Rose stays on at Chateau Beaumont. The rumors and whispers filter down to us over time. Kind, beautiful, and exquisitely tragic, she is beloved by all. There are few enough who knew the chevalier before who would dare to associate him with the beast seen fleeing the chateau on the day of the wedding feast. Whether he was gored by a wild animal or murdered by a jealous husband, or if he simply abandoned his dewy bride, Jean-Loup is spoken of no more. The LeNoir bloodline goes no further.
Rose is good to her servants, so they say, and they protect her with fierce loyalty. She is wise enough to leak a generous portion of the Beaumont fortune into the coffers of the cheese seller, the draper, the wine merchant, and the dressmaker, and the seigneurie falls under her administration. The folk marvel at their good fortune in the new Lady Beaumont, after the generations of LeNoir knights who ruled the region for centuries. The wheat crops, the vineyards, the orchards, and the livestock all flourish under her benevolence, and the whole of the region prospers. Only Jean-Loup’s lawyers go unpaid, his suit against the Villeneuve estate withdrawn at last. There is no longer any talk of a curse, but for those hushed fireside stories of Lady Rose’s bewitched wedding feast.
In time, the legend of the beautiful young widow spreads far and wide throughout the country. Much is made of how sad it is that she lives all alone in such forlorn splendor. A handsome young princeling from a neighboring duchy journeys all the way to Chateau Beaumont to seek her out. He pays her court, and in due time, she consents to accept his suit. They marry in a wedding by all accounts as lavish as the first one, although without quite so dramatic a finale, and he sweeps her off to a palace even grander than the chateau. But Rose and her new prince keep Chateau Beaumont as their secondary estate, so all the servants remain employed and the town continues to benefit from its operation.
As more time passes, gossip insists that the handsome prince she married with such happy results was once the same monster rumored to have haunted Chateau Beaumont in the dark times. They say it was the purity of Rose’s love that redeemed him.
That’s the sort of story folk love — a clear moral, a happy ending. It comforts them to think the barriers between virtue and evil, love and hate, beauty and beast, are so clearly defined. The tempest of emotions that roils in our hearts every day, the struggle that never ends to master the monsters within, to love, to live, to survive — those stories are not so comforting, nor so easily told. Happily ever after takes hard work, but folk don’t like to hear about that.
The heart is a dark wood — dangerous, compelling, and profound. Its pathways can be frightening, but only by plunging into its depths are we fully alive.
The heart revels in its mysteries. Defy them at your peril. Embrace them if you dare. That is where magic begins.
Who doesn’t love Beauty and the Beast? It’s irresistible, the tale of the tragic Beast and the brave girl who sees through the outer monster to the noble soul within.
But the moment that all thinking women dread is the climax when the marvelous Beast transforms back into the bland, handsome prince. Indeed, when the actress Greta Garbo saw Jean Cocteau’s excellent 1946 film, La Belle et la Bête, it’s reported that her response at the end was: “Give me back my Beast!”
Readers who love the classic fairy tale expect the restored prince to be the hero and Beast to be the spell that needs undoing. But, like Ms. Garbo, I never found that story satisfying. It’s Beast, after all, who earns Beauty’s love, not the prince.
So why is it the prince who gets the “reward” of Beauty’s love? And why is Beauty so ready to forget the Beast she says she loves and marry the prince? Doesn’t Beast himself deserve to be the hero?
As someone who’s always loved Beast more than the prince, I thought: wouldn’t it be more interesting if there was another woman involved, one who wants to preserve Beast and make sure the prince never returns? So, in my version, there is a good reason the young chevalier is transformed into Beast: his handsome face conceals an evil and corrupted nature. And no one knows it better than my heroine, Lucie.
My story includes all the elements of the traditional fairy tale, but it begins earlier and ends sometime after “happily ever after.” But it’s Lucie’s story I wanted to tell. My heroine is willing to sacrifice her own humanity to pursue her revenge against the prince — until she discovers that Beast is someone entirely separate, with a heart far more human than the prince’s ever was.
How would she feel when Beauty arrives on the scene, with the power to restore the prince and banish Beast forever?
As much as Beast deserves to be the hero in my book, I wanted to create, in Lucie, a heroine openhearted enough to care for Beast just the way he is — and strong enough to fight to preserve him. In Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, they both deserve a happy ending.