They Had The Most Popular Love Story Of All Time

Long long ago about three or four hundred years ago there was a man whose name was Petrus Gonsalvus. He was born with a disease that was and still is very rare. It is called Ambras Syndrome. Even now in the world there has only been about fifty people born with this disease. What the disease does is cover one's body with an unusual amount of hair. The hair covers their whole body. Some not very nice people call it werewolf syndrome. I have often talked in my stories about self esteem and bullies. Well Petrus was a real life person, but he was treated worse than an animal. He was bullied and shamed his entire life.
 He was born in 1537 on the largest Canary Island off the coast of West Africa if  I'm not mistaken.

He was called terrible names. He was called wild man and freak. He was finally captured and put in a cage. He was just a boy. They ground up raw meat and threw it in his cage as they would any wild animal. Somehow he was shipped to France to a new king as a gift to be presented to him at his coronation ceremony. The new king's name was King Henry ll.

Oddly enough, the new king didn't think of  Petrus as a freak. He took him out of his cage and dressed him in nice clothes. As you see in the first picture the ruffle around his neck was worn by the noble people or people of royalty. He was given cooked food and an education that only noble folks received. It is incomprehensible to me, but he was educated so well, that he could speak and write fluently in three different languages.

Sadly to say not very many years later the king was killed in a jousting competition. Jousting was a very common sport in those days. The goal was to knock a competitor from his horse.  That is a story in itself. You will see a picture as a likeness from those days.

When the king was killed his widow (wife) was the owner of Petrus. She decided it would be really fun to see what would happen if the hairy ugly man married a beautiful woman. She wanted a lot of little hairy babies to give to her friends as pets. She did find a beautiful woman whose name was Catherine. Catherine and Petrus did not meet each other until the day of their wedding.

Catherine and Petrus had seven children. Four of their children had an abnormal amount of hair like their father. The queen was so very happy.  She took their babies away from them and sent them as pets to her friends.  It is unclear to me just exactly what happened to the queen, but at some point in time Petrus and his family worked for a Duke who had paintings done of them by a Flemish artist.  The paintings were found in an album he kept labeled as insects and animals. The Duke did not bother having their normal children painted only the "little beasts" as the queen had called them.

Petrus and Catherine were married for forty years. It was said to be the greatest love story in all of literature and now of course, in cinema. Their story was originally written in a fairy tale by a French author Gabrielle Barbot de Villeneuve. He had a pointed way of telling the story of the women in those days having no say in who they married. They could not refuse a marriage at all.
Sixteen years later a Madame de Beaumont revised the fairy tale and posted it in a magazine for young ladies. I would so much love to have read that magazine. I am sure it had something to do with women at some point saying "no."
I am told that this revised fairy tale reads a bit like Cinderella. I ordered it and am reading it now. It is a bit difficult to read because of the old English and words that I am not familiar with.

They toured all of Europe and lived in Italy where I think they actually made their home. There is no record of Petrus' death because he was considered not human, but they think he died in 1618. Catherine, of course, was beautiful, and her death was recorded in 1623.

Marlee's "dream story" will be more of a take on the movie version combined with the real life version of Petrus and Catherine. This combination and a little of my imagination plus Marlee's should be a fun series. Hopefully she will find what she has been looking for all this time. How to be a real princess.