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English fairytale fiction story

Write a short fictional story utilizing the Fairytale genre. To name a few possibilities, you could come up with your own origin/creation story, myth, proverb, or horrific fairytale. You must include a 300-word introduction explaining the genre. You need to write what conventions of the genre you are pulling from and using. In doing this, you will provide specific examples from your own story and information from the lecture that went with the genre you choose. This intro should be on a separate page from the short story.

Format: at least 3 pages (single-spaced), Times New Roman, 12 point font, one-inch margins all the way around. *The intro is not included in this length requirement

Please Note: The short story needs to be a piece of fiction. You can incorporate details from your life, but the story needs to be fictional.

Need Plagiarism Report Too!!!

I have attached two example stories and the lecture note.

Angela Carter, “The Tiger’s Bride”

Published in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). The footnotes are not part of Carter’s text; they have been added to this
version for classroom use.

My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
There’s a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon
trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you’ve
come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb.1 Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the
voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved
brain; it gasps: ‘Luxury! more luxury!’ But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it
ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to
mock my father’s expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as
he deals the Devil’s picture books.2
The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious cynicism
peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more
and yet more draughts of the firewater they call grappa,3 rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance. When we left
Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, cornfields, farmyards, my beloved horses,
white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been
to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast.
Everyone who comes to this city must play a hand with the grand seigneur; few come. They did not warn us at
Milan, or, if they did, we did not understand them – my limping Italian, the bewildering dialect of the region. Indeed, I
myself spoke up in favour of this remote, provincial place, out of fashion two hundred years, because, oh irony, it
boasted no casino. I did not know that the price of a stay in its Decembral solitude was a game with Milord.
The hour was late. The chill damp of this place creeps into the stones, into your bones, into the spongy pith of
the lungs; it insinuated itself with a shiver into our parlour, where Milord came to play in the privacy essential to him.
Who could refuse the invitation his valet brought to our lodging? Not my profligate father, certainly; the mirror above
the table gave me back his frenzy, my impassivity, the withering candles, the emptying bottles, the coloured tide of the
cards as they rose and fell, the still mask that concealed all the features of The Beast but for the yellow eyes that strayed,
now and then, from his unfurled hand towards myself.
‘La Bestia!’ said our landlady, gingerly fingering an envelope with his huge crest of a tiger rampant on it,
something of fear, something of wonder in her face. I could not ask her why they called the master of the place, ‘La
Bestia’ – was it to do with that heraldic signature? – because her tongue was so thickened by the phlegmy, bronchitic
speech of the region I scarcely managed to make out a thing she said except when she saw me: ‘Che bella!’4
Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on
Christmas Day – her ‘Christmas rose’, my English nurse called me. The peasants said: ‘The living image of her mother,’
crossing themselves out of respect for the dead. My mother did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a
feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his whoring, his agonizing repentances. And The
Beast gave me the rose from his own impeccable if outmoded buttonhole when he arrived, the valet brushing the snow
off his black cloak. This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal, apart
as my father magnificently concluded the career he had made of catastrophe.
This is a melancholy, introspective region; a sunless, featureless landscape, the river sweating fog, the shorn,
hunkering willows. And a cruel city; the sombre piazza, a place uniquely suited to public executions, under the beetling
shadow of that malign barn of a church. They used to hang condemned men in cages from the city walls; unkindness
comes naturally to them, their eyes are set too close together, they have thin lips. Poor food, pasta soaked in oil, boiled
beef with sauce of bitter herbs. A funereal hush about the place, the inhabitants huddled up against the cold so you can
hardly see their faces. And they lie to you and cheat you, innkeepers, coachmen, everybody. God, how they fleeced us!

1 This is the first of many references in this story to a famous Biblical passage (and later interpretations of that passage): “The wolf also shall dwell
with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by
the cobra’s hole, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.” (Isaiah 11:6-8)
2 That is, the deck of cards.
3 Grappa is a type of brandy, typically with a rather high alcohol content.
4 “How beautiful!” (Italian)

