THE FATAL FIRST GLASS

The most common narrative in temperance fiction begins with a young male who, in longing to exercise the privileges of adulthood and yearning for excitement, allows himself to be lured, usually by a "fast" young man, into a drinking establishment. The subsequent "fatal first drink" launches him into a downward spiral.
In temperance fiction, imagination and ambition were associated with strong drink. Imaginative and ambitious young men were thought to be particularly susceptible to drink's seductive powers. Finding their day-to-day existence boring and unfulfilling, they imagined the possibility of better lives and tried to make their dreams realities. Therefore, they were willing to take risks. Since this leading character was usually portrayed as a sympathetic and appealing figure, the author needed to take credibility to his decision to take that fatal first glass. That is, temperance writers needed to make drink attractive enough to have lured a good young man from the path of virtue without making the intoxication so attractive that the reader would want to follow him. Temperance writers generally acknowledged this dilemma by acknowledging liquor's initial attractiveness, but then going on to explain this attractiveness as a mask behind which the true horrible consequences lurked.
In depicting the moment of the "fatal first drink," and in exploring the relationship of the drinker to his drink, Victorian temperance writers participated in the wider cultural discussion about the nature of free will, as well as of moral responsibility for antisocial acts. Temperance novels and tales should be considered alongsides the many works of Victorian fiction that attempted to express and explore that moment at which a person was transformed from an average man or woman into a social monster.
Much as writers of seduction narratives depicted the seduced as innocent or nearly innocent victims of the seducers' wiles, so temperance writers held innkeepers and devious "fast friends" chiefly, or even solely, for the drinker's downfall. Taking advantage of the (nearly always male) leading character's weaknesses --his dream of achieving a more exciting and rewarding life than the one he knew, and his tendency to trust those who claimed to be working for his interest--, these men and women convinced him that drink would bring him closer to that idealized fantasy world of comfort, leisure, excitement, and elegance. Young women offering drink were always beautiful and always "bejewelled." Seduced by this promise of luxury and beauty that the victim had dared to hope would one day supplant, he took his first drink. The first drink often surpassed expectation. In Mary Chellis's fiction, Casper, a young art merchant, takes his first drink, which gives him "a feeling of exhilaration" that would soon bring him back for a second.
Temperance writers make it clear, however, that while a young man's curiosity and desire for excitement and/or change brought him to take his first glass, the violence and degradation that followed were out of his control. Significantly, given the contemporary (19th-century) debate of nature vs. nurture, temperance writers went to great lengths to depict the drunkard's progress not as a sin or failing on his part, but rather as a seduction and enslavement by liquor itself.
Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, he was, in the logic of temperance fiction, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. Sometimes a tavernkeeper would covertly pour strong liquor in what was purportedly only lemonade or small beer, or drug a customer's glass of liquor, or even serve liquor to a customer who thought he was only drinking soda water.

