Researching my Fairy Tale
Fatal mystery series means reading old travelogues and novels, studying
antique fashion plates, poring over period railroad timetables and restaurant
menus, and—oh, yeah!—traveling in Europe. My job is SO HARD. (Kidding.)
BEAUTY, BEAST, AND
BELLADONNA is set in 1867 in the Périgord region of France. I always knew
the story would concern the “true history” of my all-time favorite fairy tale,
“Beauty and the Beast,” but beyond that, I wasn’t sure . . . until, that is, I
read about the prehistoric cave art in the Vézère Valley. These caves—the most
famous one is Lascaux—are decorated with Paleolithic pictures of animals.
Animals, you know . . . as in beasts? Bingo. There was my angle,
because the idea of pairing “Beauty and the Beast” with the painted caves seemed
so juicy.
Only catch was, I had, um, never been to the Périgord. So I packed up the Fam—my
husband, my mom, and my two little kids—and off we went!
Getting There. Okay. Maybe it wasn’t quite simple as
“and of we went!” Those of you who have traveled with little kids know what a
gigantic production it is. For example: Bring your own car seats OR deal with
the caked-on barf of someone else’s kid on the rental car company’s car seat.
Buy tons of French snacks, which are inevitably buttery and flaky and which will
grease and flake up everyone’s clothing. Oh, and those miniscule,
multi-part toys your kids insisted on packing? You lost half of them in the
airplane on the way over. (True story: once I retrieved my son’s toy car
five rows back on an airplane. You get to know people on the plane when
you’re traveling with the Tinies.)
The landscape. So. We managed to get ourselves to the Périgord,
more or less in one piece. There was the three-hour stretch on the
expressway when my two-year-old daughter wouldn’t stop screaming unless allowed
to eat one and only one bite out of every French Pringle in the can,
but we are trying to forget that. Oh my word, it is beautiful in that neck of
the woods. Rushing rivers, rocky outcroppings, thick forests. It’s beautiful in
a near-eerie way, at least for me, with its ruined castles and chateaux melting
back into the hills. In fact, more than once my husband, mom, and I argued about
whether a heap of stones in the distance was a natural formation or a castle.
That not knowing, that magical merging of natural and artificial in the
Périgord, was richly inspiring for Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna.
Caves. We visited two caves on our trip, Font de Gaume and Les
Combarelles. Font de Gaume is the one I used as a model for the cave scenes in
Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna, although some of the animal pictures I
describe are based on those in Les Combarelles. I cannot adequately describe the
breathtaking experience of visiting these caves. This might help: I somehow
managed to have a near-religious experience looking at the bison herds in Font
de Gaume even though I was lugging my daughter in a backpack while she rattled
the keys to the door of the cave that the tour guide had given her as a
distraction. I think everyone on the tour was a little nervous she’d lose the
keys somewhere in the dark. After all, the tour guide had, for security
purposes, locked us in.
Architecture. Château Vézère, the Count de Griffe’s ancestral
home that is the setting for a good deal of Beauty, Beast, and
Belladonna, is based on the lovely Château de Veyrignac, although I placed
it in a different location (a perk of writing fiction). The fateful ruined
castle was inspired by our visit to Château de Castelnaud, although Castelnaud
is not a ruin but sturdily rebuilt for tourists in hiking boots. Still, it is so
high over the valley and riddled with enough precarious turrets that when I got
my rambunctious four-year-old son out of there I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief.
Towns. I admit, the village of Vézère is a total fabrication.
But the town of Sarlat is very real, and incredibly atmospheric and even
exquisite. The center of the town includes a carefully-preserved tangle of
medieval streets, and so of course I had to set a dangerous chase scene there. I
mean, come on. I don’t want to miss ripe opportunities.
Food and Wine. At some point on the trip, my daughter decided
that she hated ANY and ALL sidewalk cafes. I thought sidewalk cafes
were the entire point of France, so this was a mind-bender for me. So in Sarlat,
instead of dining on the famous mushrooms and local wine and, I don’t know,
holding hands with my husband, I was taking a very short girl on endless walks
up and down stone-paved streets. We got to know some pigeons and cats. The only
thing my daughter would eat in Sarlat, by the way, was terrine de
canard, a super-rich duck pâté in little jars that is basically a condiment
but which she ate with a tiny spoon like baby food. I considered this an
improvement on the Pringles.
National bestselling author Maia Chance writes mystery novels that are
rife with absurd predicaments and romantic adventure. Her latest releases are
Come Hell or Highball (St. Martin’s Minotaur) and Beauty, Beast,
and Belladonna (Berkley Prime Crime). Maia lives in soggy Bellingham,
Washington, where she plays laundress and cook to two imperious children and
takes secret solace in vintage cocktails. She blogs at MaiaChance.com and loves to socialize at .
Variety hall actress Ophelia Flax knows how to win over an audience. That’s
why she’s accepted the marriage proposal of the brutish Comte de Griffe to
nettle her occasional investigative partner—and romantic sparring partner—the
pompous if dashing Professor Penrose.
But with his boorish table manners,
wild mane of hair, and habit of prowling away the wee hours, the comte has
shredded Ophelia’s last nerve. She intends to disengage from her feral fiancé at
his winter hunting party—until Penrose, his lovely new fiancée, and a stagecoach
of stranded travelers arrive at the comte’s sprawling château. Soon she can’t
tell the boars from the bores.
When one of the guests is found clawed and
bloody in the orangerie, Ophelia is determined to solve the murder before
everyone starts believing the local version of Beauty and the Beast. But until
the snows melt, she can’t trust her eyes—or her heart—since even the most
civilized people hold beastly secrets...
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