← Origin of the Stone Soup Folktale
One characteristic of folktales is that they are contextualized by each teller. This is something the authors of the early Stone Soup stories clearly did. For example, the second version of the story was written by Philippe Barbe (1723–1792) in his work Fables et contes philosophiques. He cites Madame du Noyer as the source but completely changes the scale of the story from a prose story that runs for a few book pages to that of a short fable written in verse, similar in spirit to those written by his contemporary, La Fontaine.1
Barbe’s “Soupe au Caillou” is fantastic. It features a tramp who is incredibly dynamic. Barbe’s epiphany is that the story isn’t really about soup at all. It is about character, or as he put it, d’esprit—spirit. Here is the moral as he wrote it some 250 years ago:
“Dans mille occasions, pour se tirer d’affaire,
Un peu d’esprit est nécessaire.”
“On thousands of occasions, to get oneself out of a problem,
A little spirit is necessary.”