Narrators, particularly those who were temperance reformers, often gave elaborate explanations of how a young man came to take his first drink. Generally he believed that, by drinking liquor, he could establish himself as mature, manly, and unafraid of the warnings of parents/guardians, wives/fiancées, siblings, and reformers. His decision to drink represented an attempt to escape the constraints of family and community opinion and to establish some degree of independence. Often, he combined this desire to escape family and communal restraints with an overly optimistic assessment of his own willpower, as he assured himself that he was in no danger of becoming a slave to alcohol, though he knew that others had.
Of course, temperance writers knew that, once he took his first drink, the young man would have within him a growing desire for alcohol. In an 1880 temperance hygiene book for children, Julia Coleman warned her readers that the danger of alcohol lay in its ability to "create such a craving in the drinker that he longs to be poisoned again." A female character in a temperance novel feared that while she herself had "no desire for alcohol, it may be that a single glass might arouse a demon in my breast which would not down at my bidding." Alcohol had the ability to create (or, more terrifyingly, arouse) a desire for itself within the drinker. However, if human seducers and alcohol itself were able to reshape, transform, and even create the (future) drinker's desires, it became very unclear to what extent those desires belonged to the drinker at all. Like accounts of sexual seduction and rape and/or abduction, stories of the drinker's seduction and coercion blended easily into one another.
The drinker's real problem, the seduction metaphor implied, was that he had become alienated from his own desires. Because the drinker's desires were wound up in the fantastic idealized images created by his seducers, they were, in an important sense, no longer expressions of his self, but rather of that of his seducers. Although they took care to establish the illegitimacy of the drinker's desires, the authors of temperance fiction often seemed simultaneously to empathize with those same desires. Some of these temperance reformers' most astute critics noted their seemingly paradoxical tendency to glamourize alcohol. In 1888, Edgar Watson Howe charged that temperance followers made strong drink appear exciting, talking "too much about the pleasure of strong drink, and of its pleasing effects," when in fact "the reputed pleasure in the cup is a myth [···] drinking is an evidence of depravity as plainly marked as idleness and viciousness." Howe found it strange that professed opponents of alcohol so often dwelled at such length upon alcohol's attractions.
Howe was on to something important. Temperance reformers often describe the pleasures of alcohol with striking enthusiasm or even longing. Mary Dwynell Chellis has a rare female drunken character explain her own former fascination with strong drink. Though, significantly, she tries to block the memory, she cannot. A collage of images come back to her: "brilliantly-lighted rooms; the flashing of jewels, and the gleaming of white arms; music, and the fragrance of flowers; the subtle fumes of wine, and whispered words of passion she but half comprehended." In another novel, Chellis has her own temperance-reformer character, her author avatar, acknowledge that "people sometimes crave sparkling stimulants that foam and flash before her; and when imbibed, quicken all the pulses of their lives."
The idea that alcohol increased desire and destroyed contentment remained prominent within the drink discourse through the progressive Victorian era.
There was a significant slippage, even in narratives produced by the most solid temperance supporters, between understanding strong drink as the cause of discontent and instability as its effect. Writers and tellers of such narratives often quite literally meant to convey that alcohol was the source of all social evils and that the individual's willingness to take a drink was the Achilles heel of his otherwise unassailable moral self. Yet many, perhaps even more, tellers of temperance narratives at time used alcohol and the "fatal first drink" as a sort of synecdoche or shorthand for a much more general process of embracing discontent. Drinking liquor, in this understanding, was a moment of discontent; a sign that the drinker had chosen to abandon comfort, home, and steady security in favour of risk and mobility.
To the extent that tellers of these narratives meant the "fatal first drink" more as shorthand for a process of discontent than as the literal cause of all the drinker's woes, they marked the drinker, even before he consumed his first drink, as "discontented," "ambitious," "fast," or "fanciful." When a temperance novel introduced a character as "a restless, ambitious boy," the readers knew that these were future drunkards. In William Constock's novels, one character agrees to take his fatal first drink out of a desire to remain on good terms with another man, who offers to help him out of a failing speculation. Narrators depicted the drinker, shortly after his consumption of his first drink, as engaged in multiple forms of risky behaviour, such as gambling and consuming other drugs. There was rarely a "fatal first dice throw" in these narratives. When there was one, it utterly lacked the weight of the "fatal first drink." The reader simply assumed that, having taken a first drink, the protagonist had completely given himself over to risk and chance.
Read literally, this narrative suggested that alcohol was fully responsible for the drinker's decline. Read as a synecdoche, however, the same narrative suggested that both his drinking and his decline were a natural result of certain related and preexisting character traits, such as discontent, ambition, and fastness.
Temperance writers acknowledged that there was a certain class of giddy and risk-taking young women who seduced men into taking their fatal first drink. Falling under the spell of such a seductress was parallel to entering the dangerous space of the pub.
Almost always, even those narrators employing the language of invasion imagined that the future drinker, through a somewhat voluntary act, opened himself to alcohol's attack. Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, however, he was, in the logic of many temperance narratives, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. As one temperance physician wrote in 1882, "the smallest sip of the weakest form of fermented or distilled liquor has power to set in a blaze the hidden unhallowed fire." In most of the temperance narratives, the power of the first sip was equally strong even for those with "untainted" heritage.
By taking his first drink, the drinker put himself in the power of evil companions, and, perhaps more importantly, allowed alcohol to enter his body and begin to transform it. The alcohol coursed through his veins, unseating his reason and inspiring in him a thirst for more. It pervaded him entirely and wiped away any positive resolutions he may have had. In fact, ultimately, it wiped away the drinker himself. As one author describes, "there was not much left of him."
