 Petrus Gonsalvus, or Pedro Gonzalez, lived at the court of the French king Henri II. Gonsalvus had a condition which today would be diagnosed as hypertrichosis, causing excessive hair growth; his face was almost completely covered in hair. People who met him would have thought immediately of the wild men of medieval legend. Around age ten, he was brought to court as a kind of curiosity and pet, much like other people with physical differences at the time. This is where he grew up, was educated, and eventually married a woman named Catherine. Most of their children shared Gonsalvus’s diagnosis; so did some of their grandchildren. Their medical studies and portraits still survive today. But was there more than a scientific interest to Gonsalvus's story? Were he and his wife the original inspiration for "Beauty and the Beast?"
I have never seen Gonsalvus mentioned in any analysis of the fairy tale, which is well-known to be inspired by an ancient storytelling tradition. That's not a great sign. But the theory has been shared around a fair amount and has some traction, so it deserves a look. The most well-known English work about Gonsalvus is probably a Smithsonian Channel documentary titled "The Real Beauty and the Beast”, directed by Julian Pölsler (2014). As seen by the title, it strongly promoted the fairy tale connection. It is no longer available on any streaming services, but based on the various reviews and summaries I’ve found, it runs something like this. Pedro is brought to Henri II’s court as a feral child: kept in a cage, fed raw meat, and unable to say anything but his name. Henri II bestows an education on him, translating his name into Latin as Petrus. Petrus thrives in his new life, but Henri II’s wife, the villainous Catherine de' Medici, designs a sadistic experiment to see whether Petrus’s children will also be hairy. She marries him to one of her servant girls, also named Catherine. The bride knows nothing about her groom, and faints when she sees him for the first time at the altar. Their union ends up being a happy one as she discovers Petrus is a kind and gentle man. Still, their happiness is marred, as their children who inherit Petrus’s condition are taken away and gifted to various nobles, and even though Petrus and Catherine ultimately settle down to a quiet life in Italy, the lack of burial records is interpreted to mean that Petrus is still seen as a beast and denied the Christian rites of burial. It’s a tragic Beauty and the Beast retelling complete with the moral of looking beyond appearances and plenty of memorable dramatic details (like Catherine "fainting at the altar.") This documentary seems to have been heavily fictionalized, and does not seem like a reliable source. (Incidentally, Beauty faints at the first sight of the Beast in the 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, although not in the fairy tale. So I wonder if the filmmakers actually drew from Beauty and the Beast stories to craft their depiction of Petrus and Catherine. As we'll see in a minute, there's no historical basis for details like Catherine fainting.) The Gonzalez family in historical record We can only get at the Gonzalez family’s story by piecing together brief and scattered sources. It’s hard to pin down dates, and English studies are especially scarce. Gonsalvus was known in life as "le Sauvage du Roi" (“the King’s Savage”) or, more personally, “Don Pedro.” His name appears under many different translations; it seems like he preferred Pedro, so that's what I'm going with. He was born in Tenerife in 1537, spoke Spanish, and was probably Guanche (the indigenous people of Tenerife, enslaved by the Spaniards during conquest). It may be that he was brought straight from Tenerife by slave traders. On the other hand, Alberto Quartapelle found another account from about the same time of a hirsute ten-year-old shown off throughout Spain by his father; given the rarity of the condition, it’s possible that this was Pedro, and that his own father showed him off and eventually gave or sold him to the French king. What is generally agreed on is that Henry II wanted to prove that a “savage” could be transformed into a gentleman. He arranged for Pedro to live like other noble children of court and receive a royal education. He chose important officials as Pedro’s tutors and caretakers. As he grew older, Pedro served at the king’s table, a small but still prestigious task with a salary and personal access to the monarch. After Henri II's death in 1559, his widow the regent Catherine de'Medici became Pedro’s main patron. She probably did either arrange his marriage or, at the very least, promise financial support (she arranged marriages for her court dwarfs). In Paris, in 1570, Pedro married Catherine Raffelin (spelled variously as Raphelin, Rafflin, Rophelin), the daughter of Anselme Raffelin (a textile merchant) and Catherine Pecan. As part of her dowry, Catherine Raffelin brought half of an apartment on Rue Saint-Victoir, where the couple moved. We don’t know what they may have thought of each other at first or what their first meeting was