The Princess and the Pea

Knock. Knock. Knock. In the middle of a dark and stormy night, a knocking sounded at the city gate. Outside, lightning lit up the whole sky. Thunder rolled again and again, like someone beating a drum above the clouds, and the rain poured down without stopping. And yet, strangely, through all that roaring, the small sound of knocking still carried all the way into the palace. It was hard to imagine who would be knocking at a city gate on a night like that.

In faraway Denmark there lived a writer famous for his fairy tales, and the story of that rainy night is one he wrote himself. It is short, less than a page long, and yet it brings a quiet smile every time it is told.

The story goes that in a certain kingdom there was a prince who had come of age to marry. But he would not take just any princess. The one he was looking for had to be a real princess.

So the prince set out and traveled all over the world to find her. He went from one kingdom to the next and met more princesses than he could count. There were plenty of princesses, that much was true. But each time he met one, he felt that something was not quite right. This one was somehow not right. That one was somehow not right either. Not once could he be sure that the girl before him was a real princess. And what made a princess real, even he could not say clearly. In the end, the prince had to go back home, very sad, because he wanted so much to find a real princess.

Then one evening, a great storm came. The wind howled around the watchtowers. Lightning flashed, and thunder came crashing down in long rolls. The rain lashed the windowpanes and poured over the palace roof, as if someone up in the sky had tipped over a whole barrel of water. Right in the middle of that stormy night, the knocking came at the gate. Knock. Knock. Knock. And the one who took a lamp and went out to open the gate was not a guard. It was the old king himself.

The moment the gate opened a crack, the king stood still in surprise. Outside stood a young woman. Oh, what a sorry sight she was. The wind and rain had left her bedraggled from head to toe. Rainwater streamed from her hair down over her clothes and ran right into her shoes. With every step it spilled out at the heels, squelching as if her shoes were two little boats full of water. No one could be wetter than that. And yet she stood up very straight, raised her head, and spoke each word clearly. She was a princess, she said. A real princess.

A real princess. Looking at her, soaked through and shivering in the rainy night, anyone would have found that hard to believe. When the old queen heard this, she thought to herself, very well, real or not, we shall soon find out. But she did not say a single word. She asked no questions and raised no doubts. She simply slipped quietly out of the great hall and went straight to the guest bedroom.

In the bedroom, she took all the bedding off the bed with her own hands, until nothing was left but the bare bottom of the bed. Then she took out a pea. Just one pea, perfectly round and tiny, sitting snugly in the palm of her hand. She laid the pea down on the bottom of the bed, neatly and carefully, as if setting down a treasure. Then she began to pile on the mattresses. One, two, three. She piled and piled until there were 20 mattresses stacked on top of that tiny pea. And that was not all. On top of the 20 mattresses, she piled 20 eiderdown quilts, the softest and lightest quilts in the whole palace. Now the bed rose high like a tower of mattresses and quilts, each layer as soft as the last. And far down at the bottom of the tower, the little pea lay still, and no one knew it was there.

That night, the rain-soaked princess was invited to sleep on that towering bed, and she had to climb and climb to reach the top. She lay high on 40 soft layers of mattresses and quilts, and the whole palace slowly drifted off to sleep. Outside, only the sound of the rain remained, growing fainter and fainter.

The next morning, everyone asked her whether she had slept well.

Oh, please don't ask, the princess answered. I hardly slept a wink all night. Heaven only knows what was in that bed. I was lying on something terribly hard. Whichever way I turned, I could feel it pressing into me, and this morning I am black and blue all over.

When she heard this, the old queen gave a little smile. She knew at once. The girl had lain on 20 mattresses and 20 eiderdown quilts. And yet she had still felt one tiny pea far down at the bottom of the bed. Skin so delicate and sensitive belonged to no one in the world but a real princess. The soaked girl who had knocked at the gate on that rainy night was a real princess after all.

When the prince heard this, he was overjoyed. He had traveled the whole world and never found her, and yet the real princess had come knocking at the gate by herself, in the middle of a stormy night. He hurried to marry her, because now he knew for certain that he had found a real princess at last.

And the tiny pea was not thrown away. It was put on display in a museum, set out with care so that everyone could see it. After all, a pea that had lain under 20 mattresses and 20 quilts to find a real princess was a precious thing. They say it is still there to this day, unless someone has taken it. And the Danish writer closed the story with a wink and one last line: there, that is a true story.