The physical bodies invaded by alcohol often were seen in a double character as both the victims and the perpetrators of the invasion. That is, invasion language all too frequently slid into seduction language. The seeming omnipresence of alcohol and the shifting of position between invader and invaded on the discourse of drink made the metaphor of invasion considerably more disturbing than comforting. As on the other levels of metaphorical invasion (and like vampirism, a close thematic relative), alcohol first had to be voluntarily admitted by its victim. He might choose to take a first drink because of social pressure, a desire for excitement, and/or overconfidence in his own powers of self-control. An 1872 textbook describes alcohol as "so seductive in its advances, so insidious in its influence, and so terrible in its triumph." Only after it had gained a foothold in an individual body did it reveal its true nature.
Belle Brain, in her 1897 handbook Weapons for Temperance Warfare [···] Among the excerpts to be read aloud was: "[···] only to pour down that 'raging Phlegethon of alcohol,' than which no river of the Inferno is more blood-red or more accursed." Here is a familiar pattern. Strong drink was worse than other devils because it was, as one 1894 pamphlet put it, a "liquid devil," polluting and transforming the bodies that consumed it. It "permeated" bodies, introducing the disturbing possibility that it could no longer be separated from them.
Alcohol was a particular type of transforming agent. Just as Dracula could not enter a home unless voluntarily admitted, so alcohol could not invade any body without some degree of consent.
Of course, the individual did, almost always, make a choice to take his "fatal first drink." In temperance novels, he often made the choice because of a desire for excitement and an insufficient respect for the advice of his betters. Even before he drank, the drinker --always carefully and repeatedly described as pure, perfect, and ideal-- possessed that one aspect of his character congenial to alcohol. Once he drank, of course, alcohol worked to weaken his will, particularly his will to cease drinking. If alcohol was an invader, one of the first things it did inside the body was to foment an insurrection. It transformed the will, creating an appetite for itself in the invaded body. Drinking, it was common to say in temperance circles, "dethroned reason." As the drinker drank more and more, he became "not himself." He behaved entirely differently than he would have behaved if he had been sober. Yet, if he was "not himself," who was he?
The phrase "dethroned reason," was potentially unsettling, for it suggested that reason was a monarch ruling over the rest of the body: an old metaphor but one not quite appropriate in a free Western world in the aftermath of revolutions. As one temperance physiologist puts it, alcohol released "the brutish part of human nature [···] The beasts of the menagerie may be no fiercer than before but they rage more violently and are more dangerous because the cages are open and the keepers are gone." He followed this wild animal analogy to a thinly veiled analogy to social class: "The lower passions being thus left without a master, the tendency to evil of every sort is greatly augmented." Put this way, intoxication begins to sound less like invasion and more like insurrection. Alcohol is not exactly causing the drinker to be something other than "himself"; it is enabling one part of him to revolt against its betters. As another physiology text explained, when one becomes intoxicated, "the hidden nature comes to the surface. All the gloss of education and social restraint falls off, and the lower nature stands revealed." In the late nineteenth century, poised between the faculty psychology of the early century and the Freudianism soon to come, the status of this repressed hidden nature, this beast within, had become increasingly uncertain. On one level, strong drink was an external force attacking a body that could be imagined as being somehow sound underneath the attack. That is, one could imagine extracting or driving out the invader to reveal a pure and whole body. On another level, though, drink was an infiltrating force not so much itself attacking the body as revealing the body's preexisting fissures and corruption.
Temperance advocates' metaphor of invasion, then, was entirely complicated. Certainly they continued, in many formats, to insist that the nation, the community, the home, and the body were essentially pure though temporarily invaded. However, they interspersed these repeated assertions with the metaphor was in tension. Drinkers, homes, communities, and nations were pure, yet there was something within them that caused them to allow alcohol to enter, and some part of their putatively pure bodies acted as a fifth column on behalf of invading alcohol.
At times, particularly when they insisted upon the metaphor of the perfect body, this characterization seems fairly accurate --both for temperance reformers and for their opponents. Taken as a whole, however, the discouse of strong drink was not a comforting discourse. Often it was too inconsistent and self-questioning to provide any answers, and often the implications of the invasion metaphor were deeply unsettling. Temperance reformers wrestled with the question of purity. They mobilized the potentially comforting metaphor of the pure body beset by external invaders, but they also insistently and continually undermined that metaphor by telling stories in which the invaded body was in some way identical with or sympathetic to the invader. Certainly it would have been possible for them to focus on hoary nativist arguments and to insist upon young humankind's pristine purity. By and large, however, temperance reformers did not take that path. If anything, they seem to have dwelled the most upon those things that rendered the metaphor of the invaded body most problematic, rejecting again and again the comfort it offered.
Temperance reformers were engaged in a process of constructing and destroying a metaphorical pure body. One of the most surprising things about the nineteenth-century discourse of strong drink is how subtly it changed from its early days in the 1830s through the end of the century. Even as they repeatedly told the same old narrative, drink debaters slowly reformulated it, negotiated its terms, and sought solutions to the problems it posed. After the mid-century's last liberal revolutions, as reformers began to tell the story through the language of invasion rather than that of seduction, they drew lessons from their own invasion accounts that they would apply to their reform tactics. If alcohol won men over not through its seductive influence but through its invasive coercion, and if it did so by storming through their bodies replacing their native desires and tendencies with artificial ones, then perhaps reforming women could win men back in a similar manner. More and more reformers, inspired by invasion language, called for women to leave the home, invade the male domain, and reclaim drunkards by force.

