So this story opens with a really pretty, really ugly princess being born, much like Perrault’s. Now I said in the last Riquet post that Perrault ripped off this version, but we’re not actually totally sure which story was first. Anyway. Our princess here is named Mama. She’s too stupid to even realize she’s stupid, until she meets a super ugly dude named Riquet, who informs her of the problem, and then says he can fix it if she agrees to marry him at the end of a year. (Too stupid to know she’s stupid, btw, makes her more stupid than the Perrault version, who was just smart enough to realize she was stupid.)
She agrees. A year passes, she becomes smarter and smarter, and she falls in love with another man, named Arada. And then the time comes for her to marry Riquet, who in this version is the king of the gnomes.
Mama doesn’t want to marry him anymore, and he says that’s fine, she doesn’t have to, but she can’t keep on being smart unless she does. Mama figures she’ll lose her boyfriend Arada either way—obviously if she marries someone else, but he wouldn’t like her anymore if she was stupid again, so she still couldn’t be with him if she rejected Riquet.
She elects to lose her boyfriend and keep her mind by marrying Riquet. But he’s ugly, and all the other gnomes are ugly, and she hates everything about being with him. She sends out a message to Arada, letting him know what’s happened, and he comes to join her in gnome land.
For a while Mama and Arada are happy sneaking around together, but eventually Riquet catches them. Now, he doesn’t want his wife cheating on him, but he also doesn’t want a stupid wife, so his main method of managing the situation is gone. He decides to take away her intelligence during the day, so she’s only smart when they’re together at night.
She retaliates by drugging him every night, and hanging with Arada while she’s smart and Riquet’s sleeping. But of course, they get caught again.
This time, Riquet puts a spell on Arada, so that he looks just like Riquet. Mama gets to keep her brains, but instead of a hot boyfriend and an ugly husband, she has two identically ugly husbands, and everyone is miserable forever.
Which is probably why I prefer Perrault—not a big fan of
unhappy endings.
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