The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

Paris and Brussels, circa 1500, stir and stretch themselves before our eyes. On the academic front, here is the old Chevalier, exact and guarded, accurate and self-contained. In The Lady and the Unicorn, which will perhaps eclipse Pearl Earring, Chevalier has also fixed upon a great work of art - the six tapestries now housed in the Musée de Cluny, in which the maiden progressively seduces the unicorn with the six senses: hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, and love. Girl with a Pearl Earring was coolly and precisely researched, and discreetly dripping with unstated sex. Chevalier's stroke of genius was to weave together a flair for academic research (she was for many years a reference book editor) with a deeply erotic sensuality. In her most famous novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier focused on Vermeer's immortal portrait, plucking from it a story of creation rich in historically accurate and psychological convincing detail. Thus when the set of tapestries is unrolled there shimmers beneath its brilliant surface another shadowy net of threads, weaving together the loves and longings of all involved. Cartoonists, weavers, dyers, financiers, even those who trim the hem, all add a dash of their own desires to the mix.

By accident or design, Nicholas's sexual fantasies leak into his designs - here is le Viste's wild daughter, Claude, and here Aliénor, the sweet blind daughter of the Brussels weaver there is the weaver's ambitious wife, Christine, and there - most cheekily - the saintly Geneviève herself.īut it is not just Nicholas's reckless dreams that stitch themselves among the warp and weft.

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier