In the Château de Blois hangs a portrait of a girl. She is forever eight years old and crowned with flowers, with lace about her throat. Her face is covered all over in hair, and her painted hands hold the story with which she was born:
Don Pietro, a wild man discovered in the Canary Islands, was conveyed to his most serene highness Henri the king of France, and from there came to His Excellency the Duke of Parma. From whom came I, Antonietta, and now I can be found nearby at the court of the Lady Isabella Pallavicina, the honorable Marchesa of Soragna.
The story held by the girl in the painting is almost certainly familiar to you, though you may not recognize it in the words above. The story has changed, you see, rather dramatically over the years, the centuries. When it was finally written down and bound in leather, it had already become something else, a tale thick with magic, the sort wielded by witches and fairies in their shadowed hollows; by magicians in their towers. The very air in the version you likely know hums with this magic; it eddies around the ankles of the two people who inhabit the story, the animal-husband and his beautiful bride. He is fearsome or noble, depending upon the telling—sometimes both at once, a marvel of contradictions in appearance and temperament. She is always beautiful, dutiful, good. Perhaps courageous, if you squint.
They are the only two people who inhabit the story, the only two people in the castle in the forest, the castle that does not exist as usual castles exist, on this plane, dug solid into the earth, built of stones and mortar and the good honest labor of muscles and minds. The castle in the story you probably know is insubstantial; a dream-world that comes and goes as it wishes, its stones so much milkweed fluff. The usual rules do not apply in this castle: a man lost might stumble upon it, his toes purpling with cold; might wade through snowdrifts up the great curving stairs, past gargoyles half-buried by the storm and rosebushes heavy with blossoms, bold with red, despite the season. He might find a meal and respite there, might be served wine and soup by servants made of wind. If he leaves and tries to return, he will not find the castle again, for it will be gone, entirely vanished, the forest closing around, trees pulling up their roots like tentacles, like feet, and moving upon them to crowd their trunks together, to hide the emptiness where the castle briefly rested.
But there is no history here, no weight. All is gossamer. The witch or fairy or magician transforms a man into a beast, and love transforms him back. In and out of forms, as the castle in which he imprisons himself slips in and out of time and earth-space. None of it is real.
But the girl in the painting—and her parents, who are centered in the story you know—they were real.