"Unlike most female-written fiction in the nineteenth century, temperance fiction does not end with the marriage of the heroine, but, instead, generally begins with the wedding,” and it is almost universally true that the temperance tale “explores the very real problematic circumstances women must face after the ceremony,” rather than the drama preceding the vows. The marriage in question begins as a happy, promising, and decidedly middle-class arrangement. The new husband has grand prospects: Smith’s Edward Middleton is a businessman and landowner, Stowe’s Edward Howard is, somewhat more vaguely, “first in the society in which he moved,” and the husband in T. S. Arthur’s “The Drunkard’s Wife” is Doctor Harper. Caroline Lee Hentz’s Mr. Franklin is even more considerable: “a member of Congress, a distinguished lawyer.” Consequently, the wife in each story has good reason to believe that her marital decision has been made wisely; she, her friends, and her proud parents expect domestic bliss to follow in turn.
Then, inevitably, come the bottle and the descent, usually traced through three tiers of depravity. First, the happy and prosperous family is unbalanced, but only slightly, by the introduction of “demon” alcohol. Importantly, the first drink is never entirely the husband’s fault; his essential goodness, despite the dark turns each narrative will take, is not at question.
In what I will call “domestic temperance” stories, the fallen husband begins as a paragon of bourgeois perfection, and never—even at his most degraded—entirely sheds a dimmed halo of his former goodness. Domestic temperance stories maintain continual hope for reformation, and so the drunkard retains enough humanity to warrant such an outcome. This narrative shaping begins early, as each story emphasizes the husband’s non-complicit or uninformed entrance into the dark night of spirits. In The Drunkard a begrudging lawyer, Cribbs, first leads Edward into the tavern and buys his first drink, feigning friendly collegiality. In “The Drunkard’s Wife” the doctor is offered “a good stiff glass of brandy” or wine when making house calls during winter, as a buffer against the cold. The first step is always minute and inadvertent (to quench his thirst, to warm himself from within -as a buffer against the cold-, as pain relief...), and the wife/fiancée bears it with only moderate concern, if she is concerned at all.

