Storytelling Week 4: Pearl and the Thief
There was a young merchant's daughter named Pearl. She was gorgeous and everything any man would want in a wife. All of the men in the village wanted to marry her, and she had recently turned of age.
“Father, please stop. If you talk to me about this once more I will up and die from boredom.”
Pearl had been dreading this. She knew the moment she officially became a woman, her father would not stop trying to set her up to be married. She didn’t want to get married. She wasn’t interested in boys. No matter how attractive, intelligent, brave, or clever they were, she just wasn’t interested. Pearl would have rather died than marry anyone. Not even a god himself could interest Pearl.
Her father had finally given up hope and stopped pestering his daughter about marriage. It broke him up inside, but more than anything he wanted his lovely daughter to be happy.
One day, Pearl was going along, minding her own business, and she felt a sharp pain from behind. She turned around, looking for what had caused it, and saw nothing. She turned back around and continued her walk onto the balcony.
That’s when she saw him. The most gorgeous man she had ever seen. She fell in love with him instantly. He was covered in dirt, grime, sweat, and blood. He was in handcuffs and being carried to the village square to be executed. She immediately ran to her father and begged him to save the love of her life.
The father was baffled by his daughter’s choice. Why must she love a thief out of all of the men in the country?! He was confused, but he was also desperate to make his daughter happy, so he went to the king and begged for the thief to be released so his daughter could be with her true love.
The king denied the desperate merchant’s claim, and the thief was executed. Pearl was so distraught. Answering Pearl’s prayers, a goddess came to her and brought the thief back as a reformed man, so he and Pearl could live together happily ever after.
Pearl had always thought that the goddess was just being nice because she felt so badly for Pearl. What she didn’t know was that the goddess had only brought the thief back because she was on Cupid-duty.
Cupid, the god of love, thought it was funny to make the wrong people fall in love. He was a bored and evil god, so he ran around the country side, hitting mismatched couples with his arrows left and right. The goddess that saved Pearl from a life full of unhappiness had only done so because Cupid’s mother, Venus, had demanded that she cover her son’s tracks so that the other gods and goddesses wouldn’t find out. Pearl’s story, unfortunately for the goddess, wasn’t an uncommon one. The goddess continued her duty of fixing Cupid's pranks, and Pearl lived happily ever after with her husband, the former thief.
Author’s Note: I wrote this story based off of The Girl and the Thief from the Twenty-Two Goblins unit. The original story was very similar to my own, but Cupid didn’t play a role. The story never gave an explanation for why the girl fell in love with the thief, only that it was love at first sight. I was trying to think of all of the reasons the girl would have fallen in love at first sight with a dirty thief. To me the only thing that made sense would have been if Cupid had done it. The couple is such an odd combination that I find it hard to believe that she just fell in love with some random thief on her own. I decided to give an explanation of my own with Cupid being the instigator. I blended in a little bit about Cupid from what I read last week, because I thought it was fitting. The original story had almost the same ending, but the goddess that saved the thief and fixed Cupid's mistakes was actually the god, Shiva. Instead the original god brought the thief back to life because he felt so badly for Pearl's heartache.
Bibliography:
Translated by Arthur Ryder (1917)