– 1 –

The treacherous South, where you think there is no winter but forget you take it with you.
My senses were increasingly troubled by the fuddling perfume of Milord, far too potent a reek of purplish
civet5 at such close quarters in so small a room. He must bathe himself in scent, soak his shirts and underlinen in it;
what can he smell of, that needs so much camouflage?
I never saw a man so big look so two-dimensional, in spite of the quaint elegance of The Beast, in the old-
fashioned tailcoat that might, from its looks, have been bought in those distant years before he imposed seclusion on
himself; he does not feel he need keep up with the times. There is a crude clumsiness about his outlines, that are on the
ungainly, giant side; and he has an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright
when he would far rather drop down on all fours. He throws our human aspirations to the godlike sadly awry, poor
fellow; only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a
mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it. Oh, yes, a beautiful face; but one with too much formal
symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect,
uncanny. He wears a wig, too, false hair tied at the nape with a bow, a wig of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits.
A chaste silk stock stuck with a pearl hides his throat. And gloves of blond kid that are yet so huge and clumsy they do
not seem to cover hands.
He is a carnival figure made of papier mâché and crêpe hair; and yet he has the Devil’s knack at cards.
His masked voice echoes as from a great distance as he stoops over his hand and he has such a growling
impediment in his speech that only his valet, who understands him, can interpret for him, as if his master were the
clumsy doll and he the ventriloquist.
The wick slumped in the eroded wax, the candles guttered. By the time my rose had lost all its petals, my father,
too, was left with nothing.
‘Except the girl.’
Gambling is a sickness. My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards. He fanned
them out; in the mirror, I saw wild hope light up his eyes. His collar was unfastened, his rumpled hair stood up on end,
he had the anguish of a man in the last stages of debauchery. The draughts came out of the old walls and bit me, I was
colder than I’d ever been in Russia, when nights are coldest there.
A queen, a king, an ace. I saw them in the mirror. Oh, I know he thought he could not lose me; besides, back
with me would come all he had lost, the unravelled fortunes of our family at one blow restored. And would he not win,
as well, The Beast’s hereditary palazzo outside the city; his immense revenues; his lands around the river; his rents, his
treasure chest, his Mantegnas, his Giulio Romanos, his Cellini salt cellars,6 his titles. . . the very city itself.
You must not think my father valued me at less than a king’s ransom; but, at no more than a king’s ransom.
It was cold as hell in the parlour. And it seemed to me, child of the severe North, that it was not my flesh but,
truly, my father’s soul that was in peril.
My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not? In pursuit of just such a miracle as this, had
we not travelled from the land of bears and shooting stars?
So we teetered on the brink.
The Beast bayed; laid down all three remaining aces.
The indifferent servants now glided smoothly forward as on wheels to douse the candles one by one. To look
at them you would think that nothing of any moment had occurred. They yawned a little resentfully; it was almost
morning, we had kept them out of bed. The Beast’s man brought his cloak. My father sat amongst these preparations
for departure, staring on at the betrayal of his cards upon the table.
The Beast’s man informed me crisply that he, the valet, would call for me and my bags tomorrow, at ten, and
conduct me forthwith to The Beast’s palazzo. Capisco?7 So shocked was I that I scarcely did ‘capisco’; he repeated my
orders patiently, he was a strange, thin, quick little man who walked with an irregular, jolting rhythm upon splayed feet
in curious, wedge-shaped shoes.
Where my father had been red as fire, now he was white as the snow that caked the window-pane. His eyes
swam; soon he would cry. ‘ “Like the base Indian,” he said; he loved rhetoric. ‘”One whose hand, / Like the base
Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe. . .”8 I have lost my pearl, my pearl beyond price.’

5 A secretion from the anal glands of the civet cat (an African and South Pacific weasel-like predator); it has a very strong musky odor and was
long used in perfume manufacture.
6 Andrea Mantegna was a C15 Italian painter and engraver, Giulio Romano a C16 Italian painter and architect, Benvenuto Cellini a C16 Italian
sculptor and goldsmith. All these artists are very highly regarded masters; if The Beast owns works by them, he’s rich indeed, and apparently quite
“cultured” as well.
7 “Do you understand?” (Italian)
8 The father is quoting from Shakespeare’s Othello (Act 5, scene 2).

– 2 –

At that, The Beast made a sudden, dreadful noise, halfway between a growl and a roar; the candles flared. The
quick valet, the prim hypocrite, interpreted unblinking: ‘My master says: If you are so careless of your treasures, you
should expect them to be taken from you.’
He gave us the bow and smile his master could not offer us and they departed.
I watched the snow until, just before dawn, it stopped falling; a hard frost settled, next morning there was a
light like iron.
The Beast’s carriage, of an elegant if antique design, was black as a hearse and it was drawn by a dashing black
gelding who blew smoke from his nostrils and stamped upon the packed snow with enough sprightly appearance of life
to give me some hope that not all the world was locked in ice, as I was. I had always held a little towards Gulliver’s
opinion, that horses are better than we are,9 and, that day, I would have been glad to depart with him to the kingdom of
horses, if I’d been given the chance.
The valet sat up on the box in a natty black and gold livery, clasping, of all things, a bunch of his master’s
damned white roses as if a gift of flowers would reconcile a woman to any humiliation. He sprang down with
preternatural agility to place them ceremoniously in my reluctant hand. My tear-beslobbered father wants a rose to show
that I forgive him. When I break off a stem, I prick my finger and so he gets his rose all smeared with blood.
The valet crouched at my feet to tuck the rugs about me with a strange kind of unflattering obsequiousness yet
he forgot his station sufficiently to scratch busily beneath his white periwig with an over-supple index finger as he
offered me what my old nurse would have called an ‘old-fashioned look’, ironic, sly, a smidgen of disdain in it. And pity?
No pity. His eyes were moist and brown, his face seamed with the innocent cunning of an ancient baby. He had an
irritating habit of chattering to himself under his breath all the time as he packed up his master’s winnings. I drew the
curtains to conceal the sight of my father’s farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.
Lost to The Beast! And what, I wondered, might be the exact nature of his ‘beastliness’? My English nurse
once told me about a tiger-man she saw in London, when she was a little girl, to scare me into good behaviour, for I
was a wild wee thing and she could not tame me into submission with a frown or the bribe of a spoonful of jam. If you
don’t stop plaguing the nursemaids, my beauty, the tiger-man will come and take you away. They’d brought him from
Sumatra, in the Indies, she said; his hinder parts were all hairy and only from the head downward did he resemble a
man.
And yet The Beast always goes masked; it cannot be his face that looks like mine.
But the tiger-man, in spite of his hairiness, could take a glass of ale in his hand like a good Christian and drink it
down. Had she not seen him do so, at the sign of The George, by the steps of Upper Moor Fields when she was just as
high as me and lisped and toddled, too. Then she would sigh for London, across the North Sea of the lapse of years.
But, if this young lady was not a good little girl and did not eat her boiled beetroot, then the tiger-man would put on his
big black travelling cloak lined with fur, just like your daddy’s, and hire the Erl-King’s galloper of wind10 and ride
through the night straight to the nursery and—
“Yes, my beauty! GOBBLE YOU UP!”
How I’d squeal in delighted terror, half believing her, half knowing that she teased me. And there were things I
knew that I must not tell her. In our lost farmyard, where the giggling nursemaids initiated me into the mysteries of
what the bull did to the cows, I heard about the waggoner’s daughter. Hush, hush, don’t let on to your nursie we said
so; the waggoner’s lass, hare-lipped, squint-eyed, ugly as sin, who would have taken her? Yet, to her shame, her belly
swelled amid the cruel mockery of the ostlers and her son was born of a bear, they whispered. Born with a full pelt and
teeth; that proved it. But, when he grew up, he was a good shepherd, although he never married, lived in a hut outside
the village and could make the wind blow any way he wanted to besides being able to tell which eggs would become
cocks, which hens.
The wondering peasants once brought my father a skull with horns four inches long on either side of it and
would not go back to the field where their poor plough disturbed it until the priest went with them; for this skull had
the jaw-bone of a man, had it not?