like. However, Pedro’s extensive education and wealthy lifestyle would presumably have been appealing to a potential wife. Portraits of Pedro and Catherine are reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast. And not only was Catherine a merchant’s daughter just like the Beauty of the fairy tale, but it seems she was considered a lovely woman. A portrait by Joris Hoefnagel (included at the top of this post), which shows Catherine resting a hand on her husband's shoulder, was accompanied by a segment written from Pedro’s point of view (possibly even by Pedro himself?) describing Catherine as “a wife of outstanding beauty” (Wiesner 153). Merry Wiesner lists their seven children as Maddalena, Paulo, Enrico, Francesca, Antonietta (“Tognina”), Orazio, and Ercole. All three girls plus Enrico and Orazio had hypertrichosis. Ercole apparently died in infancy, with records unclear whether he was hirsute. With baptismal records, Quartapelle places their births a few years earlier than Wiesner’s estimates and gives the initial four (in French) as Francoise, Perre (Pierre?), Henri, and Charlotte. Some children were recorded more than others, which means some may have died young; alternately, the children who didn’t inherit hypertrichosis were not recorded as much. During his years in Paris, Don Pedro studied at the University of Poitiers and became a professor of canon law. He was also in frequent contact with the king, being tasked with delivering his books. Important noblemen close to the royal family served as godfathers to the Gonzalez children. However, around the 1580s or 1590s, something happened. The family began traveling and showing up in the records of various European courts. This was also the period when many of the portraits and medical studies were done. We don't know exactly when they left, but the queen's will provided for her court dwarfs and not the Gonzalezes, which might indicate that they already had a new patron by then. It's not clear exactly why this happened, but in 1589 there were a couple of significant events: the death of Catherine de'Medici and the assassination of her son Henri III (Ghadessi p. 109-110). France was full of civil and religious unrest, Henri III's death sent people into a frenzy of joy, and it was probably not the best time to be an easily-recognizable favorite of the royal family. If the Gonzalezes hadn't already left, that would have been the time to get out. They ultimately entered the patronage of Duke Alessandro Farnese and settled at his court in Parma, Italy. The children with hypertrichosis lived similarly to their father, sent as gifts to the courts of Farnese relatives and friends. Despite this disturbing note, it does seem that the family kept in contact. Most or all of them eventually moved to the small village of Capodimonte. Their sons found wives there, and Orazio occasionally commuted from there to Rome, where he held a position in the Farnese court (Wiesner, 220). Pedro is thought to have died in Capodimonte around 1618, Catherine a few years later. There’s debate over how much agency the family members had, but Roberto Zapperi argues that their son Enrico used his position wisely and pulled strings with the Farneses to make this quiet retirement possible (Stockinger, 2004). So, a couple of notes on the information floating around from the Smithsonian documentary. First, it apparently painted Catherine de’Medici as a cruel woman who treated the Gonzalez family like a science experiment. In a completely opposite take, scholar Touba Ghadessi suggests a protectiveness, honor, and perhaps even fondness in her patronage of the family. I wonder if the truth is some mixture of the two; it wasn't necessarily black and white, and there could have been both fondness and rampant exploitation. Oddly enough, Catherine de' Medici had a little bit in common with the Gonzalezes. She, too, was foreign, and her enemies described her as monstrous. And the Gonzalezes ultimately settled in her homeland of Italy. As for the burial thing: the fact that we don't have burial records for Pedro doesn't really mean anything. The records are so spotty that it's not even clear what all of his kids' names were. Furthermore, we have baptismal and burial records for some of his children who shared his condition. I don't believe he was "denied a Christian burial" or anything like that. The inherent contradiction is seen in the fact that Pedro was married. However... it’s true that in spite of gaining some privileges - pursuing his studies, finding a wife, settling down in a quiet home - Pedro was never fully free. He was taken from his childhood home and possibly even shown off around Spain by his own father. He and his children lived their lives being othered and commodified by those around them, viewed as curiosities and entertainment. And societal attitudes towards him and his family show in the family portraits, where Gonsalvus and his children wear courtly dress but are juxtaposed against caves and wild scenes befitting animals. The fairy tale of "Beauty and the Beast" The story that we know today as “Beauty and the