Beauty and the Beast
In a cheerful provincial French town a merchant's youngest daughter spends most of her time reading — every book in the house, then books borrowed from the market, then books she has already read but loved too much to put away. She is not beautiful in the way people expect when they say the word — she is better than that: she is genuinely interested in everything. When her father, returning from a failed business trip in a winter storm, takes shelter in a great empty château and plucks a single rose from its garden for his daughter, the château's owner — a vast lonely figure cursed long ago — claims a guest in payment. The youngest daughter chooses to go in her father's place. Across the months that follow, in the château's library and gardens, the two slowly become friends. When she returns home one final time to her dying father and overstays, the Beast falls ill from loneliness; she races back, sits with him, and the curse is broken by friendship, not romance. (Story-Weaver telling: the resolution is friendship and the man's true self returning — NO kiss, per §2.3.)
A narrated bedtime story from the Yume Dreams library — read or listen to Beauty and the Beast.