The first token of Redburn's descent into evil is his breaking of the temperance pledge. When he accepts grog to relieve seasickness, he wishes guiltily that "when I signed the pledge of abstinence, I had not taken care to insert a little clause, allowing me to drink spirits on the case of seasickness." But break the pledge he does, and, as he puts it, violating the pledge "insidiously opened the way to subsequent breaches of it, which carried no apology with them."
After his first sip of alcohol, Redburn is prepared to associate with drunken sailors and to accompany his friend Harry Bolton into a lavish den of iniquity.

Authors used images of strong drink to structure plots, to signal character types, to embellish a theme, to teach a lesson, and to promote a cause.
The nineteenth-century temperance tale enjoyed success by generally sticking to a formula: a young innocent boy [···] has his first drink of alcohol, [···]. Elaine Frantz Parsons identifies six key features of these narratives: (1) the young male protagonist is a particularly promising young man; (2) he falls largely or entirely because of external influences; (3) he is weak-willed and too eager to please his new friends; (4) his desire for drink overwhelms all else; (5) he loses his control over family, economic life, and/or his own body; and (6) if he is redeemed, it is through a powerful external influence.

DRUNKEN MESSENGER: LA MANEKINE

POP THAT FRIGGING MOËT!

At laaaaast I have got the account of the drunken messenger in La Manekine!!!

Get the cannons and fire all of them!!!

For this is Philippe de Beaumanoir talking intoxication and dramatic irony, mesdames et messieurs!

Summary: "He travels for two days, until he [···] stays with the Male Dame overnight. [···] she makes him drunk and reads his message [···] The unsuspecting messenger promises to return that way.
One day and night bring him to the queen mother, who again inebriates him [···] The messenger sets out the next day and goes on without stopping [···] His absence has lasted for three weeks.
The whole matter of the substituted messages comes out, with the messenger's narrative clearly implicating the queen mother."


To the messenger she does not at all show
the great treachery or the jealousy
that she had within her heart.
(It never emerged, for any consideration,
until she will pay for it,
as she will well know.)
To fool and deceive him,
she had him given good wine to drink.
The wretch did not take notice;
he drank so much of it and so willingly
that he quite took leave of his good sense (de son sens se délivra)
because of the strong wine that made him drunk.
When the wicked lady saw this,
she laughs for the evil she is thinking.
She talks to him and flatters him so much
that she made him lie down
right inside her closet that night.
He was longing to sleep.
Because of the wine, which had gone to his head,
he had his brain all muddled;
and so he went to sleep. But that woman is awake,
who is preparing to do evil.
She has come right up to his bed
and feels through his garments
until she has found the case
in which the letter was placed.
She is very glad when she has it.
With it she quickly goes away
and has called a clerk of hers
from whom she has not at all concealed
the evil deed that she wants to do.
"Come forward! You must do,"
she says, "what I shall tell you."
"Lady, speak and I shall act."
"Now detach this seal for me
so neatly and so well
that I may have the letter out of it
and that I can put another one there."
"Lady, willingly."
Then he sought for what he needed.
With a very thin-bladed pen-knife
he detaches it and takes out the letter.
He has it read out before his lady.
[···]
at the seal in the case;
when he sees it, that pleased him greatly.
He well realized that he was drunk;
but he has got over it quickly;
he thinks that they made him lie down there
to rest at his ease;
it is for love of those whom he served,
he believes, that such hospitality was given him.
But it is otherwise than he thinks.
He gets himself ready without delay.
The wicked lady was already up
and sent for the messenger;
he came to her without dallying.
She entreats him to return
her way; let nothing hinder him.
He told her that since she wishes it,
he does not mind doing so.
Willingly will he return that way;
no obstacle will hold him.
When he has pledged this to her,
he swiftly took leave;
she gives him leave, and he goes off.

