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1648: The women behind the beloved fairytale Rapunzel
Bitter Greens
What you need to know before your trail
Charlotte-Rose de la Force, exiled from the court of the Sun King Louis XIV, has always been a great teller of tales.
Selena Leonelli, once the exquisite muse of the great Venetian artist Titian, is terrified by the passing of time.
Margherita, sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens, is trapped in a doorless tower and burdened by tangles of her red-gold hair. She must find a way to escape.
Bitter Greens is a dark, beautifully written retelling of Rapunzel, interwoven with the story of one of the tale’s first tellers.
Travel Guide
France
The author says:
Chateau de Cazeneuve in Gascony
Charlotte-Rose was born at the Chateau de Cazeneuve in Gascony, and I was lucky enough to be given a private tour by its owner, the Comte de Sabran-Pontevès, who is descended from her elder sister. Originally a medieval castle owned by the kings of Navarre, built on a crag of stone above the wild Ciron River, the chateau has two tall stone towers with only two small windows, which look very much how I’ve always imagined Rapunzel’s tower.
Paris
We also went to the Louvre and to Versailles, where Charlotte-Rose lived at the Sun King’s opulent and corrupt court for most of her adult life.
One of the saddest places on our schedule was the Église Saint-Sulpice, the grand and gloomy church in Paris where Charlotte-Rose finally married her lover, Charles de Briou, a few weeks after he reached his majority at the age of twenty-five.
Guyenne
Charlotte was born here
Guyenne or Guienne was an old French province which corresponded roughly to the Roman province of Aquitania Secunda and the Catholic archdiocese of Bordeaux.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Bitter Greens
Destination/location: France, Paris Author/guide: Kate Forsyth Departure Time: 1654
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