Origins and setting
“The Princess and the Pea” is a brief, gleaming literary wonder tale by the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen (1835). Though tiny in compass, it distils an entire courtly romance into a single night’s test: a pea, a stack of mattresses and featherbeds, and a claimant whose sensibility is proof of royal truth. The dramatis personae are few—a prince who seeks a “real princess,” his queen-mother whose eye is sharp for pretenders, a rain-drenched princess at the gate, and the humble pea—but the structure is exact and memorable: quest disappointed → storm and arrival → the bed-test → the morning’s confession → recognition and wedding → the pea preserved.
The tale
There was once a prince who travelled far and wide to find a princess to be his bride. Many wore crowns and gave fine answers, yet he came home sad.
“They were princesses enough, I daresay,” he told his mother, “but how am I to know which is a real princess?”
“Leave that to me,” said the Queen, and she smiled the small smile of someone who keeps a cupboard full of sense as well as linen.
That evening the sky turned to slate and rain fell in sheets. Thunder muttered about the towers; lightning wrote its quick signatures on the clouds. At last—bang, bang—someone beat upon the palace gate. The porter peered out and saw a young woman shivering on the step, her hair dripping, her cloak plastered to her like the skin of a wet bird.
“Who are you?” asked the porter, and the Queen came herself, lamp in hand.
“I am a princess,” the girl said, with a little curtsey that was somehow still a curtsey though her skirts clung and there was mud upon her shoe.
The Queen’s eyes—kind, but keen as pins—took in the torn lace, the white hands, the quiet bearing. “Indeed,” she said politely. “We shall see what we shall see. Come in, child. You look fit to wring.”
She had the maids bring warm soup and a towel; then, when the house was still, she went to the bedchamber and placed a single green pea upon the bedstead. Over it she ordered laid twenty mattresses, and over the mattresses twenty featherbeds stuffed with the best eider-down.
“If she be what she says she is,” murmured the Queen, “this will tell me more than ten genealogies.”
They led the princess upstairs. She thanked them sweetly, though her teeth chattered, and climbed up the soft mountain like a small climber with a candle. The wind prowled the gutters; the palace slept.
Morning came clean as a glass of water. The birds tried their first notes in the wet garden. The Queen met the guest at breakfast.
“How did you sleep, my dear?”
The princess folded her hands and spoke with perfect courtesy, though there were shadows like violets beneath her eyes.
“Oh—very badly! I scarcely closed my eyes all night.
Heaven knows what could have been in the bed.
There was something hard, and I am black and blue all over.”
The Queen and the prince exchanged a glance; the corners of the Queen’s mouth lifted, and the prince’s heart leapt so that he nearly upset the cream.
“Then you are a real princess,” said the Queen, satisfied. “No one else could feel a wee pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds.”
The prince bowed to the guest as to the morning itself. Soon there were letters to neighbouring courts, tailors busy with gold thread, cooks conferring with gardeners, and bells that swung like happy hearts. The prince and the princess were married, and the little pea was placed in a cabinet of curiosities, where anyone might see it (if they had not blinked or sneezed) and remember how a truth no larger than a seed may prove a whole story.
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