Once there was a kingdom ruled by a king and his queen. But the queen was strong and chose everything in the kingdom herself. She had given birth to a beautiful son, and the queen cared for him extremely, and she chose everything for him: how he dressed, how he ate, how he played, and how he learned until the prince grew up and reached the age of marriage.
So the queen called her son the prince to her room and asked the prince: “What are you asking from me, oh mother?” The queen answered him: “You are my only son and I have chosen everything for you in all these years. But now that you have grown up, the time has come for you to choose for yourself a wife, but you must choose a princess who suits you. The princess is not only the king’s daughter but she must be elegant, know how to choose her clothes and how to behave, and the most important of that is that her voice must be beautiful.”
So the queen gave the prince addresses of the kings of neighboring countries. The prince began to visit the kings’ palaces to search for a suitable princess to marry. In the first palace, he found a beautiful princess reading a book, but when he spoke with her, he found her voice very ugly, so he didn’t like her.
So he completed his mission to the second queen and recognized the king. The king was happy to meet him and knew about his son, but he found her lazy. She ate with them and didn’t care for him, so the prince returned to his kingdom and told his mother that he didn’t find a suitable bride.
One day, while he was sitting on the terrace of his palace, he saw a girl descending from the palace. The prince received the girl and found her mother a girl of extreme kindness and beauty. When he spoke with her, he was amazed by her gentle and beautiful voice that she was a princess. She was traveling but the rains prevented her from completing her journey, and she asked the prince to give her shelter in the palace until the rains stopped.
The wolf immediately agreed and gave the girl permission to enter the palace. But when she slept with them, she found their clothes muddy with dust from the effects of travel and rain. But she loved him, so she went to his mother and told her about the girl’s matter and that he had made his choice on her to become his wife.
And the queen decided to go down to see the girl, but when she saw her and found her eyes on her beautiful garden, she refused her son’s request and said to him that it was impossible that she be a princess and her clothes so muddy like this, as she traveled without elegance. However, the prince insisted on marrying the beautiful girl, so he told his mother the queen that she would prepare a test for her, and if she succeeded, she would give her to him to marry.
So the queen prepared a room for the girl, but she asked them to put a strange thing on them: They placed one rotten pea under the first mattress, then asked for twenty mattresses and put them on the pea, arranging them one on top of another. Finally, they placed twenty feather pillows on the mattresses, and then the girl’s sleeping arrangements were made.
The girl went to the room to rest, but she found the bed extremely high, so she asked the servants to bring a ladder to climb up on it, but she couldn’t sleep at all because of the rotten pea, and in the morning the maid came to her and asked her about her condition. The girl told the maid that she couldn’t sleep at all because the bed was like a stone. The maid went to the queen and told her the girl’s words. The queen knew that the girl with that tenderness for her son and that she would be a princess, so she summoned her son the prince and told him that she agreed to his marriage to the girl, so he sent a group of guards to accompany the princess to his kingdom, and he presented to his father the king and proposed to her, then they married and lived happily.
(Story translated from: The Princess and the Pea)