CHAPTER ONE
La Petite Princesse

I was six years old the first time ma mère allowed me to go into papère's private library without supervision. I remember tugging nervously on the white ribbons in my hair and staring at the double doors in apprehension for several minutes, before my nanny prodded me in the back and told me I had better get a move on before bedtime. So, pretending quite fervently that I was Lucy Pevensie about to stumble upon Narnia in an unassuming wardrobe, I tiptoed reverently toward the Brazilian rosewood doors and slowly turned their handles.

After savoring the moment, which even to my young mind seemed significant, I peered into the forbidden room. Then, after emitting a rather undignified squeal of delight, I tore towards the nearest bookshelf and began pulling down its contents with the reckless abandon any other child might display in a candy store.

I spent hours searching the shelves, stretching my reading muscles as I tried (and failed) to comprehend the first pages of Les Misérables, and beaming with delight when I found a first edition printing of my favorite story - Le Petit Prince. I felt very grown up then, reading to myself in the window seat.

As I knew she would, mère came in to check on me after I had settled in. When she saw the title of the book cradled in my hands, she smiled and sat down next to me to see how far I had gotten on my own. I read to her, holding myself upright and pretending like she was the child I was tucking into bed. I did that sometimes with my dolls, when I was young enough to believe they could understand what I was saying to them. In a lot of ways, ma mère was my favorite doll, and not just because she could understand me. Sometimes, if I had been very good that day, she would let me stand on the chair at her vanity and brush her long chocolate-brown curls 100 times before she tied a silk ribbon around them and nudged me away. Watching her do her makeup for parties was a bigger treat than our maid's post-dinner desserts, and most of the time she would let me sit beside her so I could observe the careful upward strokes of her mascara wand, the graceful precision with which she applied shockingly red color to her down-turned lips.

Her lips were always sad, even when they were rich with crimson lipstick and soft like my pillow when she kissed me goodnight.

I could count, at age six, the number of times I had seen her smile with true happiness.

That night, sitting in the window of papère's library, was one of those times.

"Les hommes ont oublié cette vérité, dit le renard. Mais tu ne dois pas l'oublier. Tu deviens responsible pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé."

Ma mère ceased stroking my hair and let her hand rest on my shoulder. I stopped reading and looked up from the pale yellow pages to see her pale pink lips smiling down at me, and I knew it was genuine because it lit something in the back of her eyes – the same eyes I saw when I looked AT myself in the bathroom mirror. I liked to imagine that someday, I would be as pretty as ma mère and that would make her smile all the time.

"Lis-le de nouveau, chérie, en anglais."

I would be seven before I had any real grasp of the English language. I look back now at those hours spent poring over books, as I tried so desperately to make ma mère proud of my mastery over her native tongue, and I remember how difficult it was to wrap my mouth around the choppy phrases that sounded so crude and inelegant to my ears. And all that time, I only saw those horrible words as a means to an end. I learned them for her, because I wanted to understand her like she understood me when she let me brush her hair.

"Les hommes..." I wracked my brain nervously for the translation, and I felt – but did not see – my mother's eyebrows knit together. She was so incredibly smart, and I could not remember a simple three-letter word. In my defense, the plurals in French are so very different from the plurals in English. That lesson took me the longest to learn. "The mens – "

"Men, no the." She was prompt in her correction, as she was prompt in everything else.

"Men," I mumbled apologetically, "have forgotten...the – this true...truth. Say -- said le fox."

"The fox." She mercifully dropped a kiss into the thickest part of my hair, and saved me from butchering the sentence any more. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

We spent that afternoon together amid the stacks, alternating reading duties and smiling at each other whenever I managed to successfully translate and understand any sentence longer than seven words. I loved her attention and hoarded it like I might hoard my expensive ribbons, or the hand-made satin dresses that adorned my precious collection of porcelain dolls. I knew that she loved me, and I knew that I loved her, but I also understood that she kept some of her love away, hidden somewhere inside of her. In the instances when she shared even a little bit of her stored affection with me, it was like she shared the secret kiss tucked in the corner of her mocking mouth. I was Wendy and she was Mrs. Darling, and she was giving me hope that I would never really have to grow up.

She left me when the sun sunk so low that the library was cast in golden squares of light. When the door clicked shut behind her, I closed Le Petit Prince and hugged it to my chest as I went searching for a new hidden treasure.

