Les murs ont des oreilles

They say I'm mad. A mad princess locked away in a tower, unfit to rule. Perhaps I am, a little. 

I talk to myself, they say, about anything and nothing in particular. This is what they give as proof of my madness. I don't think that they're right of course, but when has a patient of delirium ever been taken seriously for her thoughts. When I talk to myself, it is out of loneliness. No one ever comes to visit my tower. Other times, I am talking to them. 

My walls have ears you see, in the form of my scheming political rivals. How else would my private conversations with myself have become known to half the kingdom? No one comes to visit my tower. I have only my walls for company.

Sometimes the walls talk back, asking the secrets of a kingdom I'll never see again. I'm mad of course, so I feed them nonsense. They often give up talking after that. 

My hair has been growing for years and years. Sometimes I ask the walls for scissors. They refuse. I sing them songs, I beg, I bribe, but my hair still goes. I resolve to punish the walls for listening in on me by telling them of every thought that crosses my head, being completely frank with how I think of them. I don't know what the people behind them look like, but I doubt they would be pleased to see the portraits I talk to in their place. Hideous, the lot of them.

I hear snoring from the walls, on occasion, and I smile. They grow bored easily listening to the drivel I pore down their ears. I tell them everything. 

When a young man climbs my hair and is shocked to find a remarkably sane princess pent up in this tower, I resolve to keep that one thing to myself. He might help me, after all, and I wouldn't want the wrong people knowing his description. After all, the walls have ears.