your thoughts to what is real'. It appears under the title "Of what happened to a woman called Truhana" in Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor (1335), one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish
It is different from the Eastern variants in that it is told of a woman on the way to market who starts to speculate on the consequences of investing the sale of her wares in eggs and breeding chickens from them. In this case it is a jar of honey that she unbalances from her head. When the story reappears in a 16th century French version, the woman has become a milkmaid and engages in detailed financial calculations of her profits.
The story gained lasting popularity after Jean de La Fontaine
included it among his Fables (VII.10). The charm of La Fontaine's poetic form apart, however, it differs little from the version recorded in his source, Bonaventure des Périers
' Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis (1558). There the fable is made an example of the practice of alchemists, who are like 'a good woman that was carrying a pot of milk to market and reckoning up her account as follows: she would sell it for half a sou and with that would buy a dozen eggs which she would set to hatch and have from them a dozen chicks; when they were grown she would have them castrated and then they would fetch five sous each, so that'd be at least a crown with which she would buy two piglets, a male and a female, and farrow a dozen more from them once they were grown, and they'd sell for twenty sous a piece after raising, making twelve francs with which she'd buy a mare that would have a fine foal. It would be really nice as it grew up, prancing about and neighing. And so happy was the good woman imagining this that she began to frisk in imitation of her foal, and that made the pot fall and all the milk spill. And down tumbled with it her eggs, her chickens, her capons, her mare and foal, the whole lot.'
In Britain the fable was included originally in none of the main compilations of Aesop's fables. Its earliest appearance was in the opening section of Robert Dodsley
's Select fables of Esop and other fabulists (1761), in which many fables from elsewhere were collected. Titled “The country maid and her milk pail”, it is prefaced with the sentiment that 'when men suffer their imagination to amuse them with the prospect of distant and uncertain improvements of their condition, they frequently sustain real losses by their inattention to those affairs in which they are immediately concerned'. The story is briefly told and ends with the pail being dislodged when the girl scornfully tosses her head in rejection of all the young men at the dance she was to attend, wearing a new dress to be bought with the proceeds of her commercial activities. A different version was versified by Jefferys Taylor as "The Milkmaid" in his Aesop in Rhyme (1820). As in Bonaventure des Périers' telling, the bulk of the poem is given over to the long reckoning of prices. It ends with the maid toppling her pail by superciliously tossing her head in rejection of her former humble circumstances.
The moral on which Taylor ends his poem is 'Reckon not your chickens before they are hatched’, where a later collection has 'Count not...' The proverb fits the story and its lesson so well that one is tempted to speculate that it developed out of some earlier oral version of the fable. But the earliest recorded instance of it in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is in a religious sonnet dating from the 1570s. The idiom used by La Fontaine in the course of his long conclusion is 'to build castles in Spain', of which he gives a few examples that make it clear that the meaning he intends is 'to dream of the impossible'. Avoiding that may well be what Bonaventure des Périers intended in telling his story too, but in the English versions the moral to be drawn is that to bring a plan to completion more than dreaming is required.
A version of the fable was written by the German poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
in the 18th century. It differs little from other retellings, apart from its conclusion. The woman confesses what has happened to her husband, who advises her to live in the here and now and be content with what she has rather than ‘building castles in air’. Here he uses the German equivalent of La Fontaine's idiom. The story has also provided German with another idiomatic phrase, 'milkmaid's reckoning' (milchmädchenrechnung), used of drawing naïve and false conclusions.
's print in which the girl has fallen on her back (1755), an episode unsanctioned by the text. The explanation for the inelegant posture seems to be that the idiom la cruche casée (the broken pitcher) then meant the loss of virginity and so suggests a less innocent explanation of how the milk came to be spilt. Jean-Honoré Fragonard
also depicts a fall in his picture of the fable (1770), although in this case the girl has tumbled forward and the smoke of her dreams spills from the pitcher at the same time as the milk. Other paintings that allude to the fable at the time include Jean-Baptiste Huet
's "The milkmaid" (La Laitière, 1769) and François Boucher
's “The little milkmaid” (1760). A Gobelins
tapestry based on this was later to be presented to the king. In the following century the American Symbolist, Albert Pinkham Ryder
, painted his "Perrette" some time before 1890, taking its title from the name that La Fontaine gave his milkmaid.
