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Suffering is not the answer. Light is the answer.”
The rat, reader, invited himself to the party.
No one, in the midst of all this merriment, heard the Pea.
In the middle of all that beauty, it immediately became clear that it was an extremely distasteful syllable. Rat. A curse, an insult, a word totally without light.
THE QUEEN LOVED SOUP. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch, and every dinner. And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art. On this particular day, for this particular banquet, Cook had outdone herself. The soup was a masterwork, a delicate mingling of chicken, watercress, and garlic. Roscuro, as he surfaced from the bottom of the queen’s
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Did you think that rats do not have hearts? Wrong. All living things have a heart. And the heart of any living thing can be broken.
There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.
Every action, reader, no matter how small, has a consequence.
When you are a king, you may make as many ridiculous laws as you like. That is what being a king is all about.
For the first time in her life, reader, Mig hoped. And hope is like love . . . a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing. Mig
Or is it (as the soldier said about happiness) something that you might just as well do, since, in the end, it really makes no difference to anyone but you?
Reader, the mouse wept. And then he lay down on the sack of flour and slept.
Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.
And now you have a small map of the princess’s heart (hatred, sorrow, kindness, empathy),
“What kind of world is it, Miss Louise, where princesses are taken from right under our noses and queens drop dead and we cannot even take comfort in soup?”
Forgiveness, reader, is, I think, something very much like hope and love, a powerful, wonderful thing. And a ridiculous thing, too.
“I forgive you, Pa.” And he said those words because he sensed that it was the only way to save his own heart, to stop it from breaking in two. Despereaux, reader, spoke those words to save himself.
And so, screwing his courage to the sticking place,
And times are terrible. And when times are terrible, soup is the answer. Don’t it smell like the answer?”
What of Roscuro? Did he live happily ever after? Well . . . the Princess Pea gave him free access to the upstairs of the castle. And he was allowed to go back and forth from the darkness of the dungeon to the light of the upstairs. But, alas, he never really belonged in either place, the sad fate, I am afraid, of those whose hearts break and then mend in crooked ways.
I would like it very much if you thought of me as a mouse telling you a story, this story, with the whole of my heart, whispering it in your ear in order to save myself from the darkness, and to save you from the darkness, too. “Stories are light,” Gregory the jailer told Despereaux. Reader, I hope you have found some light here.
