The Princess on the Pea
A fastidious prince felt he deserved a girl of royal refinement, and he certainly found one.
1837
A fastidious prince felt he deserved a girl of royal refinement, and he certainly found one.
1837
A young and idealistic prince thought he deserved a wife of right royal delicacy, but the daughters of the kings in neighbouring kingdoms did not meet his expectations.
ONCE upon a time, a prince decided to find himself a princess, or rather (as he told himself) a real princess.
For the princesses of the neighbouring kingdoms were not at all what he imagined a princess should be, and soon he was quite discouraged.
One stormy night, there came a knock on the palace doors. On the threshold stood a bedraggled young woman, who nonetheless assured the queen that she was a princess.
‘We will see about that,’ said the queen to herself. So she took a pea along to the guest bedroom, and popped it under the mattress. Then she piled twenty more mattresses on top of that one.
In the morning the queen asked the girl how she had slept. ‘Oh! barely a wink’ she cried. ‘I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, heaven knows what, and this morning I am simply black and blue.’
And the queen knew that her son had at last found a real princess.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was the prince’s opinion of the princesses he knew?