TRANSLATION: Sans Beauty

The second in the Daughters of France series by Zénaïde Fleuriot

SANS BEAUTY by Zénaïde Fleuriot is this week’s new translation. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

UNE FILLE SANS BEAUTÉ

“In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.”

Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.

What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.

Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.

About the author. Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.

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Excerpt

In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.

It costs little to people of pleasing looks to declare that they were plain as children — the present redeems the past. But a good many like to persuade themselves there was once a moment when their irregular features were graceful, and will tell you, with perfect composure, “At two, I was a lovely child.” This can be carried so far that there is often no proving the contrary; and indeed it is sometimes true enough. Plainness rarely writes itself out in full upon a child’s face, and the prettiest children have many a time grown up plain: one sees the transformation every day.

I have not even the consolation of a moment, however brief, even in my earliest years. My stepmother told me a hundred times that when I was first brought before my grandfather, he looked at me closely and said: “What a little horror. God bless her.” Later, when I was about two, I was made to meet an aunt who will be spoken of more than once in these pages; and, kissing me, she cried, “What a pretty child — she is the image of her uncle.” Now my uncle, my aunt’s late husband, was, physically speaking, a sort of monster, and when he married her it had never been said with better reason that love is blind. My aunt thought him handsome. That was enough for her.

I have sometimes wondered by what unhappy chance I came to possess so plain a face. My father was a handsome man, as I had occasion to judge for myself later; and my mother was, they say, charming. I know this, moreover, from my own observation, for I have kept two portraits of her: one a miniature showing a fair, pale woman holding a rose, its colour no more delicate than that of her cheeks; the other graven in my memory, a faint recollection time has not effaced.

I was barely four; I lived surrounded by tenderness, and I loved my mother with all the strength of my small heart.

One day I was taken to her room. She lay in bed, as always now, for she had not left it in some while. I was set upon the coverlet; she raised herself and took my two hands in her two wasted ones, and looked at me a long time. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her colourless cheeks.

It was at that moment she stamped herself upon my memory; that pale face engraved itself there. When I wish to see her again, I close my eyes, and at once there appears a pale woman with fair hair and blue eyes fringed with dark lashes, from which large tears are falling.

I compare my two portraits, and find them alike; only the painter’s shows health in its full bright freshness, while the one in my heart shows illness in its most touching form.

Eight days after that visit, my mother died. I did not grieve for her then; I have grieved for her bitterly since. That hearth of love, going out, would have been the whole of my existence; it would have shone upon my life and nourished every good feeling in me.

I would have been loved, in spite of my plainness, for my plainness itself. A mother, they say, loves best those children nature has treated unkindly; she rights the balance, and within the family those unjust judgments the world makes are dissolved — each is valued for his worth, not his looks. She grieved to die on my account.

“My daughter will be without what draws the world’s affection,” she used to say. “She has all the more need of her mother.”

The moment she had breathed her last, I was sent to my aunt Désirée, who lost no time in having one of her old black gowns unpicked. Her one servant, who could sew, made for me out of it a garment with no proper name — a dress, if one liked, or a smock, or a shift. I made a great fuss about wearing it, and cried loudly to be taken back to my mother. Aunt Désirée told me she had gone away to Paradise. I did not quite know what that country was, and I flew into a temper; then I was told it was the good God who had called her there, and my displeasure turned against him — I refused to say my prayers for two days, to punish him. Aunt Désirée bought me a little dog; Renotte, her servant, took me riding on the donkey Aunt Désirée rode to church, and I was comforted.

I spent at Aunt Désirée’s the four happiest years of my life. My father travelled to distract himself from his grief, writing now and then to ask after me. I was the idol of these two old women, who could think of nothing they would not do to amuse me. Every Thursday and every Sunday, Aunt Désirée sent for one of her nephews, who lived nearby and was being raised by his uncles, the Messieurs du Bressy. He was allowed to come to the Rosaies, though a certain coldness stood between Aunt Désirée and his uncles, whose cause I naturally did not know.

My cousin René was a good little boy of twelve, with a peasant’s manners, but who amused me enormously — a fearless raider of birds’ nests, a tireless runner, an expert at ball. I did not think him very clever, and took full advantage of my superiority in that respect. I was the queen; he was the slave. When I was tired I would say, “René, you shall be my horse.” He would obligingly bend his back, I would climb up, and guide him now by the hair, now by the ears, whenever he failed to go as I pleased. It is to me he owed having them so long; every day I pulled them a little, and he let me.

One could not have found a happier child than I was; I enjoyed, fully, without restraint or pause, all that God has made best for man.

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