Beatrice (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

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A Series of Unfortunate Events character
Beatrice
Gender	female
Hair color	Unknown
Age	Unknown
Film actor	None
1st appearance	Mentioned in The Bad Beginning
V.F.D. alliance	Presumably the volunteer side of the schism

Beatrice is the name of a mysterious character in the children's book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. Beatrice does not appear in the main series, though she is often mentioned by the narrator as a lost love and, according to Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, is the reason Snicket started writing the Baudelaires' story. A 2006 spin-off book, The Beatrice Letters, sheds light on her story.

Lemony Snicket dedicates each book in the series to a dead love of his named Beatrice. Within the books, he gradually adds details about their relationship and the reason why it ended. She is also mentioned occasionally by characters in the books, first by Esmé Squalor in The Ersatz Elevator. Her story became a topic of much speculation among fans.

[edit] Old Beatrice

In The Beatrice Letters, which was published after The Penultimate Peril, it is revealed that Beatrice's name is Beatrice Baudelaire, making her a relative of the Baudelaire orphans. It later becomes clear that this Beatrice is the Baudelaire orphans' mother, and that there is another Beatrice Baudelaire, Kit Snicket's child, who is born in The End and raised by the orphans. The letters in The Beatrice Letters reveal that this Beatrice is searching for the Baudelaire siblings years after the events of the thirteenth book.

Although Lemony Snicket never tells Beatrice's story in full, readers can reconstruct parts of it from clues left scattered through all the books. Lemony Snicket was in love with the first Beatrice Baudelaire, and was once engaged to be married to her, but for unknown reasons she instead married Bertrand Baudelaire, the Baudelaires' father. Both Baudelaire parents died in the fire prior to The Bad Beginning, leaving their three children orphaned. Beatrice was at one time pursued by Count Olaf, and Lemony Snicket arrived disguised as a bullfighter at a masquerade ball, where she was disguised as a dragonfly, to deliver information to her, but was too late. Snicket has a triptych of paintings in his house entitled "What happened to Beatrice," which includes a typewriter, a fire, and a beautiful woman. Elsewhere Snicket mentions Beatrice being dragged to an eagles' nest. These incidents are mentioned in the books, but it is uncertain whether any of these were the causes of her death.

Beatrice, the Baudelaire orphans' mother, is thought to have stolen Esmé Squalor's sugar bowl, which is an important artifact in the series. In The Ersatz Elevator, Esmé declares to the Baudelaires that she wanted to "steal from [them] the way Beatrice stole from me." Lemony Snicket expresses a wish to have been able to stop Beatrice from attending a tea party where she met Esmé for the first time. In The Penultimate Peril, Esmé exclaims "Beatrice stole the sugar bowl from me!" However, in The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket states that he, and not Beatrice, stole the sugar bowl.

Even prior to the release of the thirteenth book, there was speculation that Beatrice was the Baudelaires' mother, based on the fact that a list of anagrams in The Hostile Hospital includes an anagram of "Beatrice Baudelaire". However, the same list includes an anagram of "Red Herring" (a similar passage, juxtaposing evidence that Beatrice is Mrs. Baudelaire and the "Red Herring" anagram appears in The Unauthorized Autobiography. However, the Red herring may also be the name "Monty Kensickle', yet another anagram for Lemony Snicket). The Baudelaires have heard her name mentioned twice by Esmé Squalor, but they have not had opportunity to discuss it, so it was unknown if the name meant anything to them. Despite the continued popularity of this theory, a passage in The Grim Grotto, mentions "the Baudelaire parents" and "the woman Lemony Snicket loved" as separate entities. Nevertheless, it is confirmed in "The End" that the Baudelaires' mother was named Beatrice. A sentence referring to Kit Snicket's daughter, Beatrice, on page 321 states "The girl, named after the Baudelaires' mother, howled and howled."

In the AuthorTracker letter from Friday the 13th January 2006 it mentions, "There is much to fear in the coming months...a series of communications from someone named Beatrice." This has been confirmed as an accompanying book, The Beatrice Letters, which sheds light on events which occur in the past and future of the series and reveals many things about Beatrice, mainly that there are two people with the name Beatrice Baudelaire. However, it does not explain how the Beatrices are related to each other or to the Baudelaire orphans. The Beatrice Letters does, however, reveal that both Beatrices are baticeers (a person who trains bats). Baticeer is an anagram for Beatrice, much as "My Silence Knot" was an anagram for Lemony Snicket and is often used in the letters Beatrice sends to Lemony in possible code. Further evidence from The Beatrice Letters is a business card for the second Beatrice entitled "Beatrice Baudelaire-Baticeer Extraordinaire."

[edit] Young Beatrice

The End reveals that the second 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 "embarassing 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."

[edit] Trivia

• She is thought by many to be named for Beatrice Portinari, the beloved of the poet Dante, who spurned him and then died young. He devoted his Divine Comedy to her, and in it she figures as his muse and personal saviour. She arranges for his journey through the afterlife and guides him through heaven.

• Some also think that she may be a reference to Beatrice, of the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, "Rappaccini's Daughter" which is based off of the Divine Comedy.