fishermen of Marseille belong to the family of fishermen all over the world. They share
alike in the storms and the calm days, the sudden disasters and the bountiful harvests.
So it was that Jacques Page’s neighbors rejoiced at his good fortune in having such an
incredible daughter. They too recognized the miracle of how, out of the dung of the dirty,
ribald city, a true Princess had been spawned.
Noelle’s parents could not get over the wonder of their daughter’s exquisite beauty.
Noelle’s mother was a heavyset, coarse-featured peasant woman with sagging breasts and
thick thighs and hips. Noelle’s father was squat, with broad shoulders and the small
suspicious eyes of a Breton. His hair was the color of the wet sand along the beaches of
Normandy. In the beginning it had seemed to him that nature had made a mistake, that this
exquisite blond fairy creature could not really belong to him and his wife, and that as
Noelle grew older she would turn into an ordinary, plain-looking girl like all the other
daughters of his friends. But the miracle continued to grow and flourish, and Noelle
became more beautiful each day.
Noelle’s mother was less surprised than her husband by the appearance of a golden-
haired beauty in the family. Nine months before Noelle had been born, Noelle’s mother
had met a strapping Norwegian sailor just off a freighter. He was a giant Viking god with
blond hair and a warm, seductive grin. While Jacques was at work, the sailor had spent a
busy quarter of an hour in her bed in their tiny apartment.
Noelle’s mother had been filled with fear when she saw how blond and beautiful her
baby was. She walked around in dread, waiting for the moment that her husband would
point an accusing finger at her and demand to know the identity of the real father. But,
incredibly, some ego-hunger in him made him accept the child as his own.
“She must be a throwback to some Scandinavian blood in my family,” he would
boast to his friends, “but you can see that she has my features.”
His wife would listen, nodding agreement, and think what fools men were.
Noelle loved being with her father. She adored his clumsy playfulness and the
strange, interesting smells that clung to him, and at the same time she was terrified by the
fierceness of him. She would watch wide-eyed as he yelled at her mother and slapped her
hard across the face, his neck corded with anger. Her mother would scream out in pain, but
there was something beyond pain in her cries, something animal and sexual and Noelle
would feel pangs of jealousy and wish she were in her mother’s place.
But her father was always gentle with Noelle. He liked to take her down to the docks
and show her off to the rough, crude men with whom he worked. She was known up and
down the docks as The Princess and she was proud of this, as much for her father’s sake as
for her own.
She wanted to please her father, and because he loved to eat, Noelle began cooking
for him, preparing his favorite dishes, gradually displacing her mother in the kitchen.
At seventeen the promise of Noelle’s early beauty had been more than fulfilled. She
had matured into an exquisite woman. She had fine, delicate features, eyes a vivid violet