9 In Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), Gulliver’s journey takes him, ultimately, to a land populated by both people and horses: the horses
are educated, cultured, and intelligent, while the people (“Yahoos” is Swift’s term) are nasty, dirty, and violent – they behave, in short, like animals.
When Gulliver finally returns home to England, he at first refuses to sleep in his house, instead bunking with his horses in the stable.
10 That is, the Erl-King’s ghostly horse. The Erl-King is a mysterious supernatural figure in German folklore, popularized in the folk ballad “The
Erl-King.” This ballad tells the story of a father riding home one night with his young son, who pleads with the father to ride faster, as the
threatening Erl-King is close behind them. The father dismisses the child’s fears, but upon arrival at his castle finds that his son is dead. The
collection of Angela Carter’s stories from which “The Tiger’s Bride” is taken contains a story entitled “The Erl-King,” although Carter’s version
does not bear direct resemblance to the folk ballad.

– 3 –

Old wives’ tales, nursery fears! I knew well enough the reason for the trepidation I cosily titillated with
superstitious marvels of my childhood on the day my childhood ended. For now my own skin was my sole capital in the
world and today I’d make my first investment.
We had left the city far behind us and were now traversing a wide, flat dish of snow where the mutilated
stumps of the willows flourished their ciliate heads athwart frozen ditches; mist diminished the horizon, brought down
the sky until it seemed no more than a few inches above us. As far as eye could see, not one thing living. How
starveling, how bereft the dead season of this spurious Eden in which all the fruit was blighted by cold! And my frail
roses, already faded. I opened the carriage door and tossed the defunct bouquet into the rucked, frost-stiff mud of the
road. Suddenly a sharp, freezing wind arose and pelted my face with a dry rice of powdered snow. The mist lifted
sufficiently to reveal before me an acreage of half-derelict façades of sheer red brick, the vast man-trap, the
megalomaniac citadel of his palazzo.
It was a world in itself but a dead one, a burned-out planet. I saw The Beast bought solitude, not luxury, with
his money.
The little black horse trotted smartly through the figured bronze doors that stood open to the weather like
those of a barn and the valet handed me out of the carriage on to the scarred tiles of the great hall itself, into the
odorous warmth of a stable, sweet with hay, acrid with horse dung. An equine chorus of neighings and soft drummings
of hooves broke out beneath the tall roof, where the beams were scabbed with last summer’s swallows’ nests; a dozen
gracile11 muzzles lifted from their mangers and turned towards us, ears erect. The Beast had given his horses the use of
the dining room. The walls were painted, aptly enough, with a fresco of horses, dogs and men in a wood where fruit
and blossom grew on the bough together.
The valet tweaked politely at my sleeve. Milord is waiting.
Gaping doors and broken windows let the wind in everywhere. We mounted one staircase after another, our
feet clopping on the marble. Through archways and open doors, I glimpsed suites of vaulted chambers opening one out
of another like systems of Chinese boxes into the infinite complexity of the innards of the place. He and I and the wind
were the only things stirring; and all the furniture was under dust sheets, the chandeliers bundled up in cloth, pictures
taken from their hooks and propped with their faces to the walls as if their master could not bear to look at them. The
palace was dismantled, as if its owner were about to move house or had never properly moved in; The Beast had
chosen to live in an uninhabited place.
The valet darted me a reassuring glance from his brown, eloquent eyes, yet a glance with so much queer
superciliousness in it that it did not comfort me, and went bounding ahead of me on his bandy legs, softly chattering to
himself. I held my head high and followed him; but, for all my pride, my heart was heavy.
Milord has his eyrie high above the house, a small, stifling, darkened room; he keeps his shutters locked at
noon. I was out of breath by the time we reached it and returned to him the silence with which he greeted me. I will
not smile. He cannot smile.
In his rarely disturbed privacy, The Beast wears a garment of Ottoman12 design, a loose, dull purple gown with
gold embroidery round the neck that falls from his shoulders to conceal his feet. The feet of the chair he sits in are
handsomely clawed. He hides his hands in his ample sleeves. The artificial masterpiece of his face appals me. A small
fire in a small grate. A rushing wind rattles the shutters.
The valet coughed. To him fell the delicate task of transmitting to me his master’s wishes.
‘My master-‘
A stick fell in the grate. It made a mighty clatter in that dreadful silence; the valet started; lost his place in his
speech, began again.
‘My master has but one desire.’
The thick, rich, wild scent with which Milord had soaked himself the previous evening hangs all about us,
ascends in cursive blue from the smoke of a precious Chinese pot.
‘He wishes only-‘
Now, in the face of my impassivity, the valet twittered, his ironic composure gone, for the desire of a master,
however trivial, may yet sound unbearably insolent in the mouth of a servant and his role of go-between clearly caused
him a good deal of embarrassment. He gulped; he swallowed, at last contrived to unleash an unpunctuated flood.
‘My master’s sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress and that only for the
one time after which she will be returned to her father undamaged with bankers’ orders for the sum which he lost to my
master at cards and also a number of fine presents such as furs, jewels and horses -‘

11 slender, thin
12 A reference to the Ottoman empire of Turkey (1299-1922), which in many of its cultural expressions was often characterized by intricate design.

