# Donkey Skin _Charles Perrault_ · 12 min read · ages 6-10 Rather than marry the king who adopted her, a princess asks for three impossible dresses and flees in the hide of the donkey that makes him rich. A ring baked into a cake fits her finger again, the hide falls to the ground, and her fairy godmother reveals who she is, before a wedding crowns the scullion queen. --- Once there was a king so loved by his people that he thought himself the happiest man alive, and his palace was full of wonders. Yet travellers who had come from distant lands to see them went away puzzled by one thing. The finest stall in his marble stables belonged to a donkey with long, drooping ears. What they could not know was that every night, while the donkey slept, bushels of gold pieces tumbled from its ears, and the attendants gathered them each morning. After many happy years the king’s dear wife fell ill. Before she died she gathered her strength, thinking as always of him first. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “You must marry again, I know, for your people’s sake. But do not hurry. Wait until you have found a woman more beautiful and better formed than I am.” “Do not speak to me of marrying,” the king sobbed. “Let me die with you instead.” But the queen only smiled faintly, turned on her pillow, and was gone. His grief was great, yet his counsellors urged him to marry again, and at last he agreed, on the one condition his wife had asked of him. Envoys rode to every country for portraits of the world’s famous beauties, but not one could stand beside the late queen for a moment. Then one day the king turned from another set of pictures and his eyes fell on his adopted daughter, who had lived in the palace since she was a baby. If any woman on earth was lovelier than the queen, he thought, here she stood, and he made his wishes known at once. The girl had no wish at all to marry him. Filled with dismay, she begged for time to think. That night, when the palace slept, she set out in a little cart drawn by a big sheep and went to her fairy godmother. “I know what you have come to tell me,” said the fairy. “Ask him for a dress that exactly matches the sky. He will never manage it, and you will be safe.” In the morning the girl told her father she would answer him when he gave her a dress the colour of the sky. Overjoyed, he summoned the kingdom’s finest weavers and ordered the robe made at once, on pain of losing their heads. Frightened out of their wits, they dyed and cut and sewed, and in two days brought a dress that might have been cut out of the heavens. The girl was thunderstruck. That night she harnessed her sheep again. “The king is more determined than I thought,” said the fairy. “Tell him you must have a dress of moonbeams.” The girl obeyed and asked for it. “Madam, I can refuse you nothing,” said the king, and he ordered it finished within a day, on pain of the gallows. By dawn it lay across her bed. Beautiful as the dress was, the girl began to cry, until the fairy heard her and came. “Well! I would not have believed it of him,” said the fairy. “Ask for a dress of sunshine. I shall be surprised indeed if he manages that.” The girl asked for it as before. The king made no difficulty. He gave his finest rubies and diamonds to trim it, and the dress blazed so that nobody could look at it except through smoked glass. The girl said the sight hurt her eyes and went to her room, where the fairy was waiting, thoroughly ashamed of how badly she had judged the king. “One thing is left,” she cried. “Ask for the skin of the donkey he sets such store by. All his riches come out of that creature’s ears, and he will never give it up.” The girl was not so sure. She told the king she could never marry him until he had given her the donkey’s skin. He was astonished, and he was grieved; but he did not hesitate a moment. The donkey was sacrificed, and the skin laid at her feet. Seeing no escape now, the girl wept, and the fairy stood suddenly before her. “Take heart,” she said. “Wrap yourself in this skin and go as far as your feet will carry you. Your dresses and jewels will follow you underground, and whenever you need something, strike the ground and you shall have it. Go quickly.” So the princess wrapped herself in the skin and slipped out unseen. The king’s men searched every road, but the fairy threw her invisible cloak over her whenever they came near. The princess walked a long way, looking for work and a roof. Cottagers gave her food out of kindness, but the skin was so dirty that none would let her indoors. Tired and low in spirits, she passed a farmyard gate one day and heard a voice calling. The farmer’s wife stood among her turkeys, beckoning her in. “I want a girl to wash the dishes, feed the turkeys and clean out the pig-sty,” she said, “and by the look of you, you will not be too fine for the work.” The girl took the place gladly. The servants laughed at the hide she went about in and nicknamed her Donkey Skin, but she worked so well that her mistress grew fond of her. A holiday was coming. At daybreak Donkey Skin struck the ground, as the fairy had told her, and there on her little bed lay the dress the colour of the sky. From that day she never let a chance of wearing her splendid clothes go by, though nobody saw her but the pigs and the turkeys. Now the farm was a royal farm. One holiday, when Donkey Skin had locked her door and put on her dress of sunshine, the king’s son rode in to rest after hunting. He wandered through the old house, opening one room after another, until he came to a handle that would not turn. He bent to the keyhole, and there sat a girl in a dress so dazzling he could hardly look at her. He asked in the kitchen who slept behind that door. The scullery maid, they told him, the one everybody laughed at and called Donkey Skin. He rode home with