Beauty and the Beast

The Mob Descends

Belle came downstairs to find the cottage door swinging open and her father gone. A note had been slipped under the door — a formal notice from Monsieur D'Arque's asylum, informing her that Maurice had been taken into custody for his own protection per the request of a concerned citizen. The signature at the bottom was Gaston's.

Belle crumpled the note in her fist. She knew exactly what this was. She had known Gaston long enough to recognize his methods: eliminate the obstacle, create the crisis, position himself as the solution. He would offer to get her father released — in exchange for what he had always wanted.

She would not give it to him.

She went to the village square instead, the enchanted mirror in her hands, and called for the gathered crowd's attention. Torches were already lit. Gaston stood at the head of the mob with a musket on his shoulder and a rallying cry on his lips. Belle raised the mirror and held it up.

"He is not a monster," she said clearly. "He is cursed. He took me in when I was lost. He was kind to me. He let me go to come back to my father, freely, at cost to himself."

The crowd murmured uncertainly. The mirror showed the Beast in his tower — curled in a chair, one large hand resting on a book, still and quiet and sad.

"He looks like a monster," someone called out.

"So would you," Belle said sharply, "if the world had treated you the way the world treated him."

But fear and a good story are hard to dislodge with truth alone. Gaston stepped forward, smooth and smiling, and redirected the crowd with easy authority. Belle was seized and locked in the cellar of the cottage along with her father, who had just been returned there to sweeten Gaston's leverage.

The mob marched for the castle. Belle hammered on the cellar door and called for anyone, anyone at all, to let them out.