I found it tucked away in a dark corner, behind an old diary that once belonged to papère. It was the diary that first caught my interest, because it was hand-bound, likely by grand-père (papère's arts-and-craftsy husband), and contained an amalgam of papers from various periods of time. The dates at the tops of several pages shocked me – would I ever be old enough to say that things were 'different' when I was young?

A name appeared a few times, a name that I never spoke aloud, but which I knew as well as my name, or my nanny's, or my bunny's.

Blair.

That was what papère and grand-père called her. I simply knew her as ma mère and, when I was feeling particularly childish, maman.

The treasure behind that diary was another diary, this one much newer, but much more worn. It was, unlike the collection of gathered materials my papère called a diary, a genuine diary. Crafted for the sole reason that girls everywhere loved to fill pretty pages with thoughts they could not speak aloud. I reached for it with wide eyes, unable to stop myself from pulling it off the shelf. I allowed myself a moment to feel the soft Italian leather beneath my fingertips.

When I opened it in the middle and let a folded photograph fall from between its pages, I sucked in a breath and felt, for the second time that day, that I was about to experience a significant moment. I set the new diary down and ran my fingers over its surface yet again. Written on those hand-stitched pages were my mother's secrets. I could deduce that much from the fact that the beautiful book was hidden so carefully in the most secluded section of papère's chateau – not only IN the forbidden library, but on a high shelf in a corner behind another book in the forbidden library. Had sheer luck led me to it? Was I supposed to read it? I desperately wanted to, so I settled myself down to examine its contents.

Some familiar letters sprawled in front of my eager eyes, but they were arranged in unfamiliar ways.

There were rocks in the bottom of my stomach when I realized my mother had written the diary in English.

My gaze left the thick cream-colored pages and found the folded-up photograph sitting peacefully beside my pale knees. Words were relative to me then, because there was no way I could translate my mother's English writing without her help...and I was not so young that I thought showing her the diary would not get it snatched away. The photograph however – the photograph was in a universal language. My eyes could interpret it without any help from a stern tutor or a thick language dictionary.

I carefully unfolded it two times, letting it unfurl like a flower in bloom.

It wasn't a slick, glossy picture like the ones papère printed of me astride a horse, of me learning to swim, of me smiling on my first day of school. This photograph was a bit sturdier than that, and its colors were fading like an old memory. It reminded me of a stormy day at dawn. The smell was what made me lean closer, because it smelled like ma mère when she sprayed her perfume on her wrists before a party.

And it was ma mère that I saw smiling up at me (that meant I had finally seen her really smile six times – far too many to count on one hand anymore), but she was very young, and there was a man holding her in his arms. A red headband kept her familiar brown curls out of her face, and she was looking at the camera with so much happiness in her eyes that I felt my own lips curve upwards to match hers.

My desire to know who the man in the picture was, and what he had done to make my mother smile so, was the inspiration I needed to form those crude English words. I learned them for her, because I wanted to understand her like she understood me when she let me brush her hair. I wanted to know how to make her happy all the time, like the man in the picture seemed to do. He pressed his lips to the side of her head, and held her close to him with his hand gripping her shoulder, and she was so happy. I had to know how to do that too.

The diary had the answers; I just had to unlock them.

A/N: I'm writing this to kick-start myself into finishing some of my other stories. =] It sort of unfolded as a mystery in my head, and since those were my favorite stories when I was little...it only seems natural to try my hand at one now.

Some clarifications:
If you haven't gleaned it from the chapter papère is Harold and grand-père is Roman – both are French for grandfather. Mère means mother, and ma mère means my mother; maman is closer to mom or mama. "Lis-le de nouveau, chérie, en anglais" can be translated as "Read it again, darling, in English". There will be a fair amount of French in the story, as it is the main character's first language, but it will rarely be more complicated than mère and papère, and if it IS, I will do my best to provide an in-text way for you to understand it without putting the translation in parenthesis.

Drop me a line if you have any further questions, and leave a review if you ARE interested in reading more! Merci beaucoup.

Disclaimer: Gossip Girl and its characters are not mine, nor do I claim they are mine, nor do I think they are mine, nor do I want anyone to think that I think they are mine. Anything you recognize from the show is from the show, and anything you don't recognize from the show is from my own head. The quote from The Little Prince is likewise not mine, and neither are Lucy Pevensie, Wendy Darling, or Mrs. Darling. The title of the story comes from the Pablo Neruda poem XVII; the full line is 'in secret, between the shadow and the soul', and it seemed to fit this piece. ...Was that thorough enough? I certainly hope so. ;]