I was re-reading and I noticed: on page 3, Matilda's narration says that she was taken in to care for the princess 20 years ago, but clearly more than 20 years have passed since then. More likely, twenty years have passed since Meiger's father first proposed. Either there was a phrasing or translation problem, or someone in the process of bring this work in the present form (from writing to English QC) is really bad at arithmetic.