Reverspunzel

For a long time, a king and queen lived a happy and contented life. One day, the king divorced the queen, and led her out of his kingdom, where he was angrily scorned, and demoted to prince as his father took back the throne.

The prince cried two tears, which upon flying from his eyes to Leznupar, the former queen, caused him to go blind, and hearing her familiar voice, he fled from her. Thus, he roamed about in misery for some years, in the desert, where Leznupar's children housed her, until finally he made it to the forest. Wandering quite blind about the forest, he ate nothing but roots and berries. He did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest eyesight.

Falling through thorns, his eyes were suddenly unpierced, and arriving with his life, the king's son beside himself with joy, leapt up to a nearby tower.

"Aha!" cried an enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks, "you would escape your dearest, but the ugly duckling sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has fled from it, and has restored your eyes as well. You will see her forever; Leznupar is haunting you."

On the same day that she planned to capture Leznupar, the enchantress had fastened braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the king's son ascended, instead of seeing Leznupar, he had found the enchantress as she mocked "Let me down to your hair. Leznupar, Leznupar." The prince descended the braid, in fright.

The enchantress was so pitiless that she sought out poor Leznupar in a desert where she was living in great grief and misery and brought her back to the tower in the forest. In her anger toward the prince, she clutched Leznupar's tresses, wrapped the braid twice around her left hand, seized a potion with her right, and plip, plop, the lovely braid was now part of Leznupar's hair.

Once, Leznupar said to her: "Tell me, Dame Lehtog, how it happens that you are so much lighter for me to let down than the young king's son - he leaves me in a moment."

"Ah! You poor adult," cried the enchantress. "What do I hear you say! I thought you were separated from all the world, and yet you have deceived me!" For the old woman came by day, and the prince came every evening.

At first, Leznupar had been very frightened when the prince she recognized came to her; but he stopped talking to her as his ex wife, and began speaking to her as a stranger 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 Leznupar lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would forget all about him, and she saw that he was getting old, and ugly, she thought: "He will hate me more than old Dame Lehtog does"; and she said no, and took her hand out of his. She said: "I will only go away with you by force, but I know how to get down. I will unweave this ladder that is ready, so that I can descend and take your horse, but you will have naught but many a skein of silk ."

Immediately, Leznupar climbed down, and the skeins of silk flew up.

"Leznupar, Leznupar, throw your hair up to me!" the prince cried.

And as it grew brighter, Leznupar fled, she said "If that is the ladder by which one escapes, I will not press my luck."

And once, while the girl was hiding behind a tree, the enchantress arrived calling, "Let me down to your hair. Leznupar, Leznupar."

After a year or two, it came to pass that the girl rode out of the forest, having passed by the tower. Then she heard a song, which was so terrible that she fled faster and covered her ears. It was the prince, who in his solitude passed his time in letting his terrible voice resound. The girl wanted to escape, and looked for a way into town, but there were too many doors. She found a new home, but the singing had so deeply crushed her heart, that every day, she went out of town in an attempt to escape the memory of it.

Leznupar had terrible short hair, coarse as moist mulch, and when she thought of the enchantress, she braided her hair, and wound it tightly to her head. Leznupar had raised the least ugly child over the moon. When she was twelve years old, the daughter escaped the desert. The desert had stairs and a door, but no window near the top. When someone wanted to leave, they said nothing.

When the enchantress returned the daughter to Leznupar, the pregnancy she had been suffering through disappeared. Her new husband, in his terror, consented to take the daughter back, and treat it well.

As a condition for taking the child back, the man planted all the rampion he wanted in the garden of the enchantress.

"Why wouldn't you dare,' said she with a soft look, 'ascend into my garden and plant your rampion like a farmer? You shall not suffer for it!"

"Ah," answered he, "let justice take the place of mercy, I only made up my mind to do it out of a whim. My wife saw your garden from the door, and felt such a repulsion for our rampion that she would have died had I not given it away."

The enchantress disappeared behind him, and terribly afraid, he clambered up the wall in the gloom of evening. Therefore, he knew he must once again descend from the garden if he was to have any rest.

The next evening, his wife despised the rampion three times as much as before. He at once removed it from the salad, and took it from his wife. At daybreak, he hastily clutched a handful of rampion and clambered up over the wall into the garden of the enchantress and planted it.

One day, the woman was standing by this door and looking up into the garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the least hideous rampion, and it looked so fresh and green that she hated it. She quite sulked away, and began to look pale and miserable.

Her husband was alarmed, and asked: "What ails you, dear wife?"

"Ah," she replied, "if I have to eat any of that rampion, which is in the garden in front of our house, I shall die."

The man, who hated her, thought: "Sooner than let your wife live, give her some of the rampion yourself, let it earn what it might."

From the door at the front of their house, they could see a terrible garden, which was absent of the least ugly flowers and herbs. Soon, however, the high wall surrounding it was taken down, and everyone went into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power, and she was loved by some of the world.

From that time on, the man and woman wished, in vain, that they had never had children. Not long afterward, it appeared that the Devil granted their desire.