This story is, above all, a work of fiction.
Though I tried to stay faithful to the facts that are known about the Gonzales family, as well as to those that scholars have deemed most likely, for the sake of a more coherent narrative I did take liberties with history. In places, time lines have been blurred and historical sites, and even people, combined. The song that Catherine sings is a modified translation of a traditional Italian lullaby.
Animal-husband tales have appeared in cultures all over the world for centuries upon centuries. One—Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s The Beauty and the Beast—has spawned countless variations. Whether the historical protagonists in this book might have been the inspiration for Villeneuve’s story is—like so much else about their lives—a matter of conjecture, though one that sparked my imagination.
Very little is known for certain about Pedro Gonzales, the hirsute boy brought to the French court around the time of Henri II’s coronation, and much of what we “know” is very likely the sort of potent mixture of fact and fiction from which legends are birthed. Still less is known about his glabrous wife, Catherine, though there are documents indicating that her father was a textile merchant. So on the basis of the sparse and sometimes contradictory information available, I had to be inventive, though I am deeply indebted to several works of nonfiction on the subject, particularly Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s The Marvelous Hairy Girls, Touba Ghadessi’s Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance, and Roberto Zapperi’s fascinating biography of Pedro, Il selvaggio gentiluomo: l’incredibile storia di Pedro Gonzales e dei suoi figli.
The history of sixteenth-century France is a turbulent one. Because I was more concerned with the Gonzales family life than with religious and court politics, I touched on only some of it, and only on that which I felt would have been most likely to affect them personally. And again, liberties were taken; Ludovico Gonzaga, the Duke of Nevers, was a real person, and believed to have been one of the minds behind the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which set off a series of decades-long wars between Catholics and Huguenots. Gonzaga was fostered at the French court around the same time that Pedro Gonzales was a child there, but their friendship is entirely my invention. For anyone interested in a deeper look into the complex history of this time and place, with all its intrigues and bloodiness, I highly recommend the works of Robert J. Knecht, who has written a number of books about French Renaissance monarchs, the French Wars of Religion, and French Renaissance court life.
We do know this much: a hairy child, approximately ten years old, arrived at the French court in 1547 and was educated at the behest of the newly crowned King Henri II. This child was born with what we now know was a form of hypertrichosis, a genetic condition causing excessive hair growth all over the body. (This form of hypertrichosis is also sometimes known as Ambras syndrome, named for the castle in Austria where some of the Gonzales family portraits were discovered.) Many years later, he was married—according to lore, at the whim of Queen Caterina (Catherine) de’ Medici, though this is unsubstantiated—to a much younger woman, also named Catherine. Some recent scholarship indicates that Pedro may, in fact, have earned a law degree and become a lecturer at a Parisian university, which would have afforded him more freedom, status, and financial security than if, as has long been believed, he was only ever a bread bearer for Henri II. Regardless, however, what we do know almost without doubt is that he and his children were subject to the whims of their royal protectors.
Pedro and Catherine lived as part of the French court until sometime after the death of Caterina de’ Medici, and went from there to the protection of the Farnese in Parma. Along the way, they may have stopped at other royal courts, though we don’t know this for certain. They did stop in Basel, where at least two of the children were examined by Felix Platter, a physician and university lecturer.
Pedro did ask the Duke of Parma for work, and ran a farm for him, though not for long, and the farm was not in Capodimonte as I have it in the novel—though the family did, in fact, live out the ends of their lives in that town—but in Collecchio.
Catherine bore Pedro at least seven children in all, not just the four who appear in this book. Their names, to the best of our knowledge, were Madeleine, Paul, Henri, Françoise, Antoinette, Orazio, and Ercole, though there may have been others, as recently discovered baptismal certificates attest. Of these seven, five are known to have been as hairy as their father; one, Paul, is believed to have been glabrous. Whether Ercole was hairy or not is unknown; he almost certainly died as an infant, and nothing else is recorded about him.
Pedro and Catherine were together from their marriage around 1570 until his death sometime after 1617. Their portraits, which were likely not painted from life, and those of their children were displayed in various scholarly works as well as in the homes of princes and nobles who collected images of “monsters.” We know what happened to all of Pedro and Catherine’s children except for Antoinette, who disappears almost entirely from the record after she leaves her parents as a child to live with the Marchesa di Soragna. Only her painted image remains—the striking portrait described in the opening to this book, painted by the Italian artist Lavinia Fontana when Antoinette was about eight years old and living with the marchesa—to remind us that she lived.