Twenty-six years ago in Marseilles, Southern France, a woman was rushed to the hospital at exactly twelve, noon to bring into the world one who has affected me in more ways than he will ever know. On the 13th of August temperatures reached record-breaking highs in France, which made this overdue mother all the more uncomfortable, and inside the hospital conditions only worsened. She was taken through the maze of passages aligned with sick, mutilated bodies that were just hanging onto life by a thread, and witnessed gruesome deaths in the moments that she passed by each room. After two days of strenuous labor without her husband by her side, Countess Collette Marie de Satigny died just in time to have named her child: Jean-Pierre Adrien de Satigny, future Count of France.
Jean was raised by his prosperous father in a mansion by the sea, and attended boarding schools around the area, which still allowed him to come home during the weekends and holidays. Jean's father, Count Jacques de Satigny, was a very important lawyer who had a great deal of unofficial power in the government, although it was never really known to Jean exactly what it was that he did with the time that they could have been spending together. Jean went through life with great admiration for his father, but became a man not by the help of Jacques but rather by the lessons and advice of the servants in the house. Jean knew the foreign maids and cooks as family and his father as an untouchable movie star.
Jacques never remarried though he had sufficient opportunities to do so. Every weekend that Jean came home, his father was entertaining a different woman. This was difficult to tell however, because they were all the same: tall, blonde, and less than half his age. Jean was allowed to meet them but it was a law in the house to not disturb any rooms which doors were closed. As Jean grew older, he himself had a girlfriend for the last two years of high school. Her name was Adele, and Jean had come to love her more than anything he had known before: more than his father, the servants of the house, and more than his own life. She looked just like his mother did in the pictures that he kept in his room. Beautiful black hair, eyes that were always bright and awake, and an infrequent smile that stretched across her entire face. She was his first and only love, and ever since their very first date, he was determined to make their relationship last forever. Jean would sneak Adele into his house every weekend without his father's knowledge, until the day after graduation when he found out that Adele had been seeing his Jacques behind his back. In a fit of pure and blinding rage, he demolished the entire house, beginning with the room where his father kept the most valuable paintings and pottery that he had collected his entire life. He took as much money as he could fit into his bag, packed his clothes, and left on the first train to Paris.
Jean used his name to find a beautiful apartment and high paying job as an assistant. When he had free time he would go out to bars to meet men that knew about life and politics, clubs to meet women that knew about men, and other clubs to meet some men that knew about men as well. It was there that he met Marcel, a short, balding man with the spirit of a fifteen year old when in fact he was closer to thirty-five. Jean would go everywhere with Marcel just to listen to him talk. They spoke of love, life, wine, and fashion. Jean knew a decent amount of information on fashion because he used to love the beautiful clothes that his father's women would always wear, and would secretly read Adele's magazines when she wasn’t looking to keep up-to-date on the season's latest crazes. Marcel admired Jean's passion, and took him to a fashion show for further inspiration. It was a revolution in fur. Fur coats, sleek fur purses, and puffy fur hats seemed to flood the runway before his eyes, and he was in love again. After this show, Jean locked himself in his apartment for several months designing extravagant dresses, accessories, coats, and even some more risqué lady's garments, all featuring one animal pelt or another.
In these months, none of his friends from the clubs saw him, not even Marcel, and he only came down from his apartment for the occasional scrap of food or rendezvous at a local brothel called La Maison Pauvre. He had a habit of always taking pictures of his adventures there because he took any contact with somebody that was close to love and formed a relationship out of it. Jean would become so attached to the women that he would make up stories to go with the different pictures that he took, and that way he had created hundreds of lives for himself to chose from. One day, he was a king with his oriental concubine, the next he was a peasant with his poor wife, and the next he was back with an Adele look-alike living happily in a room for an hour and again each time he looked back at the photograph. He began existing in the real world again while continuing on with his sketches and pictures.
In a year's time he had created two portfolios; one of his business and one of his pleasure, and then decided to travel the world looking for the animals to begin his own fashion line with. It took Jean five years to find Tres Marias, the chinchillas, my father, and me. Now by this time Jean has lost almost all of his enthusiasm for creating trendy clothing because after his father's death last year, there is no reason to be caught up in any form of labor. He keeps the pastime as an excuse for travel and the inheritance as his means. He not only lives off of it, he lives lavishly. That is all that I chose to remember of that man, for the rest is simply a nightmare anyway.
Rationale
I chose to write a back-story on Jean because after the very disturbing scene where Blanca finds his room of "art", I was left wondering what possessed this man to create such a room. That was one of the more frightening parts of the story for me, and I thought that if I gave Jean a history and a less obvious motive for all of the pictures that his hobby would seem less bizarre and wrong. Also, as he is one of the smaller characters in the novel, I felt that I could have much more creative freedom with his past. My back-story is both different and in some ways similar to Allende's writing. First of all, I told it through Blanca's perspective just to give it something more personal than a distant third party narrator and because Blanca does not have a chance to speak directly to the reader, I thought it would give the piece a little something different. Also, I feel if Blanca heard this (or a more creative, heart-wrenching story about Jean), she might have formed a less harsh opinion of her ex-husband. Although I took the reader to a different country than is presented in the novel, I did try to incorporate a similar setting by using Jacques's mansion (the big house on the corner), the brothel (the Christopher Columbus), and boarding school (like the one Alba attended). Overall, this was a very interesting and fun piece to write.
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