Marvelous
Before the much-loved tale of Beauty and the Beast came the actual life of Petrus Gonsalvus, who was brought from the Canary Islands as a boy and gifted to the French king Henri II, raised several children with his lovely wife, and was known across Europe for his hypertrichosis—his body, including his face, had unusually abundant hair.
Greeley imagines a lush, gorgeous tapestry of this man’s life and that of his wife, Catherine, beginning with a young Pedro Gonzales daydreaming on the shores of Tenerife, from which he is kidnapped by pirates and delivered to France. Though raised at court and well-educated, Pedro is regarded as a marvel rather than a man, and his lifelong reserve creates distance with his new wife, Catherine, when the Queen chooses the merchant’s daughter as his bride. Catherine despairs not that she is “Madame Sauvage” but that her husband holds himself apart. After the birth of their first child, and sheltering together during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the couple form a tenuous connection which develops into a deeply devoted marriage.
In prose wrought with exquisite rhythm and infused with startling imagery, Greeley conjures compelling emotional depths for her characters, evoking love, terror, memory, and loss in ways that feel precise and specific. She probes with great sensitivity the pains of difference and the indignities of prejudice, from young Pedro’s humiliation and terror when he finds himself presented in a cage to the king, to Catherine’s hurt at having her children treated as court pets. The story feels realistically rooted in time and place but speaks to the loves and pains of the human heart: the loss of children, the intimacy of companionship, the ways both shape a life and a person. An immersive and rewarding read, unreservedly recommended.
