Ugly: A Faerie Tale Retold

Chapter Five: Cendrella

A whole year passed in this fashion. Soon I was eighteen, and Claudette and Ella were sixteen, and Mother's mind turned to finding a suitable husband for Claudette. So time after time we cleaned the house to perfection for a young suitor to come. Time after time, the young men were drawn in by Claudette's beauty. And time after time, Ella's glowing face would appear, serving dinner, and they would forget all about Claudette and inquire who the maid was.

It is a mercy Mother didn't take it into her head to scar Ella's face or do anything else abominable. Instead, she locked Ella in the attic whenever company was around, and forced me to wait on the suitors, knowing I would, if anything, make Claudette seem all the more radiant.

There was one young man who came around for several months, until I began to hope we might finally be rid of Claudette very shortly. But then one day when I handed him his coat at the door, he looked around with wide eyes like a child who is lost in the market. "I don't think I shall be back," he said.

"If I may ask, Monsieur, why not?" There was no one else around, and I couldn't help inquiring.

"Claudette is very pretty, and that is all." He shook his head and buttoned up his coat. "There's nothing inside her head or her heart."

I couldn't argue, though I wanted to beg, Please, monsieur, take her away! At the same time, I wanted to commend him for his wisdom, but I knew that would be stepping out of my place, so I silently opened the door and nodded as he left.

Claudette was almost unbearable by this point. All she talked about was suitors. It was her dearest pleasure to remind Ella that Ella had no suitors and was not likely to get any. As for me, while I liked to dream of suitors, no one ever bothered to tease me about it, because they didn't think it a possibility any more than I did.

But poor Ella had been quite flattered during the season when Claudette's suitors sought after her instead, and now that it looked like she would never again have a man long for her... Well, you can imagine we spent many tearful nights sorting through that mess together, I reassuring her that the time would come when she could leave this house and find her own way in the world.

"But how could anyone ever fall in love with me when I'm dressed like this?" Ella would whine. "Every moment of every day, I'm covered with dirt and ashes, and I always have holes in my clothes."

This statement was not quite true, because I took care to patch her dresses with pieces of the curtains we found in the attic. Nonetheless, she very often had holes in her clothes, because she had a habit of letting her mind wander while she did chores, which frequently resulted in snagged skirts and charred hemlines.

"Don't worry, Ella. The best kind of man doesn't care whether or not you're dressed like a princess. He'll know to look at your spirit instead of your clothes." I knew the very best kind of man didn't care what your face looked like, either, but with Father and Monsieur Beauchȇne gone from the world, I didn't suppose there were any of that sort left.

Ella was terribly self-conscious about her clothes, and often left me flustered as I tried to please her. I washed her dresses for her, but could never get all the stains out. And of course the dresses were "out-of-fashion." I didn't see why that mattered a whit, as we almost never went anywhere, but Ella cared.

And Claudette knew. One morning she took it in her head to come up with a nickname for each of us. She called Ella Cendrella, or as you know her, Cinderella. And me, she simply called Laide—ugly. Mother quickly adopted these nicknames, and I soon found myself holding a sobbing Ella and explaining that "Cendrella" wasn't such an awful name after all. It was at the very least better than Ugly.