Beatrice Baudelaire (younger)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article deals with the younger Beatrice. If you are looking for the older Beatrice, please see Mr. and Mrs. Baudelaire.

A Series of Unfortunate Events character
Beatrice
Gender Female
Age Unknown
Film actor None
First appearance The End
V.F.D. alliance Presumably the volunteer side of the schism

Beatrice Baudelaire is the name of two different fictional characters in the children's book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. One of these characters is the younger Beatrice.

The End reveals that the second Beatrice, the younger Beatrice, is the daughter of Kit Snicket, who dies after giving birth, making Lemony Snicket's niece an orphan. Baby Beatrice is adopted by the Baudelaire orphans, hence the use of the surname Baudelaire rather than Snicket or Denouement's last name. At age one, "she looks very much like her mother," according to the final chapter of The End.

The last word of the last volume, The End, is "Beatrice," uttered by baby Beatrice herself.

In the companion book, The Beatrice Letters, the second Beatrice Baudelaire is now a 10-year-old girl in search of her uncle, Lemony Snicket, and of the Baudelaire orphans, who have apparently gone missing. The young girl writes Lemony Snicket a series of letters asking him to answer her questions about the Baudelaire orphans. "I must have at least twelve," she writes. (And there are twelve books before "The End".)

Beatrice writes one letter on a typewriter in her uncle's empty "small, dusty office, on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings in the city." The office overlooks an empty lot where green sprouts are emerging from the remnants of a burned building. A map on the wall contains pinned up notes marking locations where Lemony Snicket might be found. Another of Beatrice's letters is written from a cave where Lemony Snicket has been hiding. She remarks that it is "a miserable place -- drafty, bat-infested, and decorated with hideous wallpaper."

Another letter is written sometime later in the year, while the second Beatrice is sitting in her business letter writing class in the secretarial school that isn't really a secretarial school. The implication is that Beatrice has found her way to the VFD training school that her mother and uncle also once attended. However, Lemony Snicket still does not want to see his niece and is actively running away from her.

In her fourth letter, Beatrice mentions that she has shadowed Lemony Snicket from the library, to the park, as he strolled along the edge of a nearby pond, and made a mad dash for the bus. By the time she caught a rickshaw, followed him back to his dreary office building and "managed to pick the lock on the front door," he had already made his way up several flights and she could hear him wheezing from the climb. She knocks on his office door but he refuses to answer her.

A fifth letter is written an undetermined amount of time later, after the second Beatrice has set up her own office on the fourteenth floor of the Rhetorical Building, Lemony Snicket's dreary office building. From this office she writes yet another letter to her elusive uncle. She drops it into a small metal tube, drills a hole through the floor, and drops the metal tube through the hole onto Lemony Snicket's desk in the office below. She begs him again to meet her and answer her questions and vows not to rest until she has found the Baudelaire orphans. "I owe my life to them," she writes.

The sixth letter is a notecard inscribed "Beatrice Baudelaire, Baticeer Extraordinaire." But Beatrice has apologized about "embarrassing him in front of his friends". This could mean that Beatrice the first wrote the letter. She sends the card in the care of a waiter to Lemony Snicket as he is drinking a root beer float. If he doesn't want to meet her, she writes, he needs only to rip up the card and she'll go away and never approach him again. The notecard in the book is intact, which implies that Lemony Snicket has finally met with his niece.

Lemony Snicket explains that "Because I loved her so much ... it never occurred to me that there could be more than one Beatrice Baudelaire." He decides to join his niece's letters together with those written by and about the first Beatrice, in hope of making a coherent whole of the story. "Strange as it may seem," he writes to his editor in the final letter, "I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily."


In other languages