The most celebrated statue of this subject is the bronze figure that the Russian artist Pavel Sokolov (1765–1831) made for the pleasure grounds planned by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia
at his palace of Tsarskoye Selo
. It shows the seated milkmaid weeping over her broken pot, which has been converted into a water feature by a channeled feed from a nearby spring. Originally it was called "Girl with a pitcher", but it became so celebrated that it is now better known as "The Milkmaid of Tsarskoye Selo". There is only a copy there today in what has become a public park, while the original is preserved in a St Petersburg museum. In fact several other copies have been made over the years. One was given by the wife of Nicholas I, the princess Charlotte of Prussia, as a birthday gift to her brother Karl in 1827. This was placed in the grounds of his Glienicke Palace
near Berlin but was eventually destroyed during World War II
; it is now replaced by a modern copy and is known as Die Milchfrau. Yet another was erected in the public park of Schloss Britz
in 1998, and still another at Soukhanovo, near Moscow.
One of the reasons for the original statue's celebrity as 'the muse of Tsarskoye Selo' was its connection with the writer Alexander Pushkin, who stayed there in 1831 and had been inspired to write the poem "The statue at Tsarskoye Selo".
The lyric was set for piano and alto voice in 1899 by Cesar Cui
and is still performed today. In addition, two French composers have set La Fontaine's fable: Jacques Offenbach
as part of 6 Fables (1842) and Isabelle Aboulker
in the children's operetta La Fontaine et le Corbeau (1999).
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
. It was only in the 19th century that the story about the daydream
Daydream
A daydream is a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. There are many types of daydreams, and there is no consistent definition amongst psychologists. The general public also uses the term for a...
ing milkmaid
Milkmaid
A milkmaid is a girl or woman employed to milk dairy cows. She also used the milk to prepare dairy products such as cream, butter, and cheese...
began to be attributed to Aesop
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek writer credited with a number of popular fables. Older spellings of his name have included Esop and Isope. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a...
and it does not appear in the Perry Index
Perry Index
The Perry Index is a widely-used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC...
.
In the East
There is a theme common to the many different stories of this type that involves poor persons daydreaming of future wealth arising from a temporary possession. When they get carried away by their fantasy and start acting it out, they break the container on which their dream is founded and find themselves worse off. One of the earliest is included in the Indian PanchatantraPanchatantra
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian inter-related collection of animal fables in verse and prose, in a frame story format. The original Sanskrit work, which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sharma...
as "The brahman who built air-castles". There a man speculates about the wealth that will flow from selling a pot of grain that he has been given, progressing through a series of sales of animals until he has enough to support a wife and family. The child misbehaves, his wife takes no heed, so he kicks her and in doing so upsets the pot that was to make his fortune. Other variants include Bidpai's "The Poorman and the Flask of Oil", "The Barber's Tale of his Fifth Brother" from The 1001 Nights and the Jewish story of "The Dervish and the Honey Jar".
The Western fable
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
It is different from the Eastern variants in that it is told of a woman on the way to market who starts to speculate on the consequences of investing the sale of her wares in eggs and breeding chickens from them. In this case it is a jar of honey that she unbalances from her head. When the story reappears in a 16th century French version, the woman has become a milkmaid and engages in detailed financial calculations of her profits.
The story gained lasting popularity after Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...
included it among his Fables (VII.10). The charm of La Fontaine's poetic form apart, however, it differs little from the version recorded in his source, Bonaventure des Périers
Bonaventure des Périers
Bonaventure des Périers was a French author.He was born of a noble family at Arnay-le-duc in Burgundy at the end of the fifteenth century....
' Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis (1558). There the fable is made an example of the practice of alchemists, who are like 'a good woman that was carrying a pot of milk to market and reckoning up her account as follows: she would sell it for half a sou and with that would buy a dozen eggs which she would set to hatch and have from them a dozen chicks; when they were grown she would have them castrated and then they would fetch five sous each, so that'd be at least a crown with which she would buy two piglets, a male and a female, and farrow a dozen more from them once they were grown, and they'd sell for twenty sous a piece after raising, making twelve francs with which she'd buy a mare that would have a fine foal. It would be really nice as it grew up, prancing about and neighing. And so happy was the good woman imagining this that she began to frisk in imitation of her foal, and that made the pot fall and all the milk spill. And down tumbled with it her eggs, her chickens, her capons, her mare and foal, the whole lot.'
In Britain the fable was included originally in none of the main compilations of Aesop's fables. Its earliest appearance was in the opening section of Robert Dodsley
Robert Dodsley
Robert Dodsley was an English bookseller and miscellaneous writer.-Life:He was born near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where his father was master of the free school....
's Select fables of Esop and other fabulists (1761), in which many fables from elsewhere were collected. Titled “The country maid and her milk pail”, it is prefaced with the sentiment that 'when men suffer their imagination to amuse them with the prospect of distant and uncertain improvements of their condition, they frequently sustain real losses by their inattention to those affairs in which they are immediately concerned'. The story is briefly told and ends with the pail being dislodged when the girl scornfully tosses her head in rejection of all the young men at the dance she was to attend, wearing a new dress to be bought with the proceeds of her commercial activities. A different version was versified by Jefferys Taylor as "The Milkmaid" in his Aesop in Rhyme (1820). As in Bonaventure des Périers' telling, the bulk of the poem is given over to the long reckoning of prices. It ends with the maid toppling her pail by superciliously tossing her head in rejection of her former humble circumstances.
The moral on which Taylor ends his poem is 'Reckon not your chickens before they are hatched’, where a later collection has 'Count not...' The proverb fits the story and its lesson so well that one is tempted to speculate that it developed out of some earlier oral version of the fable. But the earliest recorded instance of it in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is in a religious sonnet dating from the 1570s. The idiom used by La Fontaine in the course of his long conclusion is 'to build castles in Spain', of which he gives a few examples that make it clear that the meaning he intends is 'to dream of the impossible'. Avoiding that may well be what Bonaventure des Périers intended in telling his story too, but in the English versions the moral to be drawn is that to bring a plan to completion more than dreaming is required.
A version of the fable was written by the German poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim was a German poet.- Life :Gleim was born at Ermsleben near Halberstadt. Having studied law at the University of Halle he became secretary to Prince William of Brandenburg-Schwedt at Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of Ewald von Kleist, whose devoted friend he...
in the 18th century. It differs little from other retellings, apart from its conclusion. The woman confesses what has happened to her husband, who advises her to live in the here and now and be content with what she has rather than ‘building castles in air’. Here he uses the German equivalent of La Fontaine's idiom. The story has also provided German with another idiomatic phrase, 'milkmaid's reckoning' (milchmädchenrechnung), used of drawing naïve and false conclusions.
Artistic uses of the fable
Illustrations of La Fontaine's fables in books, limited as they are to the dismayed milkmaid looking down at her broken crock, are almost uniformly monotonous. An early exception is Jean-Baptiste OudryJean-Baptiste Oudry
Jean-Baptiste Oudry was a French Rococo painter, engraver, and tapestry designer. He is particularly well known for his naturalistic pictures of animals and his hunt pieces depicting game.-Biography:...
