Like many others who have retold the tale of the juggler, the American children's book author and illustrator Barbara Cooney (1917-2000) dropped clues about her sources of inspiration. In the foreword to the first edition of 1961, she reported having been exposed to the story first on the radio in 1945. She knew that the roots of the story stretch back seven hundred years to a poem from France--her title page describes it as "an Old French legend."...