– 4 –

I remained standing. During this interview, my eyes were level with those inside the mask that now evaded
mine as if, to his credit, he was ashamed of his own request as his mouthpiece made it for him. Agitato, molto agitato,13
the valet wrung his white-gloved hands.
‘Desnuda -‘
I could scarcely believe my ears. I let out a raucous guffaw; no young lady laughs like that! my old nurse used to
remonstrate. But I did. And do. At the clamour of my heartless mirth, the valet danced backwards with perturbation,
palpitating his fingers as if attempting to wrench them off, expostulating, wordlessly pleading. I felt that I owed it to
him to make my reply in as exquisite a Tuscan as I could master.
‘You may put me in a windowless room, sire, and I promise you I will pull my skirt up to my waist, ready for
you. But there must be a sheet, over my face, to hide it; though the sheet must be laid over me so lightly that it will not
choke me. So I shall be covered completely from the waist upwards, and no lights. There you can visit me once, sir, and
only the once. After that I must be driven directly to the city and deposited in the public square, in front of the church.
If you wish to give me money, then I should be pleased to receive it. But I must stress that you should give me only the
same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances. However, if you chose not to
give me a present, then that is your right.’
How pleased I was to see I struck The Beast to the heart! For, after a baker’s dozen heartbeats , one single tear
swelled, glittering, at the corner of the masked eye. A tear! A tear! The tear trembled for a moment on an edge of
painted bone, then tumbled down the painted cheek to fall, with an abrupt tinkle, on the tiled floor.
The valet, ticking and clucking to himself, hastily ushered me out of the room. A mauve cloud of his master’s
perfume billowed out into the chill corridor with us and dissipated itself on the spinning winds.
A cell had been prepared for me, a veritable cell, windowless, airless, lightless, in the viscera of the palace. The
valet lit a lamp for me; a narrow bed, a dark cupboard with fruit and flowers carved on it bulked out of the gloom.
‘I shall twist a noose out of my bed linen and hang myself with it,’ I said.
‘Oh, no,’ said the valet, fixing upon me wide and suddenly melancholy eyes. ‘Oh, no, you will not. You are a
woman of honour.’
And what was he doing in my bedroom, this jigging caricature of a man? Was he to be my warder until I
submitted to The Beast’s whim or he to mine? Am I in such reduced circumstances that I may not have a lady’s maid?
As if in reply to my unspoken demand, the valet clapped his hands.
‘To assuage your loneliness, madame. . .’
A knocking and clattering behind the door of the cupboard; the door swings open and out glides a soubrette14
from an operetta, with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes; it takes me a moment to recognize her, in
her little cap, her white stockings, her frilled petticoats. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puff in the
other and there is a musical box where her heart should be; she tinkles as she rolls towards me on her tiny wheels.
‘Nothing human lives here,’ said the valet.
My maid halted, bowed; from a split seam at the side of her bodice protrudes the handle of a key. She is a
marvellous machine, the most delicately balanced system of cords and pulleys in the world.
‘We have dispensed with servants,’ the valet said. ‘We surround ourselves, instead, for utility and pleasure, with
simulacra and find it no less convenient than do most gentlemen.’
This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels churning out a settecento15 minuet, and offered me
the bold carnation of her smile. Click, click – she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk
that makes me cough; then thrusts towards me her little mirror.
I saw within it not my own face but that of my father, as if I had put on his face when I arrived at The Beast’s
palace as the discharge for his debt. What, you self-deluding fool, are you crying still? And drunk, too. He tossed back
his grappa and hurled the tumbler away.
Seeing my astonished fright, the valet took the mirror away from me, breathed on it, polished it with the ham
of his gloved fist, handed it back to me. Now all I saw was myself, haggard from a sleepless night, pale enough to need
my maid’s supply of rouge.
I heard the key turn in the heavy door and the valet’s footsteps patter down the stone passage. Meanwhile, my
double continued to powder the air, emitting her jangling tune but, as it turned out, she was not inexhaustible; soon she
was powdering more and yet more languorously, her metal heart slowed in imitation of fatigue, her musical box ran
down until the notes separated themselves out of the tune and plopped like single raindrops and, as if sleep had

13 “Agitated, very agitated” (Italian)
14 “A maid-servant or lady’s maid as a character in a play or opera, usually one of a pert, coquettish, or intriguing character” (OED). An operetta
is a short opera, usually comedic.
15 “Settecento” refers to the 18th Century in Italian art and culture. A minuet is a formal dance for two people.

