No cousin to Tom Thumb, Perrault’s Little Thumb is the youngest son in a large, poverty-stricken family. His mother, who was “quick about her business and brought never less than two at a time,” had seven boys in three years (all quotes from the Robert Samber translation of 1729 reprinted in the Opies’ The Classic Fairy Tales). Small without much to say, the family thinks Little Thumb is slow. Everyone blames him for whatever goes wrong without suspecting that the seventh son has excellent survival instincts, quick wit, good luck, and a ruthless streak. Even if a fairy deigned to look in on a poor family, her assistance would be superfluous.

A bad year comes and the parents cannot support the nine of them gathering faggots. Sharp-eared Thumb overhears his father and mother discussing whether it would be better to watch the boys starve to death or lose them the forest and let the wild beasts eat them. By dawn, he has figured out a plan to mark the family’s path into the woods with white stones, whose trail they can follow home. They receive a warm welcome and the remains of a good supper, a luxury afforded by a long overdue payment of ten crowns from the lord of the manor.

The parents’ desperation returns as soon as the money runs out. Little Thumb listens in on their talk of losing their children by leading them much deeper into the forest but is unconcerned with the plan in his pocket. But the door is locked and he cannot leave to gather pebbles early in the morning. He improvises and drops crumbs from his breakfast roll instead, but the birds eat them all.

With night falling, soaked to the skin from the driving rain, and hopelessly lost, Little Thumb persists and leads the band some distance to a house, where he asks the good wife, who opens the door, for shelter.  He persuades her that they would rather take their chances with her husband the ogre, who might spare them, than with the wolves outdoors, who won’t. The ogre, with his keen nose for fresh meat, discovers the boys’ hiding place under the bed, and prepares to butcher them to serve with anchovy and caper sauce to his three mates coming for lunch. His wife talks him out of it and he orders her to feed them and put to bed in the same room as their seven daughters, gray-eyed and hook-nosed  with “very long sharp teeth…not yet very wicked, but …they had already bitten several little children so they might suck their blood.”

Although the boys are in a separate bed, Little Thumb notices that the little ogresses are wearing golden crowns and quickly switches their nightcaps with the girls’ crowns, just in case the ogre thinks better of letting them live until morning. Sure enough, he comes in with the big knife, muttering about having had too much wine after dinner. To tell the boys from the girls, he needs to touch their heads. Feeling nightcaps, he cries, “Hah! my merry little lads, are you there,” cuts his daughters’ throats, and stumps back to bed. As soon as Little Thumb hears steady snoring, he gets his brothers dressed and out of the house.

By dawn they have almost run the distance to their parents’ house, but the ogre in his magical seven league boots has nearly closed the gap between them. (Nothing is said about him being armed.)  Using the boots fatigues the wearer, so he settles down for a much-needed nap. Little Thumb orders his brothers to run home while he takes care of the ogre. Even if it had been possible to kill his enemy, it would not solve his family’s problems as nicely as stripping the monster of his most valuable possessions. Little Thumb steals the boots, which being fairy-made, magically shrink to fit him, and returns to the house to play a dirty trick on the wife, without any regard for the fact that she had tried to save the boys. Telling her that robbers are holding her husband for ransom, she hands over all his riches, and the boy returns home in triumph.  What’s more, he uses the magical boots to make money by carrying orders from the king to his generals or delivering love letters.

The moral of the story according to the worldly Perrault?  Something like when survival is at stake, the end justifies the means:

No longer are children said to be a hardship

If they possess great charm, good looks, and wit.

If one is weak, however, and knows not what to say,

Mocked he’ll be and chased until he runs away.

Yet sometimes it’s this child, very least expected,

Who makes his fortune and has his honor resurrected.

His parents seem to have been absolved of child abandonment because they were in extenuating circumstances. After all, blood is thicker than water, and Little Thumb preserves patriarchy by making enough money to make the family financially secure and elevating his father and brothers at court. And so Little Thumb escapes reproof for playing the spy, accessory to murder, thieft, and liar.  The ogre was no Christian anyway.

It’s amusing to see how many illustrators ignore the passage about the boots shrinking to fit the wearer…