The Virgin Blue. Tracy Chevalier
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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Group 1997
Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 1997
Chapter head motifs © Neil Gower
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover image: Detail from Portrait of Madmoiselle Alice Guerin (oil on canvas), Paul Cesar Helleu, (1859-1927) / Musee Bonnat, Bayonne, France / Bridgeman Images
Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007241460
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007324347
Version: 2019-06-07
For Jonathan
As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful, but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
Goethe, Theory of Colours
Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake
CONTENTS
She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair changed colour in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate.
That summer the Duc de l’Aigle brought a statue of the Virgin and Child and a pot of paint back from Paris for the niche over the church door. A feast was held in the village the day the statue was installed. Isabelle sat at the bottom of a ladder watching Jean Tournier paint the niche a deep blue the colour of the clear evening sky. As he finished, the sun appeared from behind a wall of clouds and lit up the blue so brightly that Isabelle clasped her hands behind her neck and squeezed her elbows against her chest. When its rays reached her, they touched her hair with a halo of copper that remained even when the sun had gone. From that day she was called La Rousse after the Virgin Mary.
The nickname lost its affection when Monsieur Marcel arrived in the village a few years later, hands stained with tannin and words borrowed from Calvin. In his first sermon, in woods out of sight of the village priest, he told them that the Virgin was barring their way to the Truth.
—La Rousse has been defiled by the statues, the candles, the trinkets. She is contaminated! he proclaimed. She stands between you and God!
The villagers turned to stare at Isabelle. She clutched her mother’s arm.
How can he know? she thought. Only Maman knows.
Her mother would not have told him that Isabelle had begun to bleed that day and now had a rough cloth tied between her legs and