Now the Sultan Schahriar had a wife whom he loved more than all the
world, and his greatest happiness was to surround her with splendour,
and to give her the finest dresses and the most beautiful jewels. It
was therefore with the deepest shame and sorrow that he accidentally
discovered, after several years, that she had deceived him completely,
and her whole conduct turned out to have been so bad, that he felt
himself obliged to carry out the law of the land, and order the
grand-vizir to put her to death. The blow was so heavy that his mind
almost gave way, and he declared that he was quite sure that at bottom
all women were as wicked as the sultana, if you could only find them
out, and that the fewer the world contained the better. So every
evening he married a fresh wife and had her strangled the following
morning before the grand-vizir, whose duty it was to provide these
unhappy brides for the Sultan. The poor man fulfilled his task with
reluctance, but there was no escape, and every day saw a girl married
and a wife dead.
This behaviour caused the greatest horror in the town, where nothing
was heard but cries and lamentations. In one house was a father
weeping for the loss of his daughter, in another perhaps a mother
trembling for the fate of her child; and instead of the blessings that
had formerly been heaped on the Sultan's head, the air was now full of
curses.