“Money Can Do Everything”
by Italo Calvino
Italian Folktales (1980)
* * * (Good) Folktale
A king challenges a prince to prove that money can do everything by forcing the prince to talk to his heavily guarded daughter within three days or suffer beheading.
I’m sure there are those that disagree, but money really can do everything. Is it right and good that anything can be accomplished with the liberal application of money? Probably not, but that’s the world we live in. It was the world of the past. And it will be the world of the future. What’s funny about this story is that even the man with all the money didn’t believe this to be true and had to be saved by his more level-headed nursemaid, a woman I highly doubt had much money of her own. Yet still, she knew how the world worked. I think we all do – money or not.
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