II. ONCE UPON A TIME

IT ALL BEGAN... But let me step back and begin before the actual beginning. There is a good deal of background material that I ought to fill you in on, and a certain number of necessary explanations. The traditional rendition of the story, which we can call the Condensed Version, tells everything in six and a half minutes, plunging straight into the thick of things with the Princess and her golden ball. Besides, it is a version for children, who don’t require explanations of the extraordinary. Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only —not even primarily—to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us, where princes and dragons, wizards impalpable regions.

Let me start by reminding you that not all princesses in these ancient tales are beautiful. They don’t have to be: they are princesses. But our princess was, in fact, a most attractive young woman. How attractive? Well, the Condensed Version, which is usually quite straightforward about details, gets caught up in its enthusiasm when it describes her. “She was so beautiful,” it says, “that the sun, who had seen so many things, was filled with wonder every time he shined onto her face.” This is charming, to be sure, but why the hyperbole? It is true that the Princess was lovely; you might even have called her—on certain days, in certain moods, in certain rare subtleties of light—beautiful. But there are many beautiful young women scattered across the globe, walking in high heels or in sneakers down every main street of every city on earth, and if the sun were to stop and stare at each of them, our days and our nights would be longer than I can easily tell. No, exaggerations like this don’t occur to a storyteller out of the blue; there is always a reason, and the reason here, I think, is that the more difficult side of our princess’s character must have made the teller of the Condensed Version uncomfortable. For the outer mirrors the inner, and there is no character flaw that, to a discerning eye, does not manifest itself on the faces of even the surpassingly beautiful, making them far less a cause for wonder than is the face of a plain young woman with a loving heart.

In short, the Princess was proud; she was ungrateful; she was headstrong. But we will come to all that in due course.

Our story takes place in the High Renaissance, in one of the small, prosperous French kingdoms whose châteauxalong the Loire and the Saône are among the glories of European architecture. “French kingdoms, plural?” you may be asking. It is a natural question, and I must stop again to explain.