Beast” is not a folktale, but a literary fairy tale, originating with Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast (1740). This was a fantasy novella following conventions of the time, full of vivid descriptions and convoluted subplots. It took clear inspiration from folktales of beastly bridegrooms. The earliest written examples of this tradition are “Cupid and Psyche” (Rome, 2nd century AD) and “The Enchanted Brahman's Son” (India, ~3rd-5th centuries AD). People in Pedro and Catherine's time might have read Straparola's "The Pig King" from the 1550s. Closer to home for Barbot, there was D'Aulnoy's "The Ram" (1697) and Bignon's "Princess Zeineb and the Leopard" (1712-1714). Because "Beauty and the Beast" is literary, created by a single author, it’s far more likely to contain specific references or traceable inspirations than an oral folktale would be. So, was Pedro Gonzalez one of Barbot's influences? Well… it's not clear if Barbot would have known who Gonzalez was. The family's personal history has only regained attention since the 20th century, with researchers like Italian historian Roberto Zapperi doing a lot of the work to piece together the details. The family’s legacy seems more associated with Austria than with France. Their portraits in Ambras Castle in modern-day Austria remained famous, even leading to the name "Ambras Syndrome" for a type of hypertrichosis. But an inventory of the Ambras Castle collection listed Gonzalez as “der rauch man zu Munichen”, or “the hirsute man from Munich,” because that’s where the portraits were painted (Hertel, 4). Meanwhile, in France: in 1569, author Marin Liberge could make reference to “the King’s Savage” expecting that his audience would know who he meant (Amples discours de ce qui c'est faict et passe au siege de Poictiers). But by the late 19th century, French researchers were absolutely baffled by this cryptic description, not connecting it to the portraits at all. One researcher in 1895 was on the right track with the idea that Don Pedro was some type of entertainer, but also noted that his memory simply isn’t well preserved in historical records, and questioned how well-known he actually was (Babinet 143-145). When Barbot was writing in 1740, a hundred and fifty years after Gonzalez's heyday in Paris, how well was he remembered? Did Barbot ever hear of the Ambras Castle collection? Even if she did, how much would she learn of Catherine - who was only in the portraits as Gonzalez's anonymous wife? In fact, Barbot’s novel features several vivid descriptions of the Beast, and he doesn't look anything like Pedro Gonzalez. He is covered in scales, with an elephant-like trunk. This Beast seems more influenced by stories of snake husbands - like the two oldest recorded versions of beastly bridegroom tales. Psyche fears that her husband is a serpent or dragon (although Cupid never actually appears this way in the story), and the Enchanted Brahman’s Son is a snake. With the lack of parallels and number of differences, it seems unlikely that Gonzalez inspired this. A few years later, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont wrote a shorter, child-friendly adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast” which became pretty much the canon version. In her version, the Beast is barely described. This gave illustrators the freedom to imagine their own interpretations. You’ll find images of the Beast as an elephant, bear, wild boar, lion, or walrus. Depictions leaned more towards large, hairy beasts associated with strength and fearsomeness. In the era of adaptation and illustration, the Beast is more likely to be some kind of bipedal chimera. This leads up to the most iconic film portrayal: Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bête with its leonine Beast. The resemblance between the Gonzalez portraits and Cocteau’s Beast in his extravagant ruff and doublet is so striking that it seems likely the makeup artist, Hagop Arakelian, drew inspiration from Pedro Gonzalez (Hamburger, pp. 60-61). Similarly, Disney artist Don Hahn recalled the Gonzalez portraits as "one of many sources of inspiration" during early design stages for the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast (Burchard, 173). So, did the author of Beauty and the Beast take inspiration from Pedro Gonzalez and his wife Catherine? Probably not; there's nothing to indicate that she did, and a few things to point against it. But did later artists? Possibly! Fairy tales are archetypal, resonating with universal morals and fears. Trying to attribute a fairy tale to a real person's biography is dangerous ground. But sometimes real people do get adopted into storytelling tradition, and what's more, real events can have parallels to fairy tales. Sometimes, there really is a hairy nobleman who marries a merchant's beautiful daughter. We know very little about Pedro and Catherine Gonzalez; we don't know whether they had a romance for the ages. But their story is worth remembering, and I hope scholars are able to uncover more about them. SOURCES
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