I’ve forgotten the number of days, but it is evening outside, and the rose is a sunburst of red above its vase when Beast returns. He gazes fondly at the rose and sniffs the air for its scent as if to assure himself of its continued life. And then he turns away, his paws locked behind his back, creasing the rows of feathers, as he assumes a studious pose and gazes around at the shelves of books. Finally, he returns to the writing table, seats himself on the chair on his haunches, his furred and feathered upper body held erect, and takes up the little book again. He reads until dawn warms the colors in the window, and then he disappears again.
The next night, when that book is finished, Beast prowls the shelves with brow furrowed, paws behind his back like the most doleful of philosophers, until he finds another, and the next night, another. This goes on for several more nights. When his prize rose finally exhausts its span of life and crumples, he replaces it with a fresh one and goes back to his reading. He can’t get much pleasure from it; his expression is always melancholy. But still he comes, night after night. It’s another kind of feeding.
This night, halfway through his latest volume, he suddenly shoves it aside and sighs again, a great, rumbling outrush of breath. He rests his face in his paws for a few moments, then raises his head with an air of resolution and reaches into a cubbyhole below me. He withdraws a quill pen and inkstand, and from another niche extracts a sheet of parchment.
I observe in fascination as he withdraws the stopper from the inkwell with his bared front teeth, drops it to the tabletop, and noses it aside. He wrestles the pen out of its slot in the stand, traps it between his paws, and nudges it upright with his snout. After steadying the quill with his mouth, he settles the shaft snugly between the first and second toes of his paw, lifts the pen, and dips its nib in the inkwell. For a long while, he does nothing more, poised with the pen dripping in his clumsy paw, but never applying pen to paper. He gazes abstractly out into the empty air. Then his gaze falls more tenderly on the rose. At last, he scratches out a few words. Then, tentatively, a few more. I can’t make out the words from this angle, and his awkward scrawl is barely readable in any case, but the words are shaped like verses on the page.
Poetry? Can Beast be writing poetry? Oh, it is too delicious — love sonnets from the beast! Has he been so long out of the society of women, he must channel his yearning into verse? But verses must be poor substitute indeed for the caresses of a live woman. How Jean-Loup would laugh!
And my own mirth suddenly curdles within me, to think that I might share any impulse at all with Jean-Loup.
Beast pauses over his work, draws an inky slash across a word here, and scribbles a few corrections there. I see his mouth working silently as he holds up the paper to read what he’s written. He frowns, sighs, and shakes his shaggy head.
“Moonstruck puppy,” he mutters to himself. Something like an ironic smile plays across his expression. “‘Puppy,’ there’s a fine jest. Would that I were anything so adorable as a puppy.” He glances up at me, at his reflection in my polished surface. “Moonstruck gargoyle, more like.”
He shifts his gaze away from the image of himself to me. “What is it about this place that makes me want to tell my feelings?” he murmurs, tilting his head to one side. “Like a human. Like a man.” He glances at the quill still stuck between his toes and sighs. “All I lack is the skill. And the wit.” With another wry glance at me, he plucks the quill from the grip of his paw with his mouth and drops it on the desk.
“But I find I am not suited to poetry,” Beast rumbles on, rising from his chair with a sigh. “Out of doors, beyond these walls, I never think of such things. Outside, in the park, working in my rose garden, I grow stronger and faster every day. Everything is sharper, clearer, more . . . pure.”
He turns about, his gold-flecked eyes full of wonder.
“Every day, I see things that fill me with wonder: a spiderweb drooping with pearls in the rain; the majestic circling of a hawk in the winter sky. I can hear the sigh of a snowdrift or the bustle of creatures tunneling underground, their tiny claws sifting through the soft dirt. When I water my roses, I can hear the water singing its way down into the earth. And the way the world reeks — the brassy stench of a coming storm, the sweet decay of rotting leaves, sharp, spicy pine. I can track an animal in the wood from leagues away. And when I feed, the smell of blood is maddening and irresistible . . .”
He pauses in the middle of this sudden cloudburst of words, the most I have ever yet heard from him, but then plunges ahead.
“And my roses! There is nothing on earth sweeter than my roses. They are the best of nature, blessedly free from the taint of . . . human folly.” He gives his head one more little shake that ripples through his long, tawny mane. “In my garden, buoyed up by the fragrance of my roses, I feel I have the courage to do anything. Bear anything. Outside these walls, it’s almost possible to feel that I . . . belong in this body. As horrible as it is. That there might yet be a place for me somewhere in the world.”
Beast has a surer grasp of poetry than he knows, in speech at least, if not on paper. I know I ought to feel outrage that Jean-Loup is learning to content himself in any way with his new monstrosity. But, in truth, I am more amazed than angry to find Beast so awed by common things that Jean-Loup held in such disdain, or never even noticed.
“And yet, I am compelled to keep coming back here, to this library, to the world of ideas, the world of men.” Beast sighs again. “Beneath this face, this fur, I think human thoughts. I have human feelings. I am gifted with speech, like a man, and cursed to desire the fellowship of other men.”
If only Beast knew how useless those old companions were. Which of them has come back out of concern for the chevalier? They were ready enough to jest and laugh and sing at his table, so long as he provided food and wine and sport enough, but where are they now?
Beast picks up his discarded page of verses and casts his haunted gaze over it one more time. “But that was Jean-Loup’s world. His life. Not mine.”
And without rancor, without rage, he lifts his paper and burns it to ashes in my flame.
Beast carries me out of the library at dawn, but my thoughts are in such turmoil, I scarcely notice. What does he mean, Jean-Loup’s life is not his? Are they not one and the same?
Yet, even I must admit, I can find no trace of Jean-Loup in Beast’s behavior, as doggedly as I search, not since the night he shut me up in the attic cupboard. I can’t believe Mère Sophie’s spell would have erased Jean-Loup’s memory on purpose, for what use is my revenge if he no longer knows what he’s lost? It seems far more likely that he only pretends not to be Jean-Loup now, but why indulge in such an elaborate charade? What on earth would be the point? Not for my benefit. I’m scarcely a maiden. I’m not even human; my touch scorches and burns. I can’t be tricked into releasing Jean-Loup from his curse. He has nothing at all to gain by pretending to me.
I am still chewing on these thoughts when Beast sets me in my old place on the windowsill overlooking the courtyard. This is the first time I’ve seen his new crop of roses in full bloom. He’s planted emerald-green moss to carpet the rose beds, between the bushes, and it looks beautiful. The melancholy lingering in his eyes from last night evaporates when he gazes out at them. His glance shifts hesitantly to me. “Perhaps you might like to see them, too?” he suggests.
Beast senses more life in me than Jean-Loup ever noticed when I was human. Surprised by this unexpected kindness, I feel my flames fluttering all together for a moment — a brief little glimmer of gratitude. Beast smiles cautiously back at me.
Certainly, nothing is more beautiful to see than his roses. How they tower above the stone wall enclosing them! The buds are the size of lemons, the open blooms like red sunflowers.