Beauty and the Beast

8-10 min read
16 pages

Beauty and the Beast, retold for reading aloud. A rose picked in the wrong garden, a bargain kept, and a question asked every single evening.

A merchant had three daughters. The two elder ones liked balls and new dresses; the youngest liked books and the garden, and because she was also the prettiest, everyone called her Beauty, which her sisters never forgave her for.

Then the merchant's ships were lost, and the family moved to a small house in the country. The two elder daughters lay in bed till ten and complained. Beauty got up at four, cleaned the house, and had learned to like it by the end of the first winter.

One day word came that a ship had docked after all, and the merchant rode off to the port. He asked his daughters what he should bring them. The elder ones asked for gowns and jewels. Beauty asked for a rose, because there were none where they lived.

The ship's cargo had been seized for debts, and the merchant rode home with nothing. A storm caught him in the forest, and he lost the road, and through the trees he saw lights.

The castle gates stood open. There was a fire in the hall, and a table laid for one, and no one at all. He waited, ate because he was starving, slept, and in the morning found fresh clothes laid out for him and breakfast on the same table.

Going out, he passed under an arch of roses, and remembered. He picked one. There was a terrible roar, and something came down the path towards him: a Beast, huge and furred, who said that he had given the merchant shelter and food and that the man had repaid it by stealing the one thing he loved.

The merchant said the rose was for his daughter. The Beast was quiet for a moment. Then he said: go home, and if one of your daughters will come here of her own free will, in your place, you may live. Otherwise return in three months yourself.

The merchant went home and told them. The elder sisters said it was Beauty's fault for asking for a rose. Beauty said nothing at all, and in the morning she rode to the castle, and she went alone.

The Beast met her in the hall. He asked whether she had come of her own will, and she said yes. He showed her a room with her own name over the door, and a library, and a garden. He was not gentle to look at, and he did not pretend to be.

Every evening he came and sat with her while she had supper, and asked her questions about what she had read, and listened to the answers. And at the end of every evening he asked: «Beauty, will you marry me?» And every evening she said no, and he said, «Good night, Beauty,» and went away.

She was not unhappy. There was one thing only: she missed her father. In a mirror in her room she could see him, ill in bed, and she told the Beast so, and asked to go home for one week.

The Beast said that if she did not come back in a week he would die of it. He gave her a ring to turn on her finger when she wished to return. She promised, and woke the next morning in her father's house with a chest of gifts beside the bed.

Her father got better the moment he saw her. Her sisters saw the fine clothes and the chest and were bitterly jealous, and between them they decided to keep her past the week so the Beast would be angry with her — and they cried and held her hands and begged her to stay, and Beauty, who did not know why they were crying, stayed.

On the tenth night she dreamed of the Beast lying still in the rose garden, and she woke and turned the ring on her finger.

He was there, exactly as in the dream, and he did not move. She ran to the fountain and brought water in her hands and poured it over his head, and said the thing she had never said in three months: that she could not live without him, and would he please marry her.

The garden lit up as though somebody had set off every firework in the world, and where the Beast had been there was a prince, who said that a fairy had put him under a spell until a girl should agree to marry him for what he was and not what he looked like — and that her sisters were in the hall, turned into two stone statues that would stand there until they admitted they had been wrong.

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Text source: Plot by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1756), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Beauty and the Beast characters

Beauty: The merchant's youngest daughter, who asks for a rose when her sisters ask for gowns. She goes to the castle of her own free will, and the Beast asks her that question first.
The Beast: Huge, furred and courteous. He asks Beauty the same question every single evening and accepts no for an answer every single time.
The merchant: Beauty's father, ruined by lost ships. He picks the one rose in the Beast's garden after being fed and sheltered, which is the whole hinge of the story.
The two elder sisters: Ask for gowns and jewels, blame Beauty for the rose, and keep her past her week on purpose. In the end they are turned to stone until they admit it.
The fairy: Never appears. She had put the prince under the spell until a girl would agree to marry him for what he was rather than what he looked like.
The rose: Not a character, but the story turns on it twice: it is what Beauty asks for, and it is what her father steals.

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Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast characters

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