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The Test
An old king was worried: how should he choose his successor? He had a son but, like all fathers, he did not believe that his lad would be up to much. The king asked his Master what to do, and this was the reply, “Your son has got nothing to do with it, what you’re actually asking me is, ‘How can I convince myself that my son is capable of being king?’ This is what you should do: disown him, drive him out of the kingdom and disinherit him”. The father said, “It seems a tough thing to do to the poor boy”. But the Master pointed out that there was no other way to understand what the boy was capable of. So the boy was driven out of the kingdom, stripped of his title as prince, and informed that he would have to earn his own living. He became a beggar. The years passed. The young man forgot that he had ever been a prince. He had to sleep in the streets, eat things he was not used to eating and dress in rags. He didn’t even have any shelter. Simply surviving was so difficult that, even if he remembered that he was a prince, he would have said to himself: “I must have been hallucinating. I can’t be a prince, it must have been a dream. Surely I have dreamt it, imagined it, otherwise what on earth could have happened?” Some years later, while he was standing at the door of a little café, begging for a cup of tea, a golden carriage stopped opposite, and the Prime Minister got out... Seeing the carriage, the prince had the feeling that he had seen it before: “I must be imagining it. And this man looks like someone I knew, but he wasn’t that old”. And yet, he still couldn’t remember ever having been a prince. The Prime Minister touched his feet and, at that moment, a cloud vanished. All those years of begging disappeared. All he said was, “Why have you come, after all this time?” Even his voice was different; it was the voice of a prince, and not of a beggar. The Prime Minister said: “The king is dying. He is calling for you. The days of your test are over. He wanted you to know the lowest level of human existence, the beggar, so that you wouldn’t forget, once you reached the throne, that the king, too, is a human being; and that, perhaps, a beggar is a prince in another guise. Moreover he wanted you to understand that you will not become superior just because you’re a king. You can have everything you want, but deep down, you will still be a beggar. Your test is over; now the king is dying and we must hurry to the capital!” The people staying in the hostel and in the neighbourhood, who had seen this young man wearing beggar’s clothes, could not believe their eyes: the beggar was completely transformed. His face was no longer a beggar’s face; although he was still dressed in rags, the expression on his face, in his eyes, his whole appearance had suddenly changed. Now he was a king.
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