Who visits French children when they lose a tooth?

La petite souris, the little mouse. The child puts the tooth under the pillow and she exchanges it overnight, the same way the Tooth Fairy does in English-speaking countries.

Which came first, the tooth mouse or the tooth fairy?

The mouse, by a long way. Tooth-taking rodents are documented across Europe for centuries; the winged Tooth Fairy is a largely American figure of the twentieth century.

Can we use both the mouse and the fairy?

Plenty of bilingual families do, often letting the child choose who is coming. Children handle it with no difficulty at all — it is usually only the adults who worry about consistency.

Lettre de la Petite Souris — Printable Letter

The story

She is smaller than Ratoncito Pérez, greyer, and considerably more discreet. She works alone across the rooftops with a lantern, and she has an established professional opinion that haste is the enemy of the job. Nobody has ever heard her arrive. A very small number of children claim to have heard the lantern.

Where it actually comes from

The tooth-taking mouse is the older European tradition, long predating the winged fairy, and la petite souris is its French form. A clear literary ancestor is Madame d'Aulnoy's "La Bonne Petite Souris" of 1697, in which a fairy takes the form of a mouse, hides under a pillow and knocks out a wicked king's teeth — a good deal less gentle than the modern version. The custom of putting the tooth under the pillow for the mouse is documented across France, Belgium, Switzerland and French-speaking Canada, and it spread with the language.

What it does for a child

La Petite Souris is a gift for a bilingual or French-heritage family: the letter carries the language into a moment the child already cares about, which is worth more than a great deal of deliberate practice. Her particular lesson — that careful and slow beats fast — is also a genuinely useful counterweight for children who rush at things and give up when they go wrong.