Princess Badoura: A tale from the Arabian Nights

Princess Badoura
Retold by Laurence Housman
illustrated by Edmund Dulac
Hodder and Stoughton
Transcriber's Note: You may click on the plates to display a larger version.

The Sultan Shahriar stands out to fame as the greatest monogamist in all history. Having been deceived by his first wife, he caused her to be put to death, and then proceeded to avenge himself upon a thousand others. Faithful to his monogamic instincts, he married a fresh wife every day, and on the morning of the next became a widower. Having thus achieved faith to a thousand dead maidens—all equally beloved in turn—he may, in his heart of hearts, have found that change, so doggedly insisted on, did but mean boredom, and so may readily have welcomed any excuse to relax a performance to which he had bound himself by many religious oaths.
But, if he had a heart, the old Eastern chronicler has neglected to tell us what was in it; and at the point where his sacrificial bridals have become monotonous, the interest of the story shifts from bridegroom to bride, and Scheherazade, daughter of the Grand Vizier, witty, courageous, resourceful, and most prolix of all delightful tale-tellers, adventurously enters the royal menage, and becomes his only surviving wife.
For Scheherazade, intent on saving the lives of others, brings her bridesmaid with her, a younger sister named Dinarzade; and when the morning light comes to tell her that death is near, Dinarzade—prompted thereto beforehand—stirs in her attendant place at the foot of the couch, and asks for the sake of old times that one last tale may be told.
Shahriar, at the bride's humble request, grants permission, and from that moment is in the toils of the plot which has made his name so secondary in importance to hers. Scheherazade, 'to do a great right, does a little wrong': by her entrancing powers of narrative, always interrupted when the interest of each story is at its height, she breeds in her tyrant lord infirmity of will, and destroys the only principle of conduct wherewith he set out to teach woman her place. For the thousand and one nights which have given their name to the world's most famous collection of stories, he lives blissfully forsworn, postponing the execution of his wife to another day; and at the end, repenting him of his vows, does what we still make our kings do in England when justice has gone astray, and bestows his 'free pardon' upon innocence.