The Disenchantment - Softcover

Bell, Celia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593468910 ISBN 13: 9780593468913

Verlag: Vintage, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

This radiant and thrilling debut follows a passionate love affair between two noblewomen who wish to free themselves from their repressive society, whatever the cost.

In 17th century Paris, everyone has something to hide. The noblemen and women and writers consort with fortune tellers in the confines of their homes, servants practice witchcraft and black magic, and the titled poison family members to obtain inheritance. But for the Baroness Marie Catherine, the only thing she wishes to hide is how unhappy she is in her marriage, and the pleasures she seeks outside of it. When her husband is present, the Baroness spends her days tending to her children and telling them elaborate fairy tales, but when he’s gone, Marie Catherine indulges in a more liberated existence, one of forward-thinking discussions with female scholars in the salons of grand houses, and at the center of her freedom: Victoire Rose de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Conti, the androgynous, self-assured countess who steals Marie Catherine’s heart and becomes her lover. Victoire possesses everything Marie Catherine does not—confidence in her love, and a brazen fearlessness in all that she’s willing to do for it. But when a shocking and unexpected murder occurs, Marie Catherine must escape. And what she discovers is the dark underbelly of a city full of people who have secrets they would kill to keep.   

The Disenchantment is a stunning debut that conjures an unexpected world of passion, crime, intrigue, and black magic.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CELIA BELL has written short fiction for VQR, The White Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and Bomb Magazine. She is the winner of the 2018 VQR Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction and holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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CHAPTER ONE
 
It was the first sitting. The portrait was conventional, and yet Alain Lavoie was nervous as, with his brush and palette, he attempted to turn the chaos of life into ordered forms of light and shadow. Hôtel Cardonnoy was a grand house, and it bristled with servants–a Swiss guard at the main gate, two lackeys in gold braid standing watch outside the door of the room in which Lavoie now worked. When he had arrived he’d half expected the guard to see his shabby rented carriage and turn him back at the gate. Now the baronne’s lady’s maid kept watch on a stool with a copy of Le Mercure galant open on her lap. She mouthed the words as she read, sounding them out silently. Some noblewomen had their girls read aloud while he painted, to make the time pass more quickly. Marie Catherine la Jumelle, Baronne de Cardonnoy, was not one of these. She stood silent and straight as a sword in the centre of the room, looking into the light with an expression of sweet contemplation–the face of a woman, Lavoie thought, who was imagining her own beauty from the outside.
 
For himself, Lavoie was attempting not to show how the wealth of the room discomforted him. It always happened like that at the beginning of a new sitting–he’d spend an hour worrying over whether his subjects would notice the worn collar on his silk coat, before his work had the opportunity to speak for itself. It was difficult to feel self-assured in a room with so much gilding on the furniture, even though Lavoie had painted the baron himself six months ago.
 
The baronne’s right hand rested lightly on her young son’s shoulder. Her daughter stood at her left side. The children were perhaps six and nine, and both had reached the point of the sitting where they had begun to fidget. Lavoie disliked painting children. They didn’t know how to stand still, and the children of the rich were often little monsters, raised permissively by servants and then summoned to pose for hours with parents who were unpredictable strangers.
 
Only the baronne, her children and the fresh beam of light they stood in appeared on the canvas. Behind them he had outlined the shadow of a heavy column, and beyond that, the first strokes of manicured woodland, as if Madame de Cardonnoy and her children stood in a Roman ruin growing back into the gentlest kind of wildness, with no breeze to stir the confection of lace flounces on Madame’s full skirt or mud to dirty the children’s shoes. Lavoie could see the scene in his mind, superimposed on the room, although the canvas showed only a few bare lines over the blue field of imprimatura. The scent of Madame de Cardonnoy’s perfume, which floated through the room and mingled with the sharp smell of his paints, might have been blowing off the imaginary arbour.
 
