The youngest son travels for some time, seeking smaller dogs, until he discovers a fantastically decorated castle hidden in the woods.

When he returns home and breaks open the acorn, inside is an impossibly tiny dog which dances before the king.

While his brothers begin to search once more, the youngest prince returns immediately to the white cat's castle and spends another year there.

Inside the smallest seed is a massive amount of muslin, magnificently embroidered, which fits through the eye of any needle.

[5] Folklorist Stith Thompson argued that the "Animal Bride" story was made popular by Mme.

d'Aulnoy's literary opus and pointed that the tale type "maintain[ed] a clear and vigorous tradition in the folklore of all of Europe", with more than 300 versions collected.

[6] Similarly, Delarue and Théneze recognized the "evident influence" of d'Aulnoy's tale on French oral tradition, in at least eighteen of the recorded variants of their catalogue.

[8][9] Rachel Harriette Busk collected a Tirolese variant, The Grave Prince and the Beneficent Cat, with many similarities to MMe.

[11] In this light, according to folklorist Reidar Thoralf Christiansen, of the 31 Danish versions known, they are "curiously uniform": they contain the "Cat-redaction", that is, the cat as the bride's form, which also appears in Eastern and Southern Sweden.

[13] In a Latvian fairy tale, The Palace of Cats, a lord has three sons, the older two smart ones and the third a simpleton.

[14] "The White Cat's Divorce" by American writer and editor Kelly Link was commissioned in 2018 by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and features a billionaire father in place of a king.