One day as the elder princess is going for a walk in the forest to ease her sorrow, she is approached by Prince Riquet who has travelled to her kingdom to meet her having fallen in love with portraits of her that circulate widely.

While thinking upon her options for marriage, she encounters Prince Riquet in the same forest where they met one year ago, as he has come to marry her.

Prince Riquet then tells her that she was gifted at birth with the power to transform her lover into a beautiful person by the same fairy who helped him.

The basic structure of a beautiful, but stupid, princess and an intelligent, but ugly, prince remains largely the same between the two versions of the story, however, there are some key differences.

In the Bernard version of the tale, the princess is given the name “Mama”, her younger sister is not a character, and Prince Riquet is given no backstory beyond living in a subterranean kingdom.

[5] The story’s emphasis on the importance of intelligence, rather than just beauty, for a young woman is reflective of the ideals of seventeenth century upper-class society in France.

[5] In contrast, Bernard’s version provides the moral that marriage negatively affected women during seventeenth century France, and the story ends with the message that “‘in the long run, all lovers become husbands”.