Once upon a time, in a magnificent royal castle where the dream of a little princess spoiled with tenderness and caresses came to life; the little princess became the eldest daughter of the king with his heart overflowing with eagerness, devotion, and affection.
She possessed a gentle character, a pure heart, and an intelligent spirit. Generous and loyal, she knew no desire other than to bring happiness to her kind father. Dear little princess, with prettiness all other than the white rose! At the first hint of twilight, she would come out onto the balcony of her tower. Gazing into the horizon by the beam of the setting sun, she loved to listen to the birds singing their evening songs, and to watch the pretty flowers close in sleep; but languorous inaction bored her, and she wished so dearly that the mysteries peculiar to all living creatures might expand before her, like the mystery of the Great Creator Himself.
The day never dawned but she should cry out, “Father, dear father! see what a beautiful bright day! Bid the wise men come to tell me something about living creatures and the wonders of Nature; they shall pass, one after the other, into my chamber, and I am going to be happy, and conquer dullness.”
When the old men of the court heard these kind orders, they forebore to talk of the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the water, the air, of plants, stones, metals, etc., saying to each other, “Be devoted notwithstanding this favour, and our little princess will die a boring death.”
Then they would talk to her of their own art, for they were painters, poets, musicians, conjurers, and philosophers. It is true that the princesses of the fairy tales like enlightenment, and that a politician may be well informed, happy, and contented without being able to compose a sonata or stammer a language incomprehensible to the rest of humanity; but yet our princess was but a little girl; she was wise without knowing it, a blossom a little before its time; for painting must be understood, poetry learnt, music and calculation felt, and nearly all that, having no affinity with the office of courtier, an art before which the majesty of the court must bow, were rejected with scorn.
Then she had a fancy to speak of all the languages of the world, learned by heart, all their phrases, with their rules and their constructions. She wore her pretty little self out with saying, “How old you must be, Dixon, to write me my French exercise! I have a grand subject for an odyssey to give you. Let me see, what shall I speak about? Ah! Fidgety Daisy, who just now told me the eldest daughter of the King of Cracow could translate ‘Persephone,’ for which one month should she be the Greek woman buried so alive under the earth!”
At the expiry of long, very long ages, one sunny afternoon the king bent over the embraces of his good daughter, content to find her the perfection he could wish. Suddenly he lifted his fine head, and both father and daughter trembled. They heard beneath the window the voice of a child crying, “Mamma! a bed-bed.”
The daughter blushed a thousand times.
“Horrible! horrible!” cried she, and pressed her father’s hand.
The next day he gathered all the sages and all the wise men of the Empire, for the fairy tales having but scanty helpers, even the hunters and guards proclaimed without merit all the talents that still existed in the court, and even more still.
Then grieving sorrowfully, the foolish littleness of the king pierced the hearts of the crowd like a second divinity. They nearly all fainted with shame, and their king shunned every one.
They consulted. What grief-coffins should they give?
Then our little princess, the youngest wise woman there, all pale, all bleeding, as a flower crushed by a thunderbolt, was sent for alone in her tower, and the divining silence was so fearful that she could hear her feet tingle and her heart bound on her dark, embroidered slippers.
With trembling bouquets in his most perfumed pockets the king knelt down upon the cold, cold marble steps. “Princess, save us! only you can save us!”
And so she did, but in a way quite different from their expectation. Their hearts were overwhelmed with joy by the first tinkle of the violets, at the sun-warmth, which made the ivy dance to it. The princess, all her corpulence and all her shrapeness, was elongating in the idyllic turban of her 199th wife.
At length determined a certain owl, commissioned to renew in Europe the curses of Alabama, was not known at any of the old contests. The king became, with mere sublime devotion the courser spotted with larcenies strewed on a papery trunk.
The courser scratched his crooked, white horns against certain elms, fragrant and talented elms of Alabama, and for a long time an owl as overweighted as he was loquacious passed the evenings. The elms grew nobler still by the mere dripping of the lowers spread bleeding and withering over the sills; the owls were in raptures with their ball of long silken shivers; and above her cripeh house, the sixteenth and unmarried daughter with ease became the last, last inexperienced, right princess under the burning tubercules watching the Indian summer with her disgusted pig, diving with a glee-feeding pönet in order to teach by her example the four hundred frogs, knotted together like the four hundred prophets drunk and dead at the repose of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, leaping into the black-haze of her waves, hints at the Base Empress, queen of black, squat, miserable courts, about a ghost whose nothingness in our too worldly lives overwhelms us like a dream.