Beatrice Baudelaire
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| Beatrice Baudelaire | |
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| First appearance | The Beatrice Letters, The End |
| Created by | Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) |
| Information | |
| Aliases | None |
| Gender | Female |
| Age | Ten (in The Beatrice Letters; born in The End) |
| Family | Violet, Klaus, and Sunny |
| Relatives | Kit Snicket (mother; deceased) Dewey Denouement (father; deceased) Violet Baudelaire (guardian) Klaus Baudelaire (guardian) Sunny Baudelaire (guardian) |
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 younger than the other.
The End reveals that the second, younger Beatrice, is the daughter of Kit Snicket, who dies after giving birth, and either Dewey Denouement, who died in The Penultimate Peril, or Count Olaf, who died in The End, making Lemony Snicket's niece yet another orphan. Baby Beatrice is adopted by the Baudelaire orphans, hence the use of the surname Baudelaire. At age one, "she looks very much like her mother," according to the final chapter of The End.
The younger Beatrice was named as per tradition, which was to name the baby after a deceased friend. This was why Violet Baudelaire was almost named Lemony- after her mother's thought-to-be deceased ex-fiancee. The final connection in hearing the baby uttern her own name links together the clues that Lemony Snicket was always in love with the Baudelaire orphans' mother.
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, in referencing the older Beatrice, "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."
The older Beatrice was the mother of the Baudelaire orphans who had once been engaged to Lemony Snicket, but, believing him to be dead after fault newspaper articles, moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire. Lemony Snicket was always in love with her, and therefore made it his life's mission to record the history of her three orphaned children.
[edit] Beatrice?
On page 73 of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography chapter five on the chapter's opening page there is a picture of a woman in a dress holding a fan. On the bottom of the picture the word "Baudelaire" is seen, but the whole name is cut off at the bottom of the page.
[edit] Cultural allusions
Beatrice may be named after the guide through Heaven in Dante's Divine Comedy, who was herself named after a woman who was the object of Dante's unrequited love.
Alternatively, she may be named after the character of the same name in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
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