CELLAR TALES. Each of us has heard innumerable versions of the tales of the Princess. From this multiplicity of versions, varying from single details of wording to entire adventures composed of many episodes, each of us selects particular versions that eclipse or obscure the other versions, without eliminating them entirely. The versions selected by any one of us rarely replicate the versions chosen by others, but gradually, in the course of our town’s history, certain versions come to take precedence over other ones, which are relegated to a secondary status. It is here that an interesting development takes place. For these secondary versions, which have not been able to survive in the full light of day, continue to carry on a hidden life, and give rise to growths of a dubious and fantastic kind. Such offspring of rejected, inferior, but never-forgotten versions are known as cellar tales, for they grow in the dark, unseen by anyone, mysterious as elves or potatoes. In one cycle of cellar tales, the Princess and the dwarf have a child, whose face is of a beauty unsurpassed, but whose body is hideously deformed. In another series of tales the margrave in his dungeon begins to change: a pair of black wings grows on his back, and one day he appears in the sky above the river as a black angel of death. Although the cellar tales are never admitted to the main cycle of castle tales, they nevertheless do not wither away, but multiply inexhaustibly, staining the other tales with their hidden colors, exerting a secret influence. Some say that a day will come when the daylight tales will weaken from lack of nourishment; then the cellar tales will rise from their dark places and take over the earth.
THE PRINCE. As the Princess withdrew to the solitude of her tower, the Prince retired to the privacy of his oriel chamber, with its great hearth, its hunting tapestries in which the yellows were woven with gold thread, and its many-paned window that overlooked the chapel roof. Here he kept his favorite falcon in a cage, his library of rhymed romances inked on parchment and bound in ivory covers mounted on wood, and a locked chest containing the horn of a unicorn. Alone on his window seat, the Prince brooded over the Princess, the margrave, and his own unhappy fate. Had his suspicions perhaps been ill founded? Had he acted unwisely in sending the Princess to the margrave’s bedchamber? Should he perhaps pardon the margrave and release himself from the worm of doubt that gnawed at his entrails? But such a step was impossible, for at the heart of his doubt was a still deeper doubt, a doubt that questioned his doubt. The Prince remembered reading of a cunning Moorish labyrinth in which a Christian knight had wandered for so many years that when he caught sight of himself in a puddle he saw the face of an old man, and it seemed to the Prince that he was that knight. Sometimes the castle, the margrave, the Princess, his own hand, seemed images in an evil dream. He no longer called for his dwarf, who alone might have been able to soothe him, for he sensed that the little man detected in him a secret weakness, an indecisiveness, a softening of the will to rule. Should he perhaps have the dwarf killed? In the late-afternoon shadows of his oriel chamber, the Prince half-closed his eyes and dreamed of another life: surely he would have been happier as a shepherd, tending his flock, playing his oaten pipes, leaning on an elbow beside a babbling brook.