I must apologise: senility overlaying an always overhasty tendency to babble are a bad combination when it comes to trying to make one's meaning clear, but they are a combination I am stuck with.

1. I cannot read music or play an instrument, so I meant, I would like to try my hand at singing thesong, accompanied by the accomplished musican who has newly set the song for the dulcimer, thus taking the song out of a 1950s ambience of clappers, noise and syncopation, into a more ersatz medieval-ish one, a more silvery sounding one; more magical too, in that any dulcimer after Coleridge and 1798 is that ("in a vision" once he saw "a damsel with a dulcimer, on the slopes of Mount Abora")... Are you the dulcimerist, "Genie"?

2. New thoughts on the dramatis personae and plot:
(a) English: you cannot be jilted unless you have made your intentions clear; for simply tongue-tiedly "hoping" someone will "know you love them so" when you render them services will not automatically get the job done...   You the lover "hoped she know", "but" she did not, and she she "danced away", in self- and possession-absorbed joy. Inarticulate love, unknown and thus unreciprocated, leads to pathos as a result of not being cared for, but not female rudeness-to-heartlessness on the one hand and punitive male cruelty on the other...

French: you attempt clearly to make a bargain (you need not pay for my goods, but must love me"; you are quite as clearly rejected (you are daft to think I would make this bargain!); you go on ahead regardless; you still do not get your way, but in exchange for what you have given; but you have ensured you will get a payment (blackmail of a sort?); your victim agrees and pleads with you... But how far her capitulation is genuine (see the interpretation above in this thread: "she now realises...") or enforced and desperate is unclear, probably the latter (cf "the girl in Don't be Cross, it cannot be!"); unclear too is what happens then, unlike Grimm/Andersen; and so it remains open: does he let her off, does she truly love him, do they marry or do they part (she having learnt her lesson, but not he, either way)?

(b) evidence for the English betwitchment of the fingers being minor or altogther metaphorical is its effect: the girl danced "AS THOUGH" she "were entranced", the trace of the actual french sorcery becomes a metaphor... Of course, "as though" could mean "because she was" indeed entranced, but need not necessarily mean this...

There is a potential article here :-)

3. What I desperately am now yearning for is the non-original Rosemary Clooney French refrain to see what it does with the story... (cf. the nun in a "The Simpsons" episode singing NEW French words to "Dominque", thus the third set of these). Won't the original translator upthread, or any other, oblige? The song is accessible on the www... The refrain is only four lines long...   

3. Mrr sans computer reinforces my point about the magicality of little French shoemakers in contes, and the to-our-minds excessive demands/force they make/employ. What is this other story with the giant bed and the river and where is it and can it be got in translation?

Sanjay Sircar