– 5 –

overtaken her, at last she moved no longer. As she succumbed to sleep, I had no option but to do so, too. I dropped on
that narrow bed as if felled.
Time passed but I do not know how much; then the valet woke me with rolls and honey. I gestured the tray
away but he set it down firmly beside the lamp and took from it a little shagreen16 box, which he offered to me.
I turned away my head.
‘Oh, my lady!’ Such hurt cracked his high-pitched voice! He dextrously unfastened the gold clasp; on a bed of
crimson velvet lay a single diamond earring, perfect as a tear. I snapped the box shut and tossed it into a corner. This
sudden, sharp movement must have disturbed the mechanism of the doll; she jerked her arm almost as if to reprimand
me, letting out a rippling fart of gavotte.17 Then was still again.
‘Very well,’ said the valet, put out. And indicated it was time for me to visit my host again. He did not let me
wash or comb my hair. There was so little natural light in the interior of the palace that I could not tell whether it was
day or night.
You would not think The Beast had budged an inch since I last saw him; he sat in his huge chair, with his
hands in his sleeves, and the heavy air never moved. I might have slept an hour, a night, or a month, but his sculptured
calm, the stifling air remained just as it had been. The incense rose from the pot, still traced the same signature on the
air. The same fire burned.
Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl? Is that all you want of me?
‘The sight of a young lady’s skin that no man has seen before -‘ stammered the valet.
I wished I’d rolled in the hay with every lad on my father’s farm, to disqualify myself from this humiliating
bargain. That he should want so little was the reason why I could not give it; I did not need to speak for The Beast to
understand me.
A tear came from his other eye. And then he moved; he buried his cardboard carnival head with its ribboned
weight of false hair in, I would say, his arms; he withdrew his, I might say, hands from his sleeves and I saw his furred
pads, his excoriating claws.
The dropped tear caught upon his fur and shone. And in my room for hours I hear those paws pad back and
forth outside my door.
When the valet arrived again with his silver salver, I had a pair of diamond earrings of the finest water in the
world; I threw the other into the comer where the first one lay. The valet twittered with aggrieved regret but did not
offer to lead me to The Beast again. Instead, he smiled ingratiatingly and confided: ‘My master, he say: invite the young
lady to go riding.’
‘What’s this?’
He briskly mimicked the action of a gallop and, to my amazement, tunelessly croaked: ‘Tantivy! tantivy! a-
hunting we will go!’18
‘I’ll run away, I’ll ride to the city.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Are you not a woman of honour?’
He clapped his hands and my maidservant clicked and jangled into the imitation of life. She rolled towards the
cupboard where she had come from and reached inside it to fetch out over her synthetic arm my riding habit. Of all
things. My very own riding habit, that I’d left behind me in a trunk in a loft in that country house outside Petersburg
we’d lost long ago, before, even, we set out on this wild pilgrimage to the cruel South. Either the very riding habit my
old nurse had sewn me or else a copy of it perfect to the lost button on the right sleeve, ripped hem held up with a pin.
I turned the worn cloth about in hands, looking for a clue. The wind that sprinted through the palace made the door
tremble in its frame; had the north wind blown garments across Europe to me? At home, the bear’s son directed winds
at his pleasure; what democracy of magic held this palace and the fir forest in common? Or, should I be prepared to
accept it as proof of the axiom my father had drummed into me: that if you have enough money, anything is possible?
‘Tantivy’ suggested the now twinkling valet, evidently charmed at the pleasure mixed with my bewilderment.
The clockwork maid held my jacket out to me and I allowed myself to shrug into it as if reluctantly, although I was half
mad to get out into the open air, away from the deathly palace, even in such company.
The doors of the hall let the bright day in; I saw that it was morning. Our horses, saddled and bridled, beasts in
bondage, were waiting for us, striking sparks from the tiles with their impatient hooves while their stablemates lolled at
ease among the straw, conversing with one another in the mute speech of horses. A pigeon or two, feathers puffed to
keep out the cold, strutted about, pecking at ears of corn. The little gelding who had brought me here greeted me with a
ringing neigh that resonated inside the misty roof as in a sounding box and I knew he was meant for me to ride.

16 Shagreen refers to the rough skin of an animal (horse, shark, seal) used as a leathery covering.
17 Gavotte: a quick, lively, simple dance, and the music for such a dance. A few quick lively notes, in other words.
18 “Tantivy” is an old hunting term meaning “at full gallop.”

– 6 –

I always adored horses, noblest of creatures, such wounded sensitivity in their wise eyes, such rational restraint
of energy at their high-strung hindquarters. I lirruped and hurrumphed to my shining black companion and he
acknowledged my greeting with a kiss on the forehead from his soft lips. There was a little shaggy pony nuzzling away
at the trompe l’œil19 foliage beneath the hooves of the painted horses on the wall, into whose saddle the valet sprang with
a flourish as of the circus. Then The Beast, wrapped in a black fur-lined cloak, came to heave himself aloft a grave grey
mare. No natural horseman he; he clung to her mane like a shipwrecked sailor to a spar.
Cold, that morning, yet dazzling with the sharp winter sunlight that blinds the retina. There was a scurrying
wind about that seemed to go with us, as if the masked, immense one who did not speak carried it inside his cloak and
let it out at his pleasure, for it stirred the horses’ manes but did not lift the lowland mists.
A bereft landscape in the sad browns and sepias of winter lay all about us, the marshland drearily protracting
itself towards the wide river. Those decapitated willows. Now and then, the swoop of a bird, its irreconcilable cry.
A profound sense of strangeness slowly began to possess me. I knew my two companions were not, in any
way, as other men, the simian retainer and the master for whom he spoke, the one with clawed fore-paws who was in a
plot with the witches who let the winds out of their knotted handkerchiefs up towards the Finnish border. I knew they
lived according to a different logic than I had done until my father abandoned me to the wild beasts by his human
carelessness. This knowledge gave me a certain fearfulness still; but, I would say, not much. . . I was a young girl, a
virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves in
all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us –
mounts and riders, both – could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state
categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord
opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out. Understand, then, that though I would not say I
privately engaged in metaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly
meditated on the nature of my own state , how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That
clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst
men that the doll-maker had given her?
Yet, as to the true nature of the being of this clawed magus who rode his pale horse in a style that made me
recall how Kublai Khan’s leopards20 went out hunting on horseback, of that I had no notion.
We came to the bank of the river that was so wide we could not see across it, so still with winter that it scarcely
seemed to flow. The horses lowered their heads to drink. The valet cleared his throat, about to speak; we were in a place
of perfect privacy, beyond a brake of winter-bare rushes, a hedge of reeds.
‘If you will not let him see you without your clothes -‘
I involuntarily shook my head –
‘- you must, then, prepare yourself for the sight of my master, naked.’
The river broke on the pebbles with a diminishing sigh. My composure deserted me; all at once I was on the
brink of panic. I did not think that I could bear the sight of him, whatever he was. The mare raised her dripping muzzle
and looked at me keenly, as if urging me. This river broke again at my feet. I was far from home.
‘You’ said the valet, ‘must.’
When I saw how scared he was I might refuse, I nodded.
The reed bowed down in a sudden snarl of wind that brought with it a gust of the heavy odour of his disguise.
The valet held out his master’s cloak to screen him from me as he removed the mask. The horses stirred.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb;21 he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must
learn to run with the tigers
A great, feline, tawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood.
His domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide it. How subtle the muscles, how profound the tread. The annihilating
vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns.
I felt my breast ripped apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound,
The valet moved forward as if to cover up his master now the girl had acknowledged him, but I said: ‘No.’ The
tiger sat still as a heraldic beast, in the pact he had made with his ferocity to do me no harm. He was far larger than I
could have imagined, from the poor, shabby things I’d seen once, in the Czar’s menagerie at Petersburg, the golden fruit
of their eyes dimming, withering in the far North of captivity. Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.

