Publisher's Synopsis
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 thefinest dresses and the most beautiful jewels. It was therefore with the deepestshame and sorrow that he accidentally discovered, after several years, that she haddeceived 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 grandvizir to put her to death. The blow was so heavy that his mind almost gave way, andhe declared that he was quite sure that at bottom all women were as wicked as thesultana, if you could only find them out, and that the fewer the world contained thebetter. So every evening he married a fresh wife and had her strangled thefollowing morning before the grand-vizir, whose duty it was to provide theseunhappy brides for the Sultan. The poor man fulfilled his task with reluctance, butthere was no escape, and every day saw a girl married and a wife dea
