La clef d'or

"Come oot o' the gutter, ye nickum!" cried, in harsh, half-masculine voice, a woman standing on the curbstone of a short, narrow, dirty lane, at right angles to an important thoroughfare, itself none of the widest or cleanest. She was dressed in dark petticoat and print wrapper. One of her shoes was down at the heel, and discovered a great hole in her stocking. Had her black hair been brushed and displayed, it would have revealed a thready glitter of grey, but all that was now visible of it was only two or three untidy tresses that dropped from under a cap of black net and green ribbons, which looked as if she had slept in it. Her face must have been handsome when it was young and fresh; but was now beginning to look tattooed, though whether the colour was from without or from within, it would have been hard to determine. Her black eyes looked resolute, almost fierce, above her straight, well-formed nose. Yet evidently circumstance clave fast to her. She had never risen above it, and was now plainly subjected to it.

Sir Gibbie

Il était une fois, un roi et une reine qui avaient toutes les peines du monde à avoir un enfant. Puis un jour, l'heureux événement tant espéré arriva. Mais leur bonheur leur fit oublier leur peuple… Le roi et la reine omirent d'inviter les habitants du royaume à la grande fête organisée, et, fâcheux oubli, la sœur même du roi, femme étrange, peut-être même un tantinet sorcière. Le jour du baptême, elle jette un sort à la jeune princesse qui se voit retirée toute sensation de gravité. La voilà qui en plus de flotter dans les airs est incapable de prendre une situation au sérieux… Un livre moins léger qu'il n'y paraît sur le passage de l'enfance à l'âge adulte. Paru en 1864, ce conte est un immense classique dans le monde anglo-saxon.George MacDonald (1824-1905) est un écrivain et pasteur calviniste britannique. Il devient le mentor de Lewis Carroll et lui suggère la publication d'Alice au pays des merveilles. Il est notamment admiré par J. R. R. Tolkien et C. S. Lewis, qui le considéraient comme son «maître».

The Light Princess

I HAVE been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.

He lived in a low room over a coach-house; and that was not by any means at the back of the north wind, as his mother very well knew. For one side of the room was built only of boards, and the boards were so old that you might run a penknife through into the north wind. And then let them settle between them which was the sharper! I know that when you pulled it out again the wind would be after it like a cat after a mouse, and you would know soon enough you were not at the back of the north wind. Still, this room was not very cold, except when the north wind blew stronger than usual: the room I have to do with now was always cold, except in summer, when the sun took the matter into his own hands. Indeed, I am not sure whether I ought to call it a room at all; for it was just a loft where they kept hay and straw and oats for the horses.

At the Back of the North Wind

Curdie was the son of Peter the miner. He lived with his father and mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his father inside the mountain.

A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them-and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.

The Princess and Curdie

With only her nurse, Lootie, for company, Princess Irene leads a lonely and sheltered life in her mountainous kingdom. She is unaware that goblins live in the underground mines, or that they are planning a war against those who live above the ground. With her new, plucky friend Curdie and the help of her otherworldly great-great-grandmother, Princess Irene hatches a plan to defeat the goblins and save her kingdom. Published in 1872, George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin has been translated into numerous languages and has been adapted for film and television, most notably as part of the popular Fractured Fairy Tales series in the 1960s. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

The Princess And The Goblin

Once upon a time, so long ago that I have quite forgotten the date, there lived a king and queen who had no children.

And the king said to himself, "All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was. Then the king grew very cross indeed. But the queen pretended to take it all as a joke, and a very good one too.

"Why don't you have any daughters, at least?" said he. "I don't say sons; that might be too much to expect."

"I am sure, dear king, I am very sorry, " said the queen.

"So you ought to be, " retorted the king; "you are not going to make a virtue of that, surely."

But he was not an ill-tempered king, and in any matter of less moment would have let the queen have her own way with all his heart. This, however, was an affair of state.

The queen smiled.

"You must have patience with a lady, you know, dear king, " said she.

She was, indeed, a very nice queen, and heartily sorry that she could not oblige the king immediately.

I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms, the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to my wondering consciousness. The day before had been my one-and-twentieth birthday. Among other ceremonies investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in which my father had kept his private papers, had been delivered up to me. As soon as I was left alone, I ordered lights in the chamber where the secretary stood, the first lights that had been there for many a year; for, since my father's death, the room had been left undisturbed. But, as if the darkness had been too long an inmate to be easily expelled, and had dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, it had clung, these tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to throw yet darker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice.

La clef d'or

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