19 French for “fool the eye,” this refers to paintings made to look as realistic as possible.
20 Kublai Khan (sometimes “Kubla Khan” or Khubilai Khan; 1215-1294) was a Mongol general and founding Emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in
China (1271-1378). Kublai Khan was noted for his devotion to hunting.
21 Another allusion to Isaiah 11:6-8 (see footnote 1).

– 7 –

I therefore, shivering, now unfastened my jacket, to show him I would do him no harm. Yet I was clumsy and
blushed a little, for no man had seen me naked and I was a proud girl. Pride it was, not shame, that thwarted my fingers
so; and a certain trepidation lest this frail little article of human upholstery before him might not be, in itself, grand
enough to satisfy his expectations of us, since those, for all I knew, might have grown infinite during the endless time
he had been waiting. The wind clattered in the rushes, purled and eddied in the river.
I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turned their heads to watch me, also,
as if they, too, were courteously curious as to the fleshly nature of women. Then The Beast lowered his massive head;
Enough! said the valet with a gesture. The wind died down, all was still again.
Then they went off together, the valet on his pony, the tiger running before him like a hound, and I walked
along the river bank for a while. I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life. Then the winter sun began to tarnish,
a few flakes of snow drifted down from the darkening sky and, when I returned to the horses, I found The Beast
mounted again on his grey mare, cloaked and masked and once more, to all appearances, a man, while the valet had a
fine catch of waterfowl dangling from his hand and the corpse of a young roebuck slung behind his saddle. I climbed
up on the black gelding in silence and so we returned to the palace as the snow fell more and more heavily, obscuring
the tracks that we had left behind us.
The valet did not return me to my cell but, instead, to an elegant, if old-fashioned boudoir with sofas of faded
pink brocade, a jinn’s treasury22 of Oriental carpets, tintinnabulation23 of cut-glass chandeliers. Candles in antlered
holders struck rainbows from the prismatic hearts of my diamond earrings, that lay on my new dressing table at which
my attentive maid stood ready with her powder puff and mirror. Intending to fix the ornaments in my ears, I took the
looking glass from her hand, but it was in the midst of one of its magic fits again and I did not see my own face in it but
that of my father; at first I thought he smiled at me. Then I saw he was smiling with pure gratification.
He sat, I saw, in the parlour of our lodgings, at the very table where he had lost me, but now he was busily
engaged in counting out a tremendous pile of banknotes. My father’s circumstances had changed already; well-shaven,
neatly barbered, smart new clothes. A frosted glass of sparkling wine sat convenient to his hand beside an ice bucket.
The Beast had clearly paid cash on the nail for his glimpse of my bosom, and paid up promptly, as if it had not been a
sight I might have died of showing. Then I saw my father’s trunks were packed, ready for departure. Could he so easily
leave me here?
There was a note on the table with the money, in a fine hand. I could read it quite clearly. ‘The young lady will
arrive immediately.’ Some harlot with whom he’d briskly negotiated a liaison on the strength of his spoils? Not at all.
For, at that moment, the valet knocked at my door to announce that I might leave the palace at any time hereafter, and
he bore over his arm a handsome sable cloak, my very own little gratuity, The Beast’s morning gift, in which he
proposed to pack me up and send me off.
When I looked at the mirror again, my father had disappeared and all I saw was a pale, hollow-eyed girl whom I
scarcely recognized. The valet asked politely when he should prepare the carriage, as if he did not doubt that I would
leave with my booty at the first opportunity while my maid, whose face was no longer the spit of my own, continued
bonnily to beam. I will dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the part of my father’s
daughter.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said to the valet.
He did not need to lock the door, now. I fixed the earrings in my ears. They were very heavy. Then I took off
my riding habit, left it where it lay on the floor. But, when I got down to my shift, my arms dropped to my sides. I was
unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying.
I thought The Beast had wanted a little thing compared with what I was prepared to give him; but it is not natural for
humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demanded the abominable. I felt as
much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt and the smiling girl stood poised in the oblivion of her
balked simulation of life, watching me peel down to the cold, white meat of contract and, if she did not see me, then so
much more like the market place, where the eyes that watch you take no account of your existence.
And it seemed my entire life, since I had left the North, had passed under the indifferent gaze of eyes like hers.
Then I was flinching stark, except for his irreproachable tears.
I huddled in the furs I must return to him, to keep me from the lacerating winds that raced along the corridors.
I knew the way to his den without the valet to guide me.
No response to my tentative rap on his door.

22 Jinn: “In Muslim demonology, an order of spirits lower than the angels, said to have the power of appearing in human and animal forms, and to
exercise supernatural influence over men.” (OED)
23 the sound of bells ringing – in this case, the bell-like tinkling of the glass chandelier.

