The Emperor's New Clothes

Once upon a time, in a city where the emperor thought about very little except clothes, two strangers arrived and said they were weavers. Their cloth, they said, was the finest in the world, and it had one other quality besides. It was invisible to anybody who was stupid, or who was not fit for the job he held. The emperor thought this sounded useful. He gave them gold and a room and two looms, and told them to begin. They began. They sat at the empty looms and worked the shuttles back and forth all day, and asked for more silk and gold, and put both into their bags. After a week the emperor sent his most sensible minister to see how it was coming along. The minister went in, and looked at the looms, and saw nothing whatsoever. He opened his eyes very wide. He put on his spectacles. Still nothing. Am I stupid, thought the minister. Am I not fit for my office? Nobody must ever find out. "Magnificent," he said. "The colours. The pattern. I shall tell the emperor at once." The same happened to the next official, and the next. Every one of them saw an empty loom and praised it, and by the end of the month the whole court was talking about a cloth none of them had seen. At last the emperor went himself. There was nothing there. He looked at the bare frame and felt the floor tilt under him. I cannot be the one, he thought. Not me. Not the emperor. "Charming," he said. "Quite charming. You shall make me a suit of it for the procession." The weavers worked all night with no thread at all. In the morning they held up nothing, very carefully, and the emperor stood in his long white nightshirt while they dressed him in air, and everybody said how well it hung. And out he went into the street under a canopy, in his nightshirt and his gold slippers, with two courtiers behind him holding up a train that was not there. The whole city came out and cheered. Every one of them could see that there was no cloth, and every one believed he was the only one, and so they cheered louder. Then a small voice said, quite clearly, "But he has not got any clothes on." It was a child on his father's shoulders, who had not yet learned what you are supposed to say. His father repeated it. The people beside him repeated it. And in four seconds the whole street was saying it out loud, and then laughing, and the laughing went on a long while. The emperor heard it. He knew they were right. And he walked the rest of the procession with his chin up, because he had started it and meant to finish it, and the weavers were three streets away and moving fast. He wore rather less after that. He listened rather more. The end.