The Princess Bride: Chapters 1–4

The Duchess set about studying Annette and shortly found her adversary’s tragic flaw.

The Duke, for reasons passing understanding, next became smitten with his very own mother-in-law, which caused the Duchess ulcers, only they didn’t have ulcers yet.

She married soon thereafter, the selfsame man who accused her of sublimity, and gave him merry hell for many years.

Buttercup, of course, at fifteen, knew none of this. And if she had, would have found it totally unfathomable.

She hated to wash her face, she loathed the area behind her ears, she was sick of combing her hair and did so as little as possible.

He lived in a hovel out near the animals and, according to Buttercup’s mother, he kept it clean.

When she was almost seventeen, a man in a carriage came to town and watched as she rode for provisions.

He was very old, every organ in his body had long since betrayed him, and most of his important decisions regarding Florin had a certain arbitrary quality that bothered many of the leading citizens.

His last name was Rugen, but no one needed to use it—he was the only Count in the country, the title having been bestowed by the Prince as a birthday present some years before, the happening taking place, naturally, at one of the Countess’s parties.

The three stood in silence as the procession moved forward.

There wasn’t really much in this world he excelled at, and he could never quite figure out how he happened to sire his daughter, but he knew, deep down, that it must have been some kind of wonderful mistake, the nature of which he had no intention of investigating.

Buttercup’s mother was a gnarled shrimp of a woman, thorny and worrying, who had always dreamed of somehow just once being popular, like the Countess was said to be.

He was ashamed of his attire, worn boots and torn blue jeans (blue jeans were invented considerably before most people suppose), and his hands were tight together in almost a gesture of supplication.

I want him cleaned. Tonight. I want his hoofs varnished.

Flailing and thrashing, Buttercup wept and tossed and paced and wept some more, and there have been three great cases of jealousy since David of Galilee was first afflicted with the emotion when he could no longer stand the fact that his neighbor Saul’s cactus outshone his own.

I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I’ve ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more.

She could chide herself for her silly infatuation with a dullard.

She could chide herself for her silly infatuation with a dullard.

“Do I know any West—oh, Farm Boy, it’s you, how droll!”

Of course you knew I wasn’t for a moment serious, or at least I thought you knew, but then, just when you started closing the door I thought for one dreary instant that perhaps I’d done my little jest a bit too convincingly and, poor dear thing, you might have thought I meant what I said when of course we both know the total impossibility of that ever happening.

I have not known a moment in years when the sight of you did not send my heart careening against my rib cage.

I have not known a night when your visage did not accompany me to sleep. There has not been a morning when you did not flutter behind my waking eyelids....

There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C., when Saul and Delilah Korn’s inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization.

“Oh, Westley,” she said, “I must never disappoint you,” and she hurried downstairs to where her parents were squabbling.

“Gracious, but it isn’t easy being tidy.” Undaunted, she set to work.

He was supreme as usual; he was spectacular; he was singularly fabulous.

All I can guess is that for Morgenstern, the real narrative was not Buttercup and the remarkable things she endures, but, rather, the history of the monarchy and other such stuff.

Once he was determined, once he had focused on an object, the Prince was relentless. He never tired, never wavered, neither ate nor slept.

In the beginning, he traversed the world for opposition. But travel consumed time, ships and horses being what they were, and the time away from Florin was worrying.

And he decreed there were to be five levels, all with the proper needs for his individual enemies.

Still, he was an eternal optimist, so he kept the great cage of the fifth level always in readiness.

(This was all taking place in the ape pit, where the Prince had his pleasure with any simians.)

There had been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy, which almost bankrupted both nations, the Roman Rift, which did send them both into insolvency, only to be followed by the Discord of the Emeralds, in which they both got rich again, chiefly by banding together for a brief period and robbing everybody within sailing distance.

She doted on changing hats at every opportunity.

Things went on like this throughout the day, but it seems to me to be a bit too much court etiquette for modern readers, so it’s not till the evening meal that I return to the original text.

There were many doors and giant entrance ways, and the wind gusts sometimes reached gale force.

He was cheek to cheek with her, his head under her wide-brimmed blue-green hat, which brought out the exquisite color in both of her largeish eyes.

What happened then has been variously described as a norther or a sou’wester, depending on where you were seated in the room when it struck, but all hands agree on one thing: at 8:23 and twenty-five seconds, it was pretty gusty in the Great Hall.

“I do wish you hadn’t been quite so blunt,” Queen Bella said.

Then the miracle man began improving King Lotharon, and eighteen pages are used up in describing the cures. (Morgenstern hated doctors, and was always bitter when they outlawed miracle men from working in Florin proper.)