The Mouse Who Went to the Palace

There was once a boy who was a king, which sounds better than it was.

He was eight. He lived in a palace with a great many rooms and a great many grown-ups, and everybody bowed to him, and nobody ever told him anything true.

One night he lost a tooth. He put it under his pillow because somebody had told him that was what you did, and he lay there in an enormous bed in an enormous room and waited to see what would happen.

And at about midnight, something came up over the edge of the pillow.

It was a mouse. A very small mouse, in a tiny gray waistcoat and a tiny hat, carrying a satchel. He introduced himself politely as Pérez, took the tooth, put it in the satchel, and then looked up at the boy and asked whether he would like to come along.

And the boy said yes — and found that he had become exactly mouse-sized, which is the sort of thing that happens at midnight and is not worth arguing with.

So they went.

They went down a hole at the bottom of the wall and along a pipe and out into the streets of Madrid, and Pérez took him to a biscuit tin in a cupboard in a shop on Calle Arenal, which is where he lived with his family, and it was very small and very warm and there were a great many children.

And then Pérez took him somewhere else.

He took him under the door of a house near the edge of the city where a boy exactly the king's age was asleep. There was no fire. The window did not shut properly. The boy's father had been out looking for work since it got light and had come home with nothing, and there was not enough dinner, and everybody had pretended there was.

And the little king stood on the floorboards, mouse-sized, in the cold, and looked at a boy his own age, and nobody bowed to him and nobody lied to him, and he saw the whole thing exactly as it was.

They went home before it got light. He woke up in his enormous bed his proper size, and there was money under his pillow where the tooth had been.

And he was different afterwards. That was rather the point.

The priest who wrote this story wrote it for a real boy — a real eight-year-old king of Spain who really had just lost a tooth — and he did not write it to be charming. He wrote it because a boy who was going to grow up and rule a country needed, quite urgently, to see the inside of a house that was not a palace.

There is a plaque on the wall at Calle Arenal 8 in Madrid today, marking the spot where the mouse lived. People still leave notes there.

And all over the Spanish-speaking world, children still put a tooth under the pillow for Ratoncito Pérez — a very small person with a satchel who goes everywhere, sees everything, and is not fooled for a moment by a big house.