The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde quotes

Once there lived a King, whose wife was dead, but who had a most beautiful daughter⁠—so beautiful that everyone thought she must be good as well, instead of which the Princess was really very wicked, and practised witchcraft and black magic, which she had learned from an old witch who lived in a hut on the side of a lonely mountain.

This old witch was wicked and hideous, and no one but the King’s daughter knew that she lived there; but at night, when everyone else was asleep, the Princess, whose name was Fiorimonde, used to visit her by stealth to learn sorcery.

Princess Fiorimonde gazed down at it and laughed aloud.

“Aha, my proud lover! are you there?” she cried with glee; “my necklace bids fair to beat all others in the world,”

and she caressed the bead with the tips of her soft, white fingers, but was careful that they did not close round the string. Then she returned into the banqueting hall, and spoke to the King.

Gervaise bent down over the necklace as it lay upon the grass, and, with a smile, counted thirteen beads; and he knew that the thirteenth was the wicked Princess, who had herself met the evil fate she had prepared for so many others.

“Oh, clever Princess!” cried he, laughing aloud, “you are not so very clever, I think, to be so easily outwitted.”

Then he picked up the necklace on the point of the sword and carried it, slung thereon, into the council chamber, where sat the King surrounded by statesmen and courtiers busy with state affairs.

“I know why you are come,” he said, as soon as Michael entered the room. “So you have seen Princess Joan; and do you still wish to marry her?”

“I will marry her, or no one,” said Michael.

“But not till I have found out who has bewitched her, and have broken the charm.”

It really is not to be borne, that one man should be allowed to tell another that he has nothing to complain of.”

“Nay, you can have as much to complain of as you like, so long as I have not,” cried the baker, and he laughed loudly.

This only made the doctor angrier still, and he was just going to seize the baker when up came the farmer.

“This all comes of the oven imp,” cried he, as he limped home. “Directly I get home I will drive him out of my oven, and away from my house.

Better to have a hundred batches of bread spoiled than to be flogged for saying one is happy.

” But when he reached his house the little dark man was nowhere to be found; there was nought but the broken oven with its sides battered in.

“Your Highness should not wish to know too much,” they told her, whereat Princess Fernanda threw up her little head, and said,

“I want to know everything.”

As she grew up she had masters and mistresses to teach her, and learnt every language and every science; but still she said, “It is not enough; I want to know more.”