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The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracey Chevalier
HarperCollins
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)
The author of Girl with a Pearl Earring has given us another engaging historical novel based on a work of art, in this case a set of 15th century tapestries.
While the story is fiction, some of the characters certainly existed, and Chevalier claims it is "based on sensible suppositions". Whatever, it makes a captivating read.
To reflect his rising status at court, Jean Le Viste commissions artist Nicolas des Innocents to design a series of tapestries. An arrogant womaniser, Nicolas has already impregnated a maid in the Le Viste household. When he catches sight of Le Viste's daughter, Claude, he is determined to add her to his list of conquests. However, in order for her daughter to make a good marriage, Claude's mother is as determined to protect her virginity as Claude is to lose it, and arranges for a maidservant to accompany Claude at all times.
Once the designs are approved, Nicolas is sent with them to the weaver, Georges de la Chapelle, in Brussels. A family affair with every member involved in the work, even the blind daughter Alienor, the terms are such that the commission will make or break the business. Nicolas must stay until the cartoonist has enlarged and reversed the paintings to make patterns for the weavers to work from.
With his nightly visits to the taverns and brothels, Nicolas is not popular with the weaving family. However, he is not entirely without feeling and becomes angry when he learns that Alienor has been betrothed without her knowledge to Jacques Le
Boeuf. The latter is a coarse man whom everyone avoids because he stinks of the
sheeps' urine that he uses to make woad, the blue dye needed for the tapestries.
Nicolas returns to Paris but when his manoeuvrings to seduce Claude bring disaster, he is sent back to Brussels, where he attempts to help Alienor avoid her fate.
The story is told from several different viewpoints, and woven into it is a description of the making of the tapestries, which cleverly depict the five senses as well as the seduction of the unicorn. A fascinating tale, beautifully told. As a bonus, pictures of the tapestries, which now hang in a Paris museum, are reproduced in colour on the endpapers of the book.