– 8 –

– 9 –

Then the wind blew the valet whirling along the passage. He must have decided that, if one should go naked,
then all should go naked; without his livery, he revealed himself, as I had suspected, a delicate creature, covered with
silken moth-grey fur, brown fingers supple as leather, chocolate muzzle, the gentlest creature in the world. He gibbered
a little to see my fine furs and jewels as if I were dressed up for the opera and, with a great deal of tender ceremony,
removed the sables from my shoulders. The sables thereupon resolved themselves into a pack of black, squeaking rats
that rattled immediately down the stairs on their hard little feet and were lost to sight.
The valet bowed me inside The Beast’s room.
The purple dressing gown, the mask, the wig, were laid out on his chair; a glove was planted on each arm. The
empty house of his appearance was ready for him but he had abandoned it. There was a reek of fur and piss; the
incense pot lay broken in pieces on the floor. Half-burned sticks were scattered from the extinguished fire. A candle
stuck by its own grease to the mantelpiece lit two narrow flames in the pupils of the tiger’s eyes. He was pacing
backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, the tip of his heavy tail twitching as he paced out the length and
breadth of his imprisonment between the gnawed and bloody bones.
He will gobble you up.
Nursery fears made flesh and sinew; earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment. The beast and his
carnivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable
kingdom24 in which his appetite need not be my extinction.
He went still as stone. He was far more frightened of me than I was of him.
I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes.
He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his
yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.
Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me.
A tremendous throbbing, as of the engine that makes the earth turn, filled the little room; he had begun to
purr.
The sweet thunder of this purr shook the old walls, made the shutters batter the windows until they burst apart
and let in the white light of the snowy moon. Tiles came crashing down from the roof; I heard them fall into the
courtyard far below. The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house, the walls began to dance. I
thought: ‘It will all fall, everything will disintegrate.’
He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a
tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. ‘He will lick the skin off me!’
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left
behind a nascent patina25 of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged
the drops off my beautiful fur.

24 Carter is alluding to a famous painting (actually a series of famous paintings) by the American artist Edward Hicks called The Peaceable Kingdom,
which is a visual interpretation of the Isaiah passage repeatedly referenced in this story. A link to this painting is on the online syllabus for this
course; see also footnote 1.
25 “nascent” means “just in the process of being born or coming into being;” a “patina” is a gloss or sheen on wood, or a thin coating on metal or
stone; in either case, a patina is usually produced by aging.

Storiesof Magic and Transformation

Some Notes on Fairy Tales

What is a fairy tale? What if I told you that there was no such thing as a “fairy tale?”
That there are only “tales,” narrative stories that are set in a world that is clearly not our
own, that have magic and talking animals. Sometimes we call them wonder tales, or
magic tales, or just stories. There is no one definition of a fairy tale, because there
cannot be – these stories go by different names in different cultures, and they have so
many different characters that to try to codify them all into a specific list of traits would
be impossible. There are only tales, tales that tell stories of the fantastic that we don’t
really believe.

And yet, if I were to ask you to define a fairy tale, I bet you could. You could offer a
pretty clear definition, and I bet that there would be a lot of similarity between your and
your classmates’ definitions. Despite our emphasis on belief and narrative, thematic
conventions have come to exist as markers of genre. It is difficult to tell a fairy tale in
our culture that is recognizable as a fairy tale without a “once upon a time,” a damsel
in distress, or a troll under a bridge. That is because folk narratives are communally
interactive and reactive. Once the idea of a fairy tale came into existence, so did the
naming of them as fairy tales.

So this is what we talk about when we talk about fairy tales. There are folk tales that
exist(ed) in the oral tradition before they were collected, transcribed, and edited by
folks like Charles Perrault and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These tales have existed
long before they were in print, and there are innumerable variants. Then there are
literary tales that were inspired by or created to resemble, at least in terms of plot
and character type, tales told in folk tradition. Sometimes, these literary tales so
captured the public’s attention that they entered into oral tradition.

I know I said that to codify fairy tales would be impossible, and it is, but as long as you
know that this list is incomplete, debatable, and only true for a limited group of tales –
those which you would recognize, perhaps, as a fairy tale, even if you’d never heard the
story before. These stories speak to readers of every place and time. We will do well to
listen seriously to what they tell us about the real world we live in. They present
experiences in vivid symbolic form. Sometimes we need to the truth to be exaggerated
and made more dramatic, even fantastic, in order to comprehend it.

The fairy tale has undergone a process of textual and social alteration in the course of
the centuries. The fairy tale relies on various forms of cultural transmission and
ever-changing ideological configuration for its very existence. Fairy tales, in particular,
as part of contemporary culture, are constantly refashioned, restructured, and
defamiliarized in modern times. Rewritings for both children and adults assume the
readers’ knowledge of the original tales, thus encouraging the reader to take note of the
formal changes which have led to an ideological reorientation of the tales. Fairy tales
are elastic: they evolve revealing a process of organic reshaping around a set of core
elements in response to historical and cultural influences. Writers like Angela Carter
are responsible for this evolution.

Angela Carter

Although widely recognized as children’s stories, rooted in a distant world of magical realism, folk and fairy
tales form a significant layer of both literary history and cultural consciousness. The realm of fairy tale, which
was historically a tradition belonging to the matriarch in her role as storyteller, is in modern times dominated
by the versions made popular by writers such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. The archetypal role
of women in these versions of the tales – as the vulnerable victim, damsel in distress, or the pretty prize for the
male hero – is one that through the techniques of both Gothic subversion and postmodern carnivalesque, has
been exposed, rewritten and ultimately reclaimed for women by Angela Carter, who herself explained that her
intention was to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” The fairy tale form not only provides
Carter with this radical and repressive source material, but also, as Patricia Brooke notes, allows her to “contest
the authorial position, rejecting the romantic and modern authoritative voice in favour of the multiplicity of
voices, often female, that have been repressed by the ‘official’ tellings of Perrault, Grimm, or Disney.” Carter’s
feminist intention for her gothic reinventions is not so limited or distorted as to craft wholly heroic, virtuous,
and triumphant female characters, for to do so would be to break free femininity from one set of social
confinements, only to trap it within another. The women of her stories are not simple or idealized feminist
restorations. Instead, each is crafted from a dark and intricate human framework *the same from which Carter
creates her male characters* that allows them to transcend conventional gender roles. Across the collection,
both female and male characters have been depicted as cruel or kind, passive or possessive, victimized or
villainous.

