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anchor in the bay. “Do you see those big ships? One day they’ll be yours to command.”
    Visitors would come to the castle to see her, but only a few special ones were permitted to hold her. The others would stare down at her as she lay in her crib and would exclaim over her unbelievably delicate features, and her lovely blond hair, her soft honey-colored skin, and her father would proudly say, “A stranger could tell she is a Princess!” And he would lean over her crib and whisper, “Someday a beautiful Prince will come and sweep you off your feet.” And he would gently tuck the warm pink blanket around her and she would drift off to a contented sleep. Her wholeworld was a roseate dream of ships, tall masts and castles, and it was not until she was five years old that she understood that she was the daughter of a Marseille fishmonger, and that the castles she saw from the window of her tiny attic room were the warehouses around the stinking fish market where her father worked, and that her navy was the fleet of old fishing ships that set out from Marseille every morning before dawn and returned in the early afternoon to vomit their smelly cargo into the waterfront docks.
    This was the kingdom of Noelle Page.
    The friends of Noelle’s father used to warn him about what he was doing. “You mustn’t put fancy ideas in her head, Jacques. She’ll think she’s better than everybody else.” And their prophecies came true.
    On the surface Marseille is a city of violence, the town crowded with hungering sailors with money to spend and clever predators to relieve them of it. But unlike the rest of the French, the people of Marseille have a sense of solidarity that comes from a common struggle for survival, for the lifeblood of the town comes from the sea, and the fishermen of Marseille belong to the family of fishermen all over the world. They share alike in the storms and the calm days, the sudden disasters and the bountiful harvests.
    So it was that Jacques Page’s neighbors rejoiced at his good fortune in having such an incredible daughter. They too recognized the miracle of how, out of the dung of the dirty, ribald city, a true Princess had been spawned.
    Noelle’s parents could not get over the wonder of their daughter’s exquisite beauty. Noelle’s mother was a heavyset, coarse-featured peasant woman with sagging breasts and thick thighs and hips. Noelle’s father was squat, with broad shoulders and the small suspicious eyes of a Breton. His hair was the color of the wet sand along the beaches of Normandy. In the beginning it had seemed to him that nature had made a mistake, that this exquisite blond fairy creature could notreally belong to him and his wife, and that as Noelle grew older she would turn into an ordinary, plain-looking girl like all the other daughters of his friends. But the miracle continued to grow and flourish, and Noelle became more beautiful each day.
    Noelle’s mother was less surprised than her husband by the appearance of a golden-haired beauty in the family. Nine months before Noelle had been born, Noelle’s mother had met a strapping Norwegian sailor just off a freighter. He was a giant Viking god with blond hair and a warm, seductive grin. While Jacques was at work, the sailor had spent a busy quarter of an hour in her bed in their tiny apartment.
    Noelle’s mother had been filled with fear when she saw how blond and beautiful her baby was. She walked around in dread, waiting for the moment that her husband would point an accusing finger at her and demand to know the identity of the real father. But, incredibly, some ego-hunger in him made him accept the child as his own.
    “She must be a throwback to some Scandinavian blood in my family,” he would boast to his friends, “but you can see that she has my features.”
    His wife would listen, nodding agreement, and think what fools men were.
    Noelle loved being with her father. She adored his clumsy playfulness and the strange,