Five-sixths of the way through this book, one knows that a grand fairy-tale adventure is happening far from the narrator; the foreshadowings were clear, the conditions were met, the pages compress. But the narrator is bespelled in an isolated castle, and the book has been so strongly in her voice that one wouldn't want a Odysseus-at-dinner told tale intruding. What happens instead is that a small theater group appears, notices nothing of the odd enchantments and madnesses in the castle, and performs, or transmits, the adventure itself, with the narrator in the audience narrating to us. It works like clockwork, like a Vaucanson duck, like the storytelling gestures in a ballet.
The whole story is built from odd parts fit neatly together; the event is a cursed noble family, cruel and decadent, and the balance between the damage the curse finally does them and the rescue their least member achieves. The story is told by a lady's maid who grew up on the Paris streets, who has heard fine speech most of her life but isn't a précieuse, who lives by the pleasure of aristocrats but knows why the peasants hate them. The remote family castle is 'really' in the timeless high medieval era; but the curse hits them as the French Revolution hits Paris. The lady's maid Berthe both loves and hates her mistress, who she has served since they were both girls; the sublimation of anger, and dependency, and romantic love, and parental love into that single relationship is fascinating.
ISBN: 0525936084
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