At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes
had never yet beheld, came to her; but the king’s son began to talk to
her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred
that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her.
Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take
him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she
thought: ‘He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does’; and she said
yes, and laid her hand in his. She said: ‘I will willingly go away with
you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk
every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when
that is ready I will descend, and you will take me on your horse.’ They
agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until
once Rapunzel said to her: ‘Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that
you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king’s son--he
is with me in a moment.’ ‘Ah! you wicked child,’ cried the enchantress.
‘What do I hear you say! I thought I had separated you from all
the world, and yet you have deceived me!’ In her anger she clutched
Rapunzel’s beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand,
seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut
off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless
that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great
grief and misery.
On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress
fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the
window, and when the king’s son came and cried:
‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair to me.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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