“I brought you here to tell me whether the princess would be pretty and fortunate.” The king told the fairy. “I did not bring you here to have whispered conversations with the Queen.”
The fairy then turned to the king. “This little girl would be pretty and clever and be as well brought up as it was possible to be.”
The king was very happy to hear this.
He turned to the Queen. “It is a good thing that your daughter is going to marry my son. Otherwise, I would have hanged both of you.”
The king left with the fairy and the queen was miserable again. “If my daughter was pretty, then she would have to marry the prince. If my daughter was ugly then we would both be killed.” The queen was even more unhappy. “How I wish I could hide my daughter so that the wicked king could never find her.”
But there was nothing that the queen could do.
Things were far too bad there.
The man who had kept the two people in prison in the tower was also a cruel man. He gave very little food to the two people - three boiled peas and a tiny morsel of black bread.
Worse, the king made the queen work day and night at the spinning wheel in the prison.
Things were going thus when a little mouse crept inside the hole of the prison.
The queen sighed as she looked at the mouse. “Why are you here, little mouse? I have only three peas with me.”
However the mouse danced around the cell and finally the queen gave the mouse one little pea. “This is all I can offer to you for the amusement you have given me.”
The queen turned and was shocked to see plenty of delicious food appear before her.
Adapted from the Fairy Tales written by Countess d’Aulnoy
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