what he had seen through the keyhole still filling his head, and never knew whether the girl behind the door had caught sight of him too. All night he tossed about, and in the morning he woke in a high fever. The greatest doctors in the land were puzzled, and said at last that some secret sorrow lay at the bottom of it. The prince’s mother, who had no other child, knelt by his bed and begged him to tell her his trouble. Crown or wife, whatever he wanted should be his. “Madam,” said the prince, so weak he could hardly speak, “there is one thing that will cure me. A cake made by the hand of Donkey Skin.” “Donkey Skin?” said the queen, who thought he had lost his wits. “And who is that?” “Donkey Skin,” said an attendant who had been at the farm with him, “is the grubbiest creature on earth, a girl in a brown, greasy hide who keeps the hens at your farm.” “Never mind,” said the queen. “A sick man must have his whim. Send for the cake at once.” The moment a page brought the message, Donkey Skin threw off the hide, washed from head to foot, and put on a skirt and bodice of shining silver. She locked her door, took the richest cream, the finest flour and the freshest eggs, and set about her cake. As she stirred the mixture, a ring she sometimes wore in secret slipped from her finger into the dough. Perhaps she saw it and perhaps she did not, but she went on stirring. When the cake came out brown and fragrant she put on the skin again and gave the cake to the page, who would not answer a word about the prince. At the palace the prince ate so fast that the doctors were afraid for him, and he nearly choked, for the ring was in a piece he broke off. He worked it out of his mouth without anyone seeing, and slipped it under his pillow. The cake set him on his feet again, and when he was alone he kissed the ring a hundred times. But he did not dare confess that he had watched a girl through a keyhole, and the worry brought his fever back. The doctors, at their wits’ end, told the queen that her son was dying of love, and she ran with the news to the king. “My boy,” said the king at the prince’s bedside, “who is it you wish to marry? We will give her to you, though she were the lowliest servant in the house.” Moved to tears, the prince drew out the ring, an emerald of the purest water. “Let this prove that the one I love is no peasant girl. The finger that ring fits was never thickened by hard work. But whatever her station, I will marry no other.” Then the king sent heralds and trumpeters through the town, summoning every maiden to the palace, and it was proclaimed that she whom the ring fitted should be queen. The princesses came first, then the daughters of dukes, and so on in order, and not one could push the ring past the tip of her finger, to the prince’s great joy. After the high-born ladies came the shopgirls and the chambermaids, with no better fortune. “Call in the kitchen maids and the shepherdesses,” said the prince; and one look at their broad red fingers satisfied everybody. “There is not a woman left, your Highness,” said the chamberlain. “Have you sent for Donkey Skin, who made me the cake?” asked the prince. The courtiers laughed, and said they would never have dared bring so dirty a creature into the palace. “Go for her at once,” ordered the king. “I called for every maiden, high or low, and I meant every one.” The princess had heard the trumpets and knew her ring was at the bottom of it all. She had fallen in love with the prince herself, whether by sight or only by hearsay, and trembled in case another finger proved as small as her own. She had dressed for such a summons in the gown of moonlight scattered with emeralds, and when they called her down she pulled the donkey-skin hastily over it all. They took her into the hall where the prince was waiting, and at the sight of the hide his heart sank. Had he been wrong after all? “Are you the girl who sleeps at the farm?” he asked, turning his eyes away. “Yes, my lord, I am,” she answered. “Then hold out your hand,” said the prince, for he meant to keep his word whatever it cost him. To the astonishment of everyone there, a little hand, white and delicate, came out from under the brown and dirty hide. The ring slipped on with the greatest ease, and the skin fell away to the ground. There stood a figure so beautiful that the prince, weak as he was, went down on his knees before her, and the king and queen welcomed her no less warmly. Then the ceiling opened, and the fairy godmother came down in a chariot made all of white lilac, and told them who the princess was and how she came to be there. The wedding was the most magnificent ever seen. Kings came from every country on earth, among them the princess’s adopted father, who by now had married a widow. When it was over the prince’s father announced a coronation, for he and the queen were tired of reigning and the young couple must take their place. The celebrations lasted three whole months. Then the young king and queen settled down to govern, and were so loved that when they died, a hundred years later, every man mourned them as his own father and mother. --- - Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/donkey-skin - Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q835505 - Tale type: ATU 510B (per Wikidata) - Source: The Grey Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (1900), «Donkey Skin», from le Cabinet des Fées (Project Gutenberg #6746) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6746) - Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: The Grey Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (1900), «Donkey Skin», from le Cabinet des Fées (Project Gutenberg #6746) — translation: author died 1703 (+70 passed); translator Andrew Lang (ed.) died 1912 (+70 passed) - License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)