Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story titled The Princess and the Pea. This tale starts with a prince who intends to marry a princess. However, his bride must be a true princess. So, in search of a true princess, the princess traveled the world to find one.
There were lots of princesses, however, the prince couldn’t tell if the princesses were true princesses. Each princess that he met along the way had some little problem which proved that they were genuine. The princess lacked something despite meeting the criteria to be a princess. Something only a genuine princess would have.
After searching the prince returned home and he was as enthusiastic as he was before because he wanted to find a true princess. The old king and queen welcomed the prince home. People thought that the prince was looking for something which didn’t exist and they even talked behind his back.
After the summer had passed and then the rainy season started. One night there was a heavy storm. Along with lighting and thunder, it rained cats and dogs. The storm was heavy and quite terrifying. Then one midnight the royal family heard a knock on the palace gate and the king went to open the gate. The king wondered who could be outside in this heavy storm.
Outside the gate, there was a princess. The princess was in a bad state. She was drenched from the rain and she was cold. There was water running down from her hair and her dress. Her shoes were also soaked with water. The princess claimed that she was a true princess.
The old queen told her that they would find out about that and the princess said nothing. The queen prepared a sleeping room for the princess and she gave her dry clothes to change into. In the bedroom, below the bed, the queen put one pea. Then she was escorted to the sleeping room. In the sleeping room, she took off all the bedclothes and laid a pea on the edge of the bed.
She wasn’t comfortable with the bed, so she requested about twenty mattresses and carefully laid them one after the other on the top of the pea. She also layered twenty quilts on the top of the mattresses. This was the type of bed that the princess used to sleep on.
The next morning, she replied when asked how she had slept. The princess said that she didn’t have a good sleep. She couldn’t get a clear idea of what was in the bed offered to her, and she barely managed to sleep.
The princess then went on to explain how slept on something so hard that she felt the pea through the twenty mattresses and the twenty quilts that she layered on the bed. This reply shocked the royal family and they realized that no one other than a true princess could be as sensitive as she was.
When the prince heard her response, he realized she was a real princess. The princess agreed to marry the prince, who proposed and felt joy. He was happy that at last he found his true princess and married her.
After their marriage, the prince traveled the world and this time he traveled with his princess by his side. Both the prince and the princess were happy and they lived happily. The Royal Museum displayed the pea that the princess had felt for people to see. People from different parts of the world would travel to the kingdom to see the peas displayed in the royal museum. This concludes the story of the princess and the pea.
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