Edmund Dulac's Picture-Book for the French Red Cross

by Edmund Dulac

So the king went down and opened the palace gates. What was his astonishment to see standing there a lovely maiden all forlorn, her long hair drenched with the rain, her beautiful clothes saturated and clinging to her form, while the water, trickling from them, ran out at her heels. She was in a terrible plight, but she was beautiful, and she said she was a princess—a real princess. Her mind was distracted: she could not remember how or whence she came, but, being a princess, and seeing the palace gates, she had run through the storm and knocked hard.

'A real princess,' said the king, looking her up and down 'Hm! I believe you, though the queen mightn't. Come in!'

The old queen received the visitor coldly and with a critical eye. 'We shall soon see if she is what she says she is,' thought she, but she said nothing. Then she went into the spare bedroom, and took off all the bed-clothes, and laid a pea on the bedstead. On top of this she piled mattress after mattress to the number of twenty, and then twenty feather beds on top of that. 'Now,' she said to herself, 'here she shall sleep, and we shall soon see in the morning whether she is a real princess or not.'

So they put the princess to bed on the top of the twenty feather beds and as many mattresses, and said good-night.

In the morning they asked her how she had slept.

'Not at all,' replied she wearily; 'not a wink the whole night long. Heaven knows what there was in the bed. Whichever way I turned I still seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and, I assure you, this morning my whole body's black and blue. It's terrible!'

Then the old queen told what she had done, and they all saw plainly that this was indeed a real princess when she could feel the pea through twenty feather beds and twenty mattresses. None but a real princess could possibly have such a delicate skin.

So the prince married her, quite satisfied that he had now found his real princess.

Now this is a true story, and if you don't believe it you have only to go and look at the pea itself, which is still carefully preserved in the museum—unless some one has stolen it.