Once upon a time there was a merchant of Nice whose ships steamed between three continents and made him very rich. It happened one day that he needed new boots and, knowing nothing about how boots are made, visited a poor cobbler with an absurd proposition: make me a pair of boots today, I will fetch them tomorrow, and if they are the best I’ve ever worn, you’ll never lack for work. The cobbler agreed and set about the task, without regard to his current orders.
After measurements were made and styles discussed, the merchant left feeling generous and noble and in want of a hot chocolate, which he set about remedying right away. The old man, for his part, took inventory and found that he might just have enough leather for the job if his cuts were ever so precise and the leather stretched exactly so.
He was, however, short of nails and needed wood for heels. So he secured these things while the sun dropped from the sky like a mallet. The merchant, meanwhile, drank hot chocolate, admired the passersby on the promenade, and enjoyed the sun’s gentle dive toward the horizon.
The merchant’s whims about those boots changed as he sat and sipped. Tassels were passe, were they not? Buckles were much more à la mode du jour. Quite. He jotted down a note and had a waiter run it over to the cobbler.
Meanwhile, the cobbler cut and stretched the leather, laying everything out under the strangled star. As the gas lamps were lit, the waiter arrived with the merchant’s note. The cobbler took it, tipped the boy a precious copper, and despaired. “Just a few alterations,” the merchant had written, writing about “simple changes” that would alter the cut of every part of the boot and thus ruin the cobbler’s enterprise.
“Oh! how I need this to work!” the cobbler cried. “I wish I could manage it.” And he wept. He couldn’t help himself. He wept quite a lot; so much in fact that he woke up several fairies who were napping nearby.
“To order! To order.” The fairy with the round spectacles looked at each of the other fairies in turn.
“What?” asked Pertinax. “What are you doing, Flaxwing?”
“I’m calling this Parliament to order so we can discuss the issue before us.”
“This isn’t a Parliament.”
“Yes, it is,” said Meringue, “and as the Queen in Parliament, I declare it so.”
“We’re not a flock of babbling owls. And you’re not our Queen.”
“I think I am the Queen. I’m sure of it.”
“You are a queen, darling, but it’s more an honorary thing,” said Sorbet.
“It’s because your dresses are the prettiest,” said Flaxwing. Meringue blushed and bowed her head, acknowledging this truth.
The fairies of the Languedoc are a fractious bunch. Like a family of independents, having spent all their lives together yet lacking any need for mutual support, they pursue each their own whims without a trace of concord that doesn’t in itself give pleasure.
“At least he’s quiet now.” This from Sandspur, who liked playing tricks.
“Quite asleep, isn’t he? I can’t feel that bad for him,” said Pertinax.
“Oh! let him be,” said Sorbet, returning from where the cobbler lay. “Parliament or no, we should decide what to do for him.”
“You say that like we should respond with some unity of action. I don’t care what you do for him, with him, or to him. It’s nothing to me.”
“Pertinax, ever the friend of the balding ape.” Pertinax bowed his head to Sandspur at this, and Meringue noted the mockery with the arch of an eyebrow.
“We all understand the situation I think,” said Flaxwing. “That old man,” and here she looked over the top of her spectacles at the sleeping form in the corner, “is out of time, money, and options. Whipping up a pair of boots is the easiest thing. Who’s for it?”
“I am,” said Sorbet. And some would say that she was compassionate toward the old fool, but consider whether she looked on him as a person might look on a dog that eats its own vomit.
“That settles that.” Flaxwing ended the discussion like closing a book.
Pertinax left to read the latest from Bakunin, while Meringue went to change clothes. Flaxwing returned to a treatise she was writing on the effect that the phases of the moon have on dairy production, and Sandspur tried to drum up a card game with the rats who lived under the stairs. Sorbet set to work.
In no time, Sorbet crafted a pair of boots that manifested everything that was right in a boot—things the merchant didn’t even know he wanted but whose excellence he would recognize in an instant. She set the boots on the cobbler’s bench and flew off to wash the bootblack from her hands.
Later still, Sandspur approached the cobbler and bit him on the ear. He sputtered awake and saw the boots framed in the moonlight at the window. His heart was full, but his eyes remained heavy with the sleep of enchantment. He drifted back into nothingness a happier man.
Then Sandspur stole the boots.
The cobbler woke up the next day, well past breakfast time. When he couldn’t find the boots, he was heart-struck. As carefully as he looked, he found no trace of them. His materials were all used up, a testament to the boots’ existence and as final as a sentence of death. All day long, he exhausted himself with worry and finally took to his lonely bed in an extremity of despair.
The merchant, however, slept well and when he awoke, he had altogether forgotten the bargain he’d made with the cobbler. Amid ships’ manifests, tidal charts, and an excellent return on investment, he lived happily ever after.