Meeting Puss in Boots

Bulletins from a French butcher's shop

An illustration from Charles Perrault’s 1697 story The Master Cat, or Cat in Boots.

I was out on my search for interesting French barn doors the other day when I came across Puss in Boots. Taking a short cut down a remote country road, I drove through some kind of cosmic autumnal portal into the land of magic and fairy tales.

We’ve had heavy rain here for several weeks. The waterfall at the back of our house returned after a long summer drought. Then suddenly, a slither of blue sky appeared. I jumped in my car. Driving from village to village on a high plateau to the south of us, I was about to discover that one of France’s most celebrated waterfalls is also in full, magnificent flow.

I took advantage of a sunny afternoon forecast to drive off to the villages around Hauteville (“Hightown”). As the light began to fade, I hadn’t found much to photograph (apart from an appealing metal door in Cormaranche). So I sought a different route home, pausing briefly in Thézillieu then heading northward via a rough one-lane road I’d never tried before.

An appealing metal door in Cormaranche….

A few kilometres further on I rounded a bend, and the rolling rural landscape of the plateau suddenly gave way to the towering cliffs of a heavily forested gorge draped in the blazing colours of autumn. I thought I’d driven into a paintpot.

I hadn’t gone far when I reached a small car park on the edge of the road, signposted "Cascade de la Charabotte”. I stopped and followed a narrow path for about 50 metres along the side of the road. The trees gave way to a clearing, and the vista that opened up was…well, this is what I saw:

As soon as I got home I looked up the Charabotte waterfall. Sure enough, at 115 metres high it is one of the tallest in France. The river Albarine snakes across the plateau and plunges off the cliff into a deep gorge, ultimately reaching the Ain river to the west and the Rhône further south. But what about that name, Charabotte?

The most popular early version of the Puss in Boots legend was written by Charles Perrault, a 17^th century French author who turned ancient fables into what swiftly became a fabulously popular literary genre – the stories we think of today as fairy tales. The best known of his tales include Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood.

In Perrault’s version of Puss in Boots, a resourceful cat in human boots strides around the countryside, getting up to all kinds of mischief. Legend has it that Puss appeared one day in the Albarine gorge, where he slipped on rocks and his boots filled with water from the waterfall.

According to the local tourist bureau – so of course it must be true – an ancient paysan who witnessed Puss’s fall announced: “Regardez - le chat a de l’eau ras les bottes” (in English: “Look, the cat has its boots full of water”). The spot was duly named Charabotte (chat…ras…bottes).

Well, I’m glad I sorted that out.

I may not have seen many interesting doors that day, but I’m happy to have found the waterfall made famous by Puss in Boots.