But if almost everything is good and well managed in _Gracieuse_, it may also be said that almost everything is badly managed in _Finette_.[224] To begin with, there is that capital error which has been noticed above, that it is not really a fairy tale at all. Except the magic _quenouilles_, which themselves are of the smallest importance in the story, there is nothing in it beyond the ways of an ordinary adventurous _nouvelle_. The touch of _grivoiserie_ by which the Princesses Nonchalante and Babillarde allow the weaknesses ticketed in their names to hand them over as a prey to the cunning and blackguard Prince Riche-Cautele, under pretence of entirely unceremonised and unwitnessed "marriage," is in no way amusing. Finette's escapes from the same fate are a little better, but the whole is told (as its author seems to have felt) at much too great length; and the dragging in of an actual fairy at the end, to communicate to the heroine the exceedingly novel and recondite maxim that "Prudence is the mother of safety," is almost idiotic. If the thing has any value, it is as an example, not of a real fairy tale nor of a satire on fairy tales (for which it is much too much "out of the rules" and much too stupid), but of something which may save an ordinary reader, or even student, from attacking, as I fear we shall have to do, the _Cabinet des Fees_ at large, and discovering, by painful experience, how excessively silly and tedious the corruption of this wise and delightful kind may be. One might, of course, draw lessons from others of the original batches, but this may suffice for the specimen batch under immediate review. _Peau d'Ane_, one of the most interesting to "folklorists" and origin-hunters, is, of course, also in itself interesting to students of literature. Its combination of the old theme of the incestuous passion of a father for his daughter, with the special but not invariable shadow of excuse in the selfish vanity of the mother's dying request, is quite out of the usual way of these things. So is the curious series of fairy failures--things apparently against the whole set of the game--beginning with the unimaginative conception of dresses, weather-, or sky-, moon-, and sun-colour, rendered futile by the success of the artists, and ending in the somewhat banal device of making yourself ugly and running away, with the odd conclusion-contrast of Peau d'Ane's squalid appearance in public and her private splendour in the fairy garments. [Sidenote: The danger of the "moral."]