He suspected no treachery;
[···]
She was very happy when she sees
the messenger who is coming from France.
And the messenger advances
until he greets her and she, him.
Then she said: "Now, let there be no lying!
Were you in France?" "Yes, Lady."
"Did you see my son? How does he do?"
"Very well, Lady. And he is so valiant
that he is winning all the tourneys."
"And at the news that he heard,
tell me if he rejoiced."
"Indeed, Lady, I well remember
that he went to read it in his chamber,
he and only two others.
They were there a rather long time.
I don't know what he saw there and what he did,
except that in turn I made up a letter
that I am carrying back to the seneschal.
And I am taking him word that great harm
will come to him if he does not do
what he will see set out in the letter."

When the lady hears this,
she dares not inquire of him further
lest he take notice;
for she desires to deceive him.
And so she wanted to let it go at that,
and thinks about putting him at ease.
Strong wines were not denied him,
and he made such a disposition of them
that he fell into a drunken state.
Thus he failed two times,
for he was never able to keep from it;
and afterward many a day he thought himself a fool.
Many evils are done through drunkenness;
therefore, the one who indulges in it is a great fool;
many have been killed through it,
and many a great deed hindered.
So it was with this man
who foolishly plunged into it.
The glutton drank so much that he became drunk;
not until the next day did he emerge
from drunkenness. This gladdened her,
the wicked, arrogant lady.
As she had done a short time before,
in her chamber, at her back,
she made him lie down that night.
There the messenger satisfied
his desire to sleep,
he who, on that score, was not wise.

When the dark night had come,
the king's mother did not hold back;
she has stolen his letter
and taken it into her chamber,
so that no one ever knew of it except the clerk
by whom was opened the seal
of the letter that the messenger carried.
The wicked lady exhorted him
and told him not to resist
her will, but to detach quickly
the seal that her son is sending.
The wicked clerk, who was in the way of evil,
just as his lady was,
said "Gladly," without urging.
He detaches the seal with the little pen-knife;
he draws out the letter that is inside,
then he has spread it flat
and read it out before his lady.

The king calls his seneschal,
not concealing his distress,
and has said to him without delay:
"The messenger who came from France,
have him come to me immediately.
I want to have words with him."
"Sire," he says, "very willingly."
He has sent for him by two squires.
They soon went and soon returned,
and brought the messenger
promply before the king,
trembling with fear;
he well believes that he has done wrong,
and his heart is constricted with fear.
The king sees him, and asks him,
when he had left the seneschal
to go straight to France,
by what route he had gone.
"And let there be no concealing from me
the lodging where you were received,
both coming and going.
With that, I wish to acquit you.
If you tell the truth, you will have nothing to fear;
if you die, you will soon know
what death dies a man who is hanged;
you will be defended by nothing else."

The messenger understood the king,
and has answered like a sensible man:
"Sire," he says, "I shall tell you
the whole truth, whatever I may get for it.
Outward bound, I slept at the home of your mother,
who was very hospitable towards me.
Through cunning, as I guess,
she had me drink of her strong wine,
until it went to my head.
Thus folly took hold of me,
and did with me as she pleased.
She made me lie in her closet
that night, until the next day,
when I arose quite early.
When I saw myself in that chamber,
my limbs trembled with fright.
I feared treachery so much
that I put my hand into my case.
I saw the seneschal's seal;
thus, I could not think of any evil.
As soon as I was ready to leave,
I saw her coming before me.
She prayed much for me not to leave her,
that I should return to her place,
and thus I promised her.
I went to you; I returned passing by her place,
and, the next day, I took myself for a fool.
I drank so much that night that I got drunk;
until the next day, I had not emerged from drunkenness.
And I lay in her closet,
where I had lain the other time,
as one who does not doubt of any evil
nor does think of any evil.
Since your seal was intact,
I did not notice at all
that they could have exchanged the letter.
But, since you did not write
the words that the seneschal read,
I do believe that the disloyal one,
your mother, had them changed;
but I couldn't do anything about it.
I pray that you don't make her die suffering.
I have told you everything I had to tell.
Do with me as you please."

[···]
how the foolish messenger went off,
the one who did not acquit himself wisely, (qui n'esploita pas comme sage)
how he went, how he returned,
and how afterwards he thought himself