My version of the Ankou is based on research and translation undertaken by my husband, Greg Mosse, from the books inherited from my uncle in April 2013. I chose to set the story in the period between World War I and World War II, where the way of life still followed the steady tread of the century before and the century before that, and aimed to capture a timelessness in the retelling of the old folk tale.
As in many ghostly stories, the narrator is an outsider who finds himself drawn into a strange, hidden community. Today, this part of Brittany is famous for its surfing and seafood. But the ancient legend – the one that has endured ‘ever since the world began’ – insists that the Baie de Trépassés, the Bay of the Departed, has always been a portal into death.
LA FILLE DE MÉLISANDE
Allemonde, a legendary land
The Past
Author’s Note
This story was written in May 2008 for a 75th-anniversary celebration for Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex, Midsummer Nights. Each author in the collection was invited to choose one – significant – opera as their inspiration and I chose Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy. Debussy is an off-stage character in the second of my Languedoc Trilogy, Sepulchre, which is partly set during the 1890s, so I had been listening to a great deal of French impressionist music and reading symbolist poetry, plays and novels to all the better immerse myself in the world of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Pelléas et Mélisande, the only opera Debussy wrote, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 1902. Adapted from Maeterlinck’s symbolist play of the same name, it had mixed reviews at the time, though quickly became seen as marking a turning point in the development of opera from its nineteenth-century traditions to a musical form lighter on its feet.
For readers not familiar with Maeterlinck’s tragic tale or Debussy’s interpretation, here are the bare bones of the story. A man quick to anger, violent and jealous, Prince Golaud comes across a young woman, Mélisande, wandering lost in a forest. Timid, fearful, traumatised, she does not know where she has come from – though she remembers a sea journey – and has no idea why she finds herself in this strange, dark kingdom. Golaud marries her and takes her home to the court of his grandfather, the old blind King Arkel, where Golaud’s mother Geneviève and his young son from an earlier marriage, Yniold, live. Golaud’s half-brother, Pelléas, is also resident at the castle, though he is seeking permission from Arkel to leave.
This being opera, Pelléas and Mélisande fall in love. She is expecting Golaud’s child, but she lives in fear of his violent temper and his jealousy – in Act I, when she loses her gold wedding ring, Golaud forces her to go to find it, despite her terror of the dark – so she looks, in part, to Pelléas for protection. Suspicious, vengeful, Golaud becomes obsessed with finding out the ‘truth’ – ‘la verité’ – of the relationship between his half-brother and his wife, and he forces his son, Yniold, to spy on the pair. When Golaud sees them taking their leave of one another by the fountain in the grounds – they understand their love affair cannot be – he stabs Pelléas and pursues the grieving Mélisande. The closing scene of Act V sees Mélisande going into labour prematurely and dying as her daughter is born, without ever holding her. Even then, rather than seeking forgiveness or attempting to atone for his actions, Golaud still demands ‘the truth’. The whispering final lines hint that the same fatalistic pattern of misery and twisted love is destined to continue down the generations.
From there, I imagined the childhood of this unwanted, unmothered child, Mélisande’s daughter – I gave her the name Miette, ‘little one’ – and what might it have been like to grow up in the sombre halls of the castle, in the shadow of murder. How Miette might have felt hearing rumours about her mother’s death and her uncle’s murder, her suspicions of what might have happened to Yniold’s mother, Golaud’s first wife. Seeing her father not brought to account for his deeds, because of his high birth, yet nonetheless a man haunted by the past and making an annual pilgrimage to the scene of his crime. With such a background, it seemed natural that Miette, purposeful and determined, would grow up to want to avenge her mother.
In the writing, I wanted to mirror the dreamy, otherworld quality of Debussy’s score, the indeterminate setting, the blurring of past and present and future, the sense that nothing was certain, nothing was quite as it seemed. Such is the nature of mythologies and legend, both symbolic and real, not fixed in place or time, but rooted instead in impression, in emotion, in atmosphere. My story is set, however, on the occasion of Miette’s eighteenth birthday . . .