I. PROLOGUE: IL ÉTAIT UNE FOIS...

Once upon a time, there was a duke of France who had a beautiful daughter, named Marguerite. Marguerite was more beautiful than any maiden in France: her hair looked like liquid gold, and her eyes were hazel. But in addition to her beauty, Marguerite had a kind and loving heart. And so she was beloved by many.

As a woman, Marguerite was expected to one day marry and become lady of a grand household, managing it as though she were the keeper of an inn, only with servants. Marguerite knew that, with servants, she would not have to sew or cook, clean or spin, so she easily neglected her training as a future wife and spent much of her time outside: talking to her father's serfs as they worked in the fields, or sitting at the base of a tree, her head bent over a book.

By the time Marguerite was seventeen, she had many suitors for her hand: other dukes, counts, lord, and even some marquesses and earls. Yet Marguerite fell in love with a man who worked for her father: a hard-working carpenter who was as honest, as kind, and even as fond of reading as Marguerite, but who was much poorer than her. His name was Maurice.

Marguerite knew that her father would never allow her to marry Maurice—

"Why not, Papa?"

"Hmm?" The father dropped his "story voice" and bent his smile on the tiny, dark-haired girl curled up in his lap. "'Why not' what, mignon?"

The little girl frowned, tossing her head impatiently. "Why wouldn't her papa let her marry the carpenter, if she loved him?"

"Because the carpenter was poor," Maurice explained with a rueful smile. But his daughter was still unsatisfied.

"I don't understand," she told him. "All the stories you and Mama have told me say that when two people want to get married, it's because they are in love! And also the stories say that love is the most important thing in the whole wide world."

"It is. But Marguerite's papa thought that the 'most important thing in the whole wide world' was money." He looked down at his daughter's face, anticipating her next question. "Do you remember what Mama's house was like?"

The girl nodded eagerly. "Yes! It was always warm there. The food was tasty, and I had such pretty, colorful dresses." She glanced involuntarily at the plain brown wool she now wore, and thus never saw the quick hurt look in her father's eyes. "Whenever you tell me stories about castles, I think about when I was there."

"Well, all of those things—big houses and rich food and pretty dresses—cost a lot of money. If you don't have a lot of money, you have to live in a little house like ours."

"A little brown house."

"What?"

"Everything here is brown," the little girl told her father in a tone that meant it should be perfectly obvious. "The walls and floor and food and even our clothes. And brown," she informed him, "is not my favorite color. Blue is."

Her father chuckled. "Are you very unhappy living here with me, then? Shall I paint everything blue to please you?"

"No," she said firmly. "I am very happy, because I love you, Papa."

Her father blinked hard several times. "I love you, too. And the duke in the story loved his daughter very much, and he was already very rich, but what he wanted most for her was to marry a rich man so that together they would be twice as rich."

"Oh."

Maurice correctly interpreted his daughter's sudden dearth of questions as both understanding, and as license to proceed. So he did proceed.

Marguerite knew that her father would never allow her to marry Maurice, so they were married secretly. They made plans to run away together, but Marguerite's father found out and became very angry. He banished the carpenter from his lands, and made sure no one ever found out about Marguerite's disobedience by marrying her off to a neighboring nobleman, after all.

But the nobleman found out, anyways, because Marguerite eventually had a baby who looked just like her, as well as her true husband, Maurice. (As usual, Maurice hurried through this part of the story. He didn't feel equal to actually explaining bigamy, or the offspring thereof, to a six-year-old.) The nobleman was kind to the little girl, though he wished for children of his own, and Marguerite raised her daughter in relative happiness for some years before tragedy struck.

A horrible plague swept the countryside, and the nobleman was taken ill almost immediately. He died within days of Marguerite, who also succumbed to the plague, having been terribly weakened by the stillbirth of her second husband's son. Marguerite's daughter was cast into the world by the nobleman's cruel mother. Fortunately, the little girl's true father, the carpenter Maurice, learned of his Marguerite's plight, and hastened to rescue and raise their daughter himself.

"And now," said Maurice, "it's time you were in bed."

Dutifully, the girl jumped from her father's lap and ran into her little brown bedroom, where she undid her wool frock and folded it neatly in a chest at the foot of her bed. But she soon came scampering into the room again, shivering in her shift—and so, as anxious to be near her father again as the fire into which he now gazed, lost in reverie. "Papa?"

Maurice started. "Yes?"

"Why don't you ever say 'the end' when you finish telling me this story?"

Maurice picked up his daughter and carried her to her bed. Tucking her in as best as he knew, he replied, "Because it's not finished yet. The little girl hasn't grown up. Someday you will finish telling me the story. Now go to sleep, Belle."