's print in which the girl has fallen on her back (1755), an episode unsanctioned by the text. The explanation for the inelegant posture seems to be that the idiom la cruche casée (the broken pitcher) then meant the loss of virginity and so suggests a less innocent explanation of how the milk came to be spilt. Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings , of which only five...
also depicts a fall in his picture of the fable (1770), although in this case the girl has tumbled forward and the smoke of her dreams spills from the pitcher at the same time as the milk. Other paintings that allude to the fable at the time include Jean-Baptiste Huet
Jean-Baptiste Huet
Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet was a French painter, engraver and designer associated with pastoral and genre scenes of animals in the Rococo manner, influenced by François Boucher....
's "The milkmaid" (La Laitière, 1769) and François Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
's “The little milkmaid” (1760). A Gobelins
Gobelins manufactory
The Manufacture des Gobelins is a tapestry factory located in Paris, France, at 42 avenue des Gobelins, near the Les Gobelins métro station in the XIIIe arrondissement...
tapestry based on this was later to be presented to the king. In the following century the American Symbolist, Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality...
, painted his "Perrette" some time before 1890, taking its title from the name that La Fontaine gave his milkmaid.
The most celebrated statue of this subject is the bronze figure that the Russian artist Pavel Sokolov (1765–1831) made for the pleasure grounds planned by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I , was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers...
at his palace of Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo is the town containing a former Russian residence of the imperial family and visiting nobility, located south from the center of St. Petersburg. It is now part of the town of Pushkin and of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.-History:In...
. It shows the seated milkmaid weeping over her broken pot, which has been converted into a water feature by a channeled feed from a nearby spring. Originally it was called "Girl with a pitcher", but it became so celebrated that it is now better known as "The Milkmaid of Tsarskoye Selo". There is only a copy there today in what has become a public park, while the original is preserved in a St Petersburg museum. In fact several other copies have been made over the years. One was given by the wife of Nicholas I, the princess Charlotte of Prussia, as a birthday gift to her brother Karl in 1827. This was placed in the grounds of his Glienicke Palace
Glienicke Palace
Glienicke Palace is located on the Island of Berlin-Wannsee, near the Glienicke Bridge, on the B1 across from the Glienicke Hunting Lodge. It was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Prince Carl of Prussia in 1826, The building, originally merely a cottage, was turned into a summer palace in...
near Berlin but was eventually destroyed during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
; it is now replaced by a modern copy and is known as Die Milchfrau. Yet another was erected in the public park of Schloss Britz
Schloss Britz
The Schloss Britz is the former manor-house of the historical Rittergut and village Britz, now a district of Berlin-Neukölln. Today it is the domicile of the cultural foundation Kulturstiftung Schloss Britz and includes in his originally reconstructed rooms from around 1880 a museum for interiors...
in 1998, and still another at Soukhanovo, near Moscow.
One of the reasons for the original statue's celebrity as 'the muse of Tsarskoye Selo' was its connection with the writer Alexander Pushkin, who stayed there in 1831 and had been inspired to write the poem "The statue at Tsarskoye Selo".
-
-
-
-
- One day a girl with an urn
- Let it drop on the boulder beneath her.
- Sadly she sits and alone,
- Uselessly holding the pieces.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- But see! What marvel is this?
- For the water pours yet from her vessel.
- There she continues today,
- Her gaze on this endless spring.
-
-
-
The lyric was set for piano and alto voice in 1899 by Cesar Cui
César Cui
César Antonovich Cui was a Russian of French and Lithuanian descent. His profession was as an army officer and a teacher of fortifications; his avocational life has particular significance in the history of music, in that he was a composer and music critic; in this sideline he is known as a...
and is still performed today. In addition, two French composers have set La Fontaine's fable: Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach was a Prussian-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr....
as part of 6 Fables (1842) and Isabelle Aboulker
Isabelle Aboulker
Isabelle Aboulker is a French composer, particularly known for her operas and other vocal works. In 1999 she gained a prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in 2000 the music prize of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques for her numerous lyric pieces.-Life and work:Isabelle...
in the children's operetta La Fontaine et le Corbeau (1999).