Puss in Boots

7-9 min read
16 pages

Puss in boots, the folk tale to read aloud. A miller's son inherits a cat, and the cat asks him for a pair of boots and a sack.

A miller died and left three sons. The eldest got the mill, the second got the donkey, and the youngest got the cat, and he sat on the step and worked out what a cat was worth.

«Get me a pair of boots,» said the cat, «and a sack. Then stop worrying.»

The young man had exactly enough for the boots. The cat put them on, took the sack up the hill, propped it open with two carrots in it, and lay down beside it looking dead.

A rabbit went in. The cat pulled the string, put the sack over his shoulder, walked to the palace and asked to see the king.

«A present,» he said, «from my master, the Marquis of Carabas.» The king had never heard of the Marquis of Carabas. He said it was very good of him.

The cat did this every week for two months — partridges one week, hares the next — until the king would have recognised the name of the Marquis of Carabas anywhere.

Then the cat found out that the king would be driving along the river on a certain morning with his daughter. «Go and swim there,» he told his master. «Exactly there. And don't argue about it.»

So the miller's son was in the river when the carriage came round the bend, and the cat was on the bank shouting that his master was drowning and that thieves had taken his clothes.

The king sent for a suit from the palace. In it the miller's son looked entirely like a marquis, and the princess, who was in the carriage, looked at him twice.

The cat went ahead along the road. In every field he came to he told the men mowing: «The king will ask whose land this is. Say it belongs to the Marquis of Carabas, or you will be chopped up small.» And they said it, every one of them, and the king was more impressed at each field.

At the end of the road was a castle, and the castle belonged to an ogre who could turn himself into anything he liked.

The cat knocked and paid his respects. «They say you can become a lion,» he said. The ogre became a lion, and the cat went up the curtains and stayed there until he changed back.

«A lion is nothing,» said the cat, from the top of the curtains. «Anyone big can be something big. They say you can become a mouse, and I don't believe a word of it.»

The ogre became a mouse to prove it, and the cat came down off the curtains in one jump, and that was the end of the ogre.

So when the king's carriage arrived, the cat was standing in the gateway of the castle. «Welcome,» he said, «to the house of my master, the Marquis of Carabas.»

They were married that month. The cat never wore the boots again after the wedding, and he never explained anything to anybody, and he was given a cushion by the fire for the rest of his life, which was what he had been after all along.

…read the rest in the Marytale app.

Marytale is an app of illustrated bedtime stories to read to your child — a picture on every page, no ads and no internet needed. The bookmark stays where your child fell asleep.

Try it free

Scan with your phone to get Marytale

Text source: Folk plot in the public domain (Charles Perrault 1697, Brothers Grimm 1812). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Where «Puss in Boots» comes from and who wrote it down

Puss in Boots

More stories to read