TheBanyanTree: The Princess and the Pea: the Inside Story

[Dee Churchill]

You've all heard the "once upon a time" about the Princess and the Pea, I'm sure. But just in case you've been away slaying dragons or chasing unicorns, I'll give you a quick summary...

It was a dark and stormy night...yeah, I know. Crummy beginning, but it WAS a lightning-flashing, frog-strangling kind of night when the princess showed up at the door of the castle. She was a fair mess, too, I can tell you. Hair dripping and straggling all over, clothes sopping, slippers in shreds...and she wasn't in too good a mood, either.

Still, under all that mess, she was a beautiful woman, which the prince noticed right away. He would, having just returned from yet another failed search for a "real" princess. The old king and queen had rather spoiled the young man and he refused to settle for just any old princess. He turned his nose up at an astonishing number of smashing young women because, for one reason or another, they didn't meet his impossible standards. When the bedraggled stranger claimed to be a real princess, he crossed his fingers in hopes she'd clean up good and begged his mother to see to the test.

The old queen sighed and made the arrangements while the princess was bathing and donning warm, dry nightclothes. You know the drill: a small hard dry pea on the bottom of the bed. Twenty mattresses on top of that and twenty eiderdown beds on top of the mattresses.

Sure enough, when the princess came down for lunch (she slept through breakfast, of course), she whined up a hissy fit about her uncomfortable night, claiming something in the bed had made her black and blue all over and she had hardly managed a wink of sleep.

The prince was ecstatic. Only a REAL princess could be so sensitive. He proposed between the kippers and the plum pudding and wedding arrangements were flying about the kingdom before you could say "Oops!" Everyone tried to warn him but he was deaf to any hints that he should be wary of what he had wished for. Well, he was young and more than a little blind to what was obvious to everyone else. His vision grew terribly clear in short order, however. I suspect he may have begun to feel ominous twinges even as early as the grand parade through the city, right after the wedding.

The princess had insisted the peasants were to throw rose petals as the carriage moved along the parade route. Only the petals. One enthusiastic person threw a whole rose blossom and the princess went into hysterics, claiming a possible concussion.

It got worse. Back at the castle, the prince's beloved hunting hounds were banished to the outdoors because the princess couldn't abide the fleas. All the servants had to wear specially made eiderdown slippers so they could move silently as ghosts through the castle. Her food couldn't be too hot or too cold and, in fact, it had to be served in the privacy of her spacious room where she ate alone because she couldn't stand the clatter and clink of utensils and wine glasses or the noisy conversations at mealtimes. Although she loved music, the harpist had to sit in the dungeon when he played. Nobody else could hear him but she claimed her delicate ears were attuned to his tunes, so to speak.

As you can probably guess, the more intimate aspects of conjugal privilege were not on the list of Things That Could Be Abided as far as the princess was concerned. The prince grew ever more despondent and woeful while the princess grew plump and even more shrewish as she vegetated and whined in her quarters.

In desperation, the prince paid a visit to the witch living deep in the heart of the forest. "I can't continue to live this way," he cried. "Nor can I divorce her for she will take everything I own out of spite. Can you help me?"

"I thought you would never ask," said the witch. "Not to worry, your highness. I'll have the princess out of your hair in the shake of a bat's wing."

That very night, a wolf took up a position beneath the window of the room where the princess slept and it began to howl. Long, mournful, loud howling. The hounds would not go near the wolf for it was, of course, a magical creature and could not be captured or coerced in any way.

This went on for seven nights and, for seven days, the princess complained and screamed and stamped her foot because she couldn't get a wink of sleep. There was nothing the prince or anyone else could do about the magical wolf because it WAS a magical wolf. Finally realizing this, the desperate princess had servants load seven wagons with assorted belongings, told the prince to file for an uncontested divorce, and rode out of the kingdom in her fancy coach. To the vast relief of everyone, she was never heard from again.

The prince, a far wiser man than he had been before, soon married a jolly, laughing scullery maid who bore him jolly, laughing children who happily played with the hounds all over the castle. Once a month, the whole family would go visit the witch in the heart of the forest. The children got to play with the magic wolf and the witch baked incredibly good brownies for everyone to eat while they played Scrabble and Go Fish.

The moral of the story? Always stay on the good side of anyone who bakes great brownies.  

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