# Cinderella's deadline and the limits of the example

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH04.P020](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH04.P020/#char=659,728): "If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?""

The deadline belongs to the Perrault tradition of Cinderella. In the English witness reproduced by D. L. Ashliman from Andrew Lang's *The Blue Fairy Book* (1889), pp. 64–71, the godmother explicitly warns that the carriage, attendants and dress will revert after midnight. The page identifies Perrault's *Cendrillon* (1697) as Lang's source. Chesterton's imagined conversation is his own argumentative addition: this tale explains what the deadline does, but does not explain why the magic has that deadline. [Read the tale and its source statement](https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault06.html).

The ending also qualifies his use of it. Cinderella forgets the warning on the second evening; her clothes revert, but the lost slipper enables the prince to find her, and the godmother subsequently supplies splendid clothes again. Breaking the condition therefore ends one magical privilege without destroying all future happiness. Chesterton extracts an ethic of grateful acceptance from a particular feature of the story; he is not reproducing the whole plot's treatment of disobedience and recovery.

## Sources

- [Charles Perrault, Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper, in Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book](https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault06.html), Lang 1889, pp. 64–71; Ashliman transcription: godmother's midnight warning, second ball, slipper recognition and concluding source statement

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