Title: Unworthy
Author: Rissa85-Stargazing85
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: Angst, Drama, Romance
Part: Prologue (Bloodlines)
Disclaimer: I do not own any Disney animational (is that a word?) characters.
Author's Note: Beauty and the Beast, besides Pocahontas, is one of my all- time favorite movies. Unlike most Disney movies, it can be psychoanalyzed, chopped, and put back together in whatever sequence best fits. The depth is incredible, and it can be understood at age seven to age seventy. (Unlike Hunchback of Notre Dame, which real meaning is for mature audiences! - Also another fav! =}. This story is going to reflect most of the movie plotline up to a point. Starting from...well from the beginning...
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He gazed intently at the burning crimson light encompassing the supernatural flower protected by crystalline glass. Much like his life, if only he could see his once beautiful self-protected by wealth, broken by nothing. Beauty was strength, beauty was powerful, beauty was everything. He had witnessed it himself. But beauty was vulnerable.
He had been a beautiful child, Marcel Jourdain Montague, and lavishly spoiled. His mother attempted to raise him to the best of her abilities, even though his father had been present, he was of no help. A man that was in a constant state of drunkenness due to heavy opium use did not aid in helping a healthy, mischievous and appalling charismatic boy to grow to manhood. In his rare times, when opium wore off and his true self could be shown, the basis of a well-meaning father could be seen.
His father, Leverette Donatien Montague, came from an old family, reaping in the benefits of the Portuguese slave trade and partly funded the Italian Medici bank empire more than two hundred years before. His father's family never knew the feeling of destitution nor wanting. But his father became King of the provincial part of southern France, near the Mediterranean Sea, by being the third in line. The king had fallen ill and quickly died of typhoid fever, without an heir, his brother had been next, but came to a catastrophic end in a sailing accident. His father had been next in line and was given a splendid coronation service in which close royalty and family had been present.
His mother, Chanelle Claire D'Aubigne, came from a wealthy family, not from blood lines, solely from money. Though her family was less credible, since blue blood sufficed to marry blue blood. But his mother had been such a gorgeous creature that his arrogant father had humbled himself and stooped a step down to ask for her hand. They met as her family was holding a banquet in Italy for her, in honor of her coming-of-age, and as Leverette had been traveling was immediately welcomed.
Both families had not been mutual in their enthusiasm. The family D'Aubigne had been more than pleased at the luck their daughter had secured to the family bloodlines. The family Montague had been hostile at best, and unpleasant at worst to the courtship and later to the new bride. Being a haughty family and having a name synonymous with royalty and supremacy only to be mingled with the lines of lesser was intolerable.
As a boy, he always held his mother in regard to his father. Though his father's line was clearer much more defined than hers. Having once been the man of the social hour, and becoming shunned from his family, who greatly withdrew their financial funds but still allowing to live quite a lavish lifestyle, cracked his arrogant ego and he took to drink. All of this he had learned from his wealthy peer social circle and from the whispered matrons that attended the lavish parties he hated to attend. His mother never spoke about his father when he was not present, which was very near never.
Almost to make amends for his lack of parenting, Chanelle gave commands that her boy should have everything that he wished. No was not a word she used to him very often and it was rightly so. Being confined to only his social circle and the elite, he believed it so that he was beautiful and powerful. He looked down upon commoners, the crippled, and the very poor. And of course the savages he had heard were in the distant and yet-to-be explored lands. And as a Frenchman, most of Europe was regarded as lesser to France's geographical diversity and loveliness.
Early in his youth, his father had managed to begin gambling and in a public duel, in which he had been taking opium, had managed to become shot clean through his neck. His mother took to her bed with sickness, and it was at this time that he reinforced his self-importance to its greatest. The Montague family, though never admitting to it, dwindled their funds sent to his mother until she cautiously she replied that her son should live with them, so that he may inherit the Kingdom when he was old enough to rule. A council of Royalty had been ruling at that time.
While living with his father's family side, he began to feel ashamed of his loving mother's family. And shortly after he left, he had heard that she had become insane. Indeed, once he had visited her, she was murmuring in her sleep, carrying a candle around the castle and yelling so at the top of her lungs at his deceased father about her innocence in causing his isolation by his family.
Though she was insane, a slight pang of guilt lashed at him, she was nothing like herself. Clearly, his father's death had touched a pang of guilt that was impossible for her to recover from. Unable to completely shun his mother, but content to speak ill of her among his circle of elite companions, he guilt remained checked. He received a message while living with his paternal grandmother, the harshest critic on his father's 'disgraceful marriage selection'.
His mother had died during the night, and he felt himself unable to take to her funeral, he claimed because he was too distraught, but the guilt he felt over speaking so horribly about her to his society had caught up with him. To lose himself, he began to employ various high-priced mistresses and to clear his mind with brandy and port, the highest brand imported and potent.
He, deferred himself in favor of his favorite cousin, an Italian on his father's side. And was content to keep his father's elaborate castle to himself, declaring himself Prince and was deemed so by the neighboring villages who never saw him, but heard rumors of his ill behavior. He kept himself in his castle, after his mother ceased, and kept himself in her wing-The West Wing.
