The Little Girl Sold with the Pears

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The Little Girl Sold with the Pears is an Italian fairy tale collected by Italo Calvino in Italian Folktales. Ruth Manning-Sanders included a variant, as "The Girl in the Basket", in A Book of Ogres and Trolls.

[edit] Synopsis

A man had to pay the king four baskets of pears as rent, but one year, his trees yielded only three and a half, so he put his youngest daughter in the four basket to fill it up. The royal servants found her by the pears she ate, and she went to work as a servant. As she grew up, she and the prince fell in love. The maidservants grew envious and told the king that she had boasted she could steal the witch's treasure. The king insisted that she do it.

She went and passed by an apple tree and a peach tree to sleep in the third, a pear tree. In the morning, a little old woman was under the tree and gave her grease, bread, and millet. She went on, gave the millet to three women in a bakery, sweeping out the ovens with their hair, threw the bread to some mastiffs, crossed by a red river with a charm that the little old woman had given her, and greased the hinges of the witches' house. Then she took the treasure chest. The chest began to speak, but the door refused to slam on her, the river to drown her, the dogs to eat her, and the women in the bakery to bake her.

Curious, she opened the chest and a golden hen with her chicks escaped, but the little old woman put them back. The prince told her to ask, for her reward, for the coal chest in the cellar. When she asked and it was brought up, the prince was hidden in it, so they married.

[edit] Variants

In Manning-Sanders's variant, the girl is helped by the prince rather than a little old woman, she must first magically do all the laundry in the day, the victim of her theft is an ogress rather than a witch, and the things that spring from the chest are musical instruments that play on their own.

[edit] See also