The Governess

It seemed to the hungry children that they had just been told to start eating their pottage when a very stern voice said, "le stop! You must be pigs. You eat slowly. I promise you will get another meal if 

you learn to eat faster and your lessons just as fast.  Now hurry hurry. You must not be late. You have much to learn about being a royal servant. Now tout suite!" (hurry in French) "

"You must address me as Mademoiselle de le Grace. From this moment you will answer to no one but me unless of course, it is the Queen herself, but that will probably never happen. You will report to the lesson room as soon as you take whatever belongings that you have to your appointed pallet."

Grandma Lu stopped again and grinned at the folks that were listening. "This is really hard to understand but peas were just new to France about the time that little Catherine and Regan arrived. The peasants in the farmland surrounding the castle could now grow peas and some other vegetables. The women would put them in a pot in the morning and it would cook all day while they were in the fields with the menfolk. The peas made the soup thick. That's where the word pottage came from. If some of you older folks ever jumped rope you may remember a little song we sang while we jumped. Remember 'peas porridge hot,  peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old'? Well, it actually was pottage, not porridge. And so much like other kinds of food the longer it cooks the better it tastes."

Grandma Lu chuckled again and said, "Well, I had better get on with my story. I get to rambling on sometimes. So any way, Regan whispered to little Catherine. "What does she mean 'stop eating. We just started. We are not eating like pigs. Why do we have to hurry and what lessons. What's going on?"

Little Catherine had a feeling she knew exactly what was happening. The Queen would travel all over Europe and find all kinds of treasures but also all kinds of people. She wanted the smartest and the best as well as the most beautiful to be her servants. "I think to earn our food and our beds we have to wait on the Queen. It will be better than being cold and hungry, don't you think? Besides, we have nowhere else to go. We no longer have nice warm homes and loving parents. We had best just accept our lot in life and do as we are told."
Regan whispered back, "Well, I'm sure glad I sneaked an apple in my pocket. That way I can have a snack later." One little girl at the table heard Regan and grinned at her. Regan may have company wanting to share her apple at bedtime.
The little Catherine motioned for the others to follow their lead and this they did very unwillingly because they all were very hungry and tired.

Unknown to Catherine and Regan the Queen's husband, King Francis ll had received a very unusual gift from a friend. A hairy beast of a child that would in hundreds of years be even more famous than little Catherine.
The beast child had arrived like an animal in a cage. The King, being a kind man, took him out of the cage and treated him as a son. He clothed him as he would a noble and also educated him to the extent that he could speak and write three languages. Sadly, the King died in a sporting event and left the beast as he was called, to his wife, the Queen.

Catherine, a daughter of a royal court servant, would grow into a beautiful young woman. The Queen wanted a family of hairy beasts so she chose Catherine, a beautiful young woman to marry the now grown man so that she could see a complete family of hairy beasts and have them for pets. She would take their babies away and give them as gifts to other royal friends.

       
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Catherine and her husband Petrus were married for more than forty years. They had seven children three of whom were normal people without an abundance of hair. They toured Europe and lived in Italy for the majority of their lives. They were not buried together because Petrus was not considered a human so he had no record of birth or death. Catherine however, had her birth and death recorded. There was no mention of her parents and her many siblings. I have a feeling that once she left to live in the castle they never saw her again. The story of the homeless girls is pure fiction, however, many of the facts are true. I found them on the internet and was absolutely fascinated.
There were two fairy tales that emerged from their real story that appeared in books. Years and years later a movie called Beauty and the Beast became popular in a Disney film called just that. Beauty in the Disney film also wore the yellow dress as the Catherine in the painting that the Italian Duke had painted that I have in this story.