“The Tiger’s Bride”

Carter subverts the traditional fairy tale stock characters, employing the excesses of the Gothic form in
order to dissect, dismantle, and parody various aspects of the original tales: exposing their repressive
absurdities and forming revised narratives within a framework of deconstructed gender identities. Carter’s
narratives consistently expose, challenge, and abandon the conventional gender identities of traditional
fairy tales: two-dimensional identities that dictate that women need be vulnerable and submissive, and
men must be strong and dominant. Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” delves into the nature of men and women
and the relationships between them by exploring and analyzing the motifs of wildness and civilization. In
the traditional stories of “Beauty and the Beast,” women are presented as the civilizing agent in the
relationship with men, who succumb to their “beastliness,” giving way to their animalistic, wild side, while
in Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride,” the reverse is true—women are the ones who open up to the beast within
them in relationship with men, instead of being the civilizing agent. The original narrative of ‘The Tiger’s
Bride” works to destabilize the artificially restrictive categories of “Beauty and the Beast.” The literal and
figurative unmasking of each character – which signifies the deconstruction of both repressive gender
constructs – permits the revelation of their true animal forms, which become a symbol of a nature that is
liberated, pure and unified.

“The Snow Child”

This retelling of “Snow White” continues the tradition of using magic tales as a way of communicating
through symbol and fiction what cannot be otherwise spoken. The confines and dangers of patriarchal
society, most notably the fickle nature of power allotted to women and the resulting threats and acts of
rape that cannot be countered, are brought forward through Carter’s carefully crafted language, and her
effective inversion of a familiar narrative challenges the readers’ expectations as they are forced to
confront the damage being done to women within this culture. In this story, Carter explores whether a
woman can be both villain and victim. She presents a figure who is very aware of the instability of her
status; Christina Bacchilega notes that “[a]ny shift in the Count’s affection is immediately reflected in the
relationship of the two women, whose socio-economic fortunes mirror each other in reverse–as the one
gains, the other loses–and depend entirely on the Count’s words.” This quickly shifting position that
women must negotiate within a male-dominated society is a predominant focus of “The Snow Child”,
expressed symbolically throughout the text. The Countess may be a villain, but she is also trapped within
a social structure that affords her little autonomy, and as long as they are contained by this system she and
the snow child are both fated victims.

Existing on two pages alone, this story of Carter’s is a condensed, tightened version of the tale that, in its
brevity, denies the reader any space to look away from the horrors that unfold. Following in the magic tale
tradition, “The Snow Child” contains only what is relevant to the narrative and drives the plot forward.
Her symbols are presented in the same sophisticated layers expected in these tales; however, she
continually subverts assumptions and destabilises the story. Such narrative decisions invite the audience
to be co-creators in the experience and read their own meaning into the events they encounter while never
allowing them to take their eyes off those trapped within these lines of text. In doing so, Carter
demonstrates that there is still a need for folktales because women continue to suffer within patriarchal
power systems as they face, on a daily basis, issues of rape, incest, and abuse that, even when overlooked
and marginalised, continue to demand a voice.

Girl on Divan —
Berthe Morisot

Seated Figure of Summer —
Giuseppe Arcimboldo

June 28, 2013

Such beautiful writing.

April 16, 2014

Reply !

Yes absolutely, It sounds of the most beautiful poetry.

April 27, 2014

Thanks for posting this . I have done a super short analysis of this

fascinating story on my blog, check it out if you have time!

http://thecandleindoors.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/the-bloody-

chamber/#more-152

June 17, 2014

Reply
!

This is creepy as fuck! How can a man rape a dead child made

out of snow in f ront of her fucking wife!?!?

!
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!
!
!
!

“The Snow Child” —
Angela Carter
Posted on June 21, 2013 by Biblioklept

“The Snow Child” by Angela Carter

Midwinter — invincible, immaculate. The Count and his wife go riding, he on a grey mare

and she on a black one, she wrapped in the glittering pelts of black foxes; and she wore

high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs. Fresh snow fell on snow already

fallen; when it ceased, the whole world was white. “I wish I had a girl as white as snow,” says

the Count. They ride on. They come to a hole in the snow; this hole is filled with blood. He

says: “I wish I had a girl as red as blood.” So they ride on again; here is a raven, perched on a

bare bough. “I wish I had a girl as black as that bird’s feathers.”

As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red

mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated

her. The Count lifted her up and sat her in f ront of him on his saddle but the Countess had

only one thought:how shall I be rid of her?

The Countess dropped her glove in the snow and told the girl to get down to look for it; she

meant to gallop off and leave her there but the Count said: “I’ll buy you new gloves.” At that,

the furs sprang off the Countess’s shoulders and twined round the naked girl. Then the

Countess threw her diamond brooch through the ice of a f rozen pond: “Dive in and fetch it

for me,” she said; she thought the girl would drown. But the Count said: “Is she a fish to

swim in such cold weather?” Then her boots leapt off the Countess’s feet and on to the girl’s

legs. Now the Countess was bare as a bone and the girl furred and booted; the Count felt

sorry for his wife. They came to a bush of roses, all in flower. “Pick me one,” said the Countess

to the girl. “I can’t deny you that,” said the Count.

So the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls.

Weeping, the Count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member

into the dead girl. The Countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him narrowly; he

was soon finished.

Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might

have dropped; a blood stain, like the trace of a fox’s kill on the snow; and the rose she had

pulled off the bush. Now the Countess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand, she

stroked her furs. The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife; when she

touched it, she dropped it. “It bites!” she said.

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