He would soften the light around her face and draw it through the expertly arranged fawn-coloured curls on her head, returning to her some of the glow that she would have had as a young girl. Now, in her early thirties, she was still lovely, in a slightly creased, pensive way that Lavoie would have liked to paint. But the baron would be happier if Lavoie made her look like a teenaged shepherdess. She might even appreciate that too, if she was sensible to flattery.
 
He had blocked in Madame de Cardonnoy’s face, the shell-shape of her hand resting on the boy’s shoulder. The blue imprimatura reflected through the layer of colour like the glimpse of a vein showing through skin. The boy, a blond child with a bit of a rat face, was twisting back and forth, wringing his mouth into stretched-out shapes like wet washing. The girl, older and more able to keep still, shot a look at her brother that was half condescension and half envy. She was dressed like a fashion doll, in imitation of her mother, the green ribbons on her cream skirt clearly chosen to match the grass-coloured silk of her mother’s gown. One of her hands kept digging surreptitiously behind her in her skirt, where something must have itched. She never put the hand back in the same place, once she was done scratching – sometimes she folded her arms neatly in front of her, and sometimes she made a fist in the fabric of her dress. Lavoie decided that he would paint the arm tucked demurely behind her back.
 
The part of his mind that wasn’t occupied with the canvas was doing sums in his head, comparing the cost of the little girl’s dress to that of his own silk jacket, which he wore only on professional visits and spent his Sundays washing the paint stains out of. Did the Cardonnoy girl have six dresses like the one she was wearing, or had this one been ordered specially for the painting? Surely her mother, who came from a bourgeois family and had married a baron, must have come with an enormous dowry. Beauty didn’t mean much for that kind of marriage. Lavoie had heard that it was her financier father’s money that had purchased this hôtel.
 
The boy was now rocking from his toes to his heels, bending at the waist as if he was being pulled back and forth on a string.
 
‘Please, if you could keep him still, Madame,’ Lavoie murmured.
 
‘Nicolas, hush. Stand straight.’
 
Lavoie had expected her to pinch the child’s ear to enforce the command. The most unruly and spoilt children, he found, often lived in fear of their mother. A nursemaid would allow them to gallop around the nursery and break their toys, but the lady of the house still expected them to be polite and presentable before her friends. ‘Look how gallant he is,’ they might say of a little boy. ‘Come now, darling, bow and kiss the comtesse’s hand!’ And if the child didn’t behave, he’d be slapped, to teach him manners. It wasn’t that Lavoie had never been slapped during the years of his apprenticeship, but the way these fine ladies lost their polished mannerisms the instant a child disobeyed unsettled him.
 
So it surprised him when she smiled at her son and patted his hair with her hand. No part of her, except her hand and the wrist attached to it, moved–it was like watching a puppet’s hand, pulled smoothly through the air on a string.
 
‘If you like,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you a story to make the time pass faster. But you must stand perfectly still.’
 
The boy sighed at this, and the girl straightened up and folded her hands neatly in front of her, her face turning eagerly back towards her mother.
 
‘Can we have the one about the girl under the peapod, Maman?’ she asked, and the corner of Madame de Cardonnoy’s mouth turned up. Her expression had been so poised that Lavoie had not realised that her polished smile did not reach her eyes. Now it did, and he saw the difference.
 
‘Don’t forget to look at Monsieur Lavoie, Sophie,’ the baronne said. ‘The story I’m going to tell you is one that you haven’t heard before, but my mother told it to me.’
 
‘Are there ogres in it?’ the boy asked.
 
‘Of course there are.’ Madame de Cardonnoy raised her eyes to Lavoie and gave him another of those secret smiles. ‘That is, if you don’t mind listening to a children’s story, Monsieur Lavoie.’
 
‘Of course not,’ he said. He returned the baronne’s smile only belatedly, and with a feeling approaching dread. Occasionally he painted some wrinkled Parisian lady with grandchildren who expected him to entertain her by flirting. The baronne was not in that category. If he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593468910
• ISBN 13: 9780593468913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland