The Prince and the Widow and the Stone soup

You’ve probably heard parts of this story before, and thought that was the whole of it, but those parts were just parts and this is the whole story and anyway it’s not a story, it’s more like a reporting of true facts that happened some years ago in a country somewhat removed from our own.

In this country there was a young prince who didn’t marry, after quite a few years of this he wasn’t a young prince anymore and his father the king or his mother the queen (I forget) were soon going to die and said I worry how you will take care of yourself without a wife, which was an incredibly idiotic thing to say because the prince had several hundred servants; servants who made his food, and scrubbed his boots and wiped his backside with scented serviettes, and in short the prince did not need anyone to take care of him because he was a prince, but the king and or queen were somewhat stupid being a king and or queen and having been taken care of all their lives which had prevented the natural development of any sort of brainpower.

So the prince decided to go forward into the country and try to find himself someone to marry, and so that nobody be swayed by his station in life he only took a few hundred cuoras (the currency of the country which has now been done away with as they have joined the EU some years back, but much after the happenings of this story) which would have lasted a family of three for a year, but he being a prince burned through it in a few weeks.

The prince was reduced to wandering the dusty roads of his kingdom and begging for food, another man might have gone back to the palace and taken more money with him but the prince was rather less practical and more proud than another man might be, and so he continued to look for a wife in his unprincely circumstances.

Now you may be wondering how it can be that a prince leaves his palace and goes wandering about the countryside without anyone being aware of it, and the answer is that it cannot be, but the speed of communication and so forth not being all the ways equal not everyone knew the true situation, some people thought that the prince was traveling in fine state, some thought he had gone abroad, some thought he was living a dissolute life with a young poet whose powerful drug habit and marvelous good looks had enraptured the prince.

But there was a particular widow who was still not that old possessed of a strong personality living on a small farm near the outer edge of a village that was quite charming, if you didn’t have to live there but drove through very quickly, and she was well-informed as to the prince’s current situation, because she had a cousin who worked in the royal household and another cousin who lived at the last hotel the prince stayed and thus she was able to surmise in the ways of a widow who has had to shift for herself, that he was skint.

As a consequence she had her eye out, which is a good thing to have out metaphorically — otherwise not so much. And when that eye spied a middle aged man of gentlemanly demeanor, well dressed, but dirty from the road she naturally thought he might be the prince, so she opened her oven where she was baking bread (this is in no way meant metaphorically, she really opened her oven where she was baking bread) and let the scent of the fresh bread drift down the road to his inquisitive nostrils. He came quickly to her door.

He stood for some seconds looking rather dimwitted, because he realized all at once that he was poor and had never spoken to a woman of higher apparent station than himself.

“Well, what do you want?!” asked the woman, sharply. She knew princes need to be taken in control when first met, or they will end up ruling over you.

The prince experienced now something in his mind that he had never experienced and it excited him, this was the experience of cunning.

“Good lady, I have walked some ways and I am hoping to make some soup before continuing on my way — if you let me use your pot I will be quite happy to share my soup with you”

This was not what she was expecting, intrigued she allowed him to user her cooking pot. He filled it with water, and then picked a stone from her garden washed it off and put it into the pot.

Now she knew what was going on, she remembered this particular story from her youth — now before you get worked up and complain that we’ve cheated you it is true that there was a story before this one of the man making stone soup, but every version of the story you have heard have in fact been descended from this one. So you see we are not trying to pull a fast one, or any kind of one at all.

The cooking of the stone soup went as expected, he heated the stone but then asked for some garnishes from her garden and one thing and another went on and at the end it was a full pot of delicious soup he was boiling. As to how the prince knew how to make soup, princes and other members of the upper classes in those days were invariably raised by lower class women who had them around with them while doing their tasks, and so, while they also had to attend classes teaching them how to fence, curtsy, and ride a horse, they also learned quite early on how to sew, cook stews, and swear at chambermaids.

The widow was impressed despite herself, and decided that if this man was not a prince she wouldn’t want to let him pass by and if he was a prince the timing was propitious, therefore she said “a man like you is good to have around, stay here and you will be suitably cared for”, the prince of course suspecting nothing and grateful for the validation of his soup-making skills as it was perhaps the only thing he had ever done where the other person watching him do it hadn’t obviously thought he was getting ahead based on other than personal merit.

So the prince stopped there that night and in the morning the widow was no longer a widow.

This story was written by IG Agent 71.