Presently, he looked into the glass, his eyes becoming unfocused as he looked into the shredded picture of his flawless self. He covered his face with his talons, hating the state he had been reduced to and feeling the immeasurable amount of self-hatred and despair that seized him. He could be free, if he found love.
Love. What was love? He could not remember the last time he had felt love. When his mother died he had not felt love but guilt. When his father died, he had felt nothing than as if an unknown commoner had committed suicide. His mother had spent time with him, tried to teach him love but he could never grasp the concept. Even when he employed the several mistresses he had, it was not love.
He finally resorted to the fact that there was no such emotion as love. But there was such an emotion as mutual benefit. Love was no more than a fantasy created by life's dreamers to explain an abstract and unreal emotion. Perhaps he was far too selfish to experience love. There would be no way for him to give up his life in order to save another's, no matter how fond he became of them.
At any rate, the Enchantress had commanded that either he would find love or would spend the rest of eternity as his present state. Despair filled him, his ugly dark brown fur, hideous fangs, and massive figure complete with talons. What beauty could ever learn to love a beast? Belle sighed with patience as she watched her father work diligently on one of his present inventions. He had such a creative mind, and an active imaginations, perhaps it ran on her father's side of the family. As far as she could remember her father had been the leading figure in her life. He was all that she ever had. Her mother was person she had never known, never spoke to, never seen save for a tucked away picture.
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Her mother, was someone she had not known much of. She had passed hours after childbirth, and had gone to live with her only paternal aunt for the first few months after her birth. Ever since, she had lived with her father and who was gentle and tried to make her as comfortable as he could with their meager income funded by some of his smaller inventions and their eggs which they took to town every week.He had always been gentle to her, as far back as she could remember unless she spoke of her mother. Then his face would twist into a painful gaze and he would question in a strange tone mixed with despair and hurt of why she would think of her? Not wanting to distress her father, she usually and guiltily apologized and let her father alone who sulked for a few moments before becoming cheerful again.
The town had never talked about her father reverently. But her mother was someone she heard of rarely, and it was in tones of reverence and awe. From what she gathered from shopkeepers she questioned clandestinely from her father, most specifically the bookkeeper, her mother had been a Spanish beauty from a family that had been once wealthy and Catholic but hit hard times. As the fortune dwindled and her father rallied against the oppressive government, both her parents had been assassinated. Somehow, she had ended her vagrancy in France, she had been a prostitute in Paris before settling in the small provincial town and marrying her father, Maurice Corbett of the common Laroque family.
The Laroque family was humble but skeptical that their only son should marry a Spanish prostitute. Being French, they looked down on the Spanish. And though she claimed she had once been wealthy, she had no royalty blood to claim and was in a worse position than them, who had never been wealthy but was far from destitute. The marriage was successful, save for her mother's erratic mood swings. She had heard her mother had dark brown straight hair, with dark brown eyes fringed with thick and black lashes.
The first image she had seen of her mother was when she had been looking behind her father's bed when he asked her to run to his room for his tobacco pipe. It was an old and faded painting, quite large and it was framed in gold, which would've cost a fortune in itself. Her beauty had halted her, and she did not know she had been looking at her mother until the village bookkeeper had told her that her mother had been Spanish. The next time she had gone to stare at it, she could not find it.
Perhaps that it why she had heard her paternal father and mother whisper, when she was a child, that the family line had been defiled. Her father had been fair-haired and light-eyed, likewise all the paternal family she had seen had light-eyes and light hair. She had brown hair and brown eyes. 'Defiled by Spanish, probably mingled with the blood of Moors, should've known better than to marry a prostitute...' was a few phrases she had remembered her paternal grandparents to whisper harshly. It hurt her to hear people that she had loved to talk so awful about a woman she wanted to be and admired deeply. It also hurt her that she would never know the woman that gave her birth and managed to pull herself from a soiled state to one of respectability. Half of her being was gone, and a void was what she always felt. As if half a part of her existence was missing.
She had always been an avid reader, but during her adolescence and presently, if half-filled the void that her mother had left. It seemed she would forget her cherished grandparents' comments, deceased they were presently. She had always held them in high regard, and their comments bit her to the very core. Especially as she was growing, transforming to wanting to look like her mother to wishing ardently not to look like her.
Reading made her travel to distant lands and open her imagination. She wondered briefly if her mother ever read. The bookkeeper that had gave her information had passed years before, and the new one knew nothing of her mother, though he had become a close friend and was a gentle old man who loved reading probably as much as she.
Presently, she brought herself to the closed book on her lap and sighed. The familiar feeling of regret that she would never know her mother surfacing. It was an odd feeling of lost that she had grown to tolerate. Still the tightness of her chest began and her eyes watered slightly, as she had learned to control them. And blinked them back, feeling herself cornered in the house her mother had inhabited and breathed and lived in. And she informed her father, "I'll be in town." She replied with evenness, as her father lost in his work dismissed her with a wave of his hand, off- handedly wishing her well knowing she carried the customary book as she did as always when she went to town.