(By now, most of the mice had gone. Heady delights of philosophy had failed to sustain them for long, for they soon discovered that puzzling over the meaning of life seemed inversely related to their enjoyment of it: many of their best minds had grown weak from wrestling with the longer words, not a few had died of existential despair, and one sad morning, the most learned mouse of them all was found flat as a pancake, apparently crushed by the weight of her knowledge. As for the vicarious thrills of the arts, it transpired that there were only so many ways to eat a chunk of cheese shaped like a cat. In a desperate bid to restore the flagging enthusiasm for his work, Gouda the artist abandoned realism and began to add outlandish trunks, horns, tentacles, wings, and warts to his cheese sculptures until his new creations looked so revolting he simply could not bring himself to eat them without retching; and his digestive issues aside, after this infusion of the fantastic and the arbitrary into his themes, the powerful yet simple message behind his early masterpieces—the unequivocal triumph of good over evil—was hopelessly obscured. Eventually even his most devoted fans turned away from him, disappointed, and once the smell of moldy gouda grew unbearable, a youngster named Tuft gathered a few of his adolescent friends, all equally disenchanted with higher pursuits, and led a bloodless raid on Gouda’s studio, where they did away with visual arts once and for all.
After that, intoxicated by their success and meeting no resistance—even Gouda appeared relieved—Tuft and his cheering army abolished education, manners, abstract thinking, cutlery, all other kinds of thinking, and much of the vocabulary. Mice should be mice, they shouted gleefully to anyone willing to listen. Their days were short, and they should not waste them lazing about in sunless holes of stone, frightening each other silly with Unnatural Ideas and oohing and aahing over wantonly ruined cheese. No, they should go back to nature and be what they always had been—happy mindless creatures who smelled flowers and one another’s behinds, ran through the rain, flexed their muscles, squeaked their animal joys to the skies. And the mice liked what they heard, for it spoke to something deep and furry within them, and they abandoned the palace in droves. Only the aging professor of Human Studies worried about leaving the princess, out of some obscure loyalty he himself had trouble explaining—unbeknownst to him, he was the last surviving descendant of Brie the First on his mother’s side and Nibbles the First on his father’s; but after a full day of observing her from under her bed, he concluded that mice were not meant to understand the doings of men and that he, too, should follow the call of the wild and revert to a fierce woodland beast, leaving the incomprehensible woman with a sad face to sit alone in her stuffy room and absurdly persist in stinging her fingers with nettles.)
As she worked on the shirt, she thought about buttons and happiness. She decided on her wedding dress for her prince’s liberation: it seemed the appropriate choice. The confectionlike gown, once her most cherished possession, hung in a cloud of white tulle in her dressing room. Sewing scissors at the ready, she stood before it one morning, looked at the pearl-encrusted buttons running down its lacy back, and recalled trumpets blaring, horses prancing, crowds tossing rice into the warm spring air, her stepsisters acting huffy and displeased, and the prince lifting her veil, bending down to kiss her. When their lips had touched, she had believed that she would float in this tranquil warmth of love and comfort, shielded from all unhappiness, from all change, forever after. Now she trailed her fingers over the buttons’ cool iridescence and wondered how many to snip off. Precisely when had Prince Roland stopped being the attentive, generous man who had made her feel content and secure and been replaced by the soulless, hard-eyed automaton who wielded his sharp porcupine quill and his virile member with an equal self-obsessed, callous ruthlessness?
For she knew everything now. She had long since retrieved the magic mirror from the wastepaper basket, brushed off the cherry pits stuck to the glass, and made sheepish apologies. The mirror, which had seen it all and took everything in stride, had accepted her contrition, and she now spent an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon, as well as an occasional hour or two in the evening, watching the prince’s antics; for it seemed only prudent to keep track of his doings. She found out a great number of things, all confirming (had she needed any further confirmation) that this man was not the man she had married. This man ruled the kingdom with an iron hand, crushing every disagreement, no matter how minor, punishing every criticism, no matter how trivial, signing death warrants and exile orders with no trace of misgivings. In his leisure moments, he worked his way through the female inhabitants of the palace—and here, once her furious blushing had given way to a horrified fascination at the thoroughness of the curse, his exertions proved rather instructive to watch. The study was the place of choice for his assignations, and he plowed into scullery girls with angular hips and middle-aged countesses plumped up on bonbons, all strewn with egalitarian abandon and in varied combinations on his floral rug; he also not infrequently contrived to couple paperwork with assorted diversions, as a flock of women serviced him under his desk while he perused his reports. The latter revelation shed nauseating new light on that afternoon when she had surprised Esmeralda the Singing Maid in the act of searching for a thumbtack at the prince’s feet and had then, so trustingly, alighted in his lap. It made her study her son with fearful apprehension—would the shame of his life’s quickening find reflection in his nature? It also confirmed that, by the sixth year of marriage—conveniently, she could calculate the precise date based on Ro’s subsequent entrance into the world—Prince Roland had no longer been himself, which brought her back to the pressing question: Exactly when had her beloved prince stopped being her prince?
The radiance of their early years together shone undimmed in her mind: the first year, brimming over with dances, roses, and ardent (if properly restrained) affections; the second, when she had bathed in the prince’s doting attentions through her long confinement; and the third, when she had learned the ways of the palace, indulged in the innocent joys of poems and tapestries, and basked in her overall sense of belonging.
Without the slightest hesitation, she sheared three buttons from the dress’s back.
Then, her scissors yawning in her hand, she stopped and thought.
The fourth year, now—what was she to make of the fourth year, the year she had paid her surprise visit to the von Liebers’ palace? The prince had not been entirely kind to her at the time, but he had offered oranges and explanations later. And the following stretch, before the unequivocal afternoon in the man’s lap, had not been one of relentless misery, either, filled as it had been with the ups and downs of a regular, albeit not altogether fairy-tale, existence. Was her husband not entitled to some intermittent infelicities, moments of impatience or irritability, and sour moods before she would brand him an accursed monster? At what point would the weight of her cumulative unhappiness signal the innate change in his personality rather than an occasional bad day on his part?