"I once loved a woman, who for various reasons could not marry me. If she had simply told me in person,
I would have been very sad, of course, but eventually it might have passed. However, she chose instead to write a 200-page
book...first brought to me by a flock of carrier pigeons...I read it still, over and over..." (MM 16)
The short part of the theory:
- each book is dedicated to Lemony's lost love, Beatrice
- Beatrice is most certainly dead
- this is an allusion to Dante's Divina Commedia - for the good Beatrice parts (pronounced Bee-ay-tree-chay
if you want to sound all medieval Italian-y, like I do!), read all the way through to the end of Purgatorio!
Don't slack off after part one, it's like reading/watching The Fellowship of the Ring and then giving up!
Okay, need to calm down...)
According to UA, Lemony and Beatrice were going to be married, and Beatrice was the star actress of the play The
World is Quiet Here, or at least, "I am engaged to be married to the original actress" (79).
- The World is Quiet Here required the actress to "whistle Mozart's Fourteenth Symphony"
(79).
- WW 27: Aunt Josephine on her husband Ike: he was " 'the only person I knew who could whistle with crackers in
his mouth.'
'Our mother could do that,' Klaus said, smiling. Her specialty was Mozart's Fourteenth
Symphony.' "
I would argue that on this quote alone, Beatrice appears to be none other than the Baudelaire's mother. Remember
that Lemony says something incorrectly slandered him, leading Beatrice to break the engagement and marry another man (there's
several pieces of evidence all over the books confirming this; I have to collect those). This means that Lemony has
lost Beatrice twice, first in the broken engagement, and secondly in the Baudelaire fire. This also reasons out that
the slander against Lemony cannot alone be setting the Baudelaire fire, for Beatrice couldn't have broken
off the engagement because of a fire she died in as a married Baudelaire. Of course, that fire along with the other
slanderous disaster could BOTH be blamed on Lemony -- a sugar bowl caper, perhaps? Just a hunch.
BUT...
"...and to show this article to so many volunteers, including the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman
I happened to love." (GG 310).
Grammatically and at first sight, this means that Beatrice and the Baudelaire parents cannot be one and the same.
BUT: could it also be intentionally misleading? Lemony's on the run, after all. He's gone through training for
Veiled Facial Disguises and what not. What I'm trying to say is, he's probably good at hiding things (like a letter
to his sister in SS). It's apparent that after Beatrice's marrying another man and even death, Lemony still loves her.
Why couldn't he hide a clue to Beatrice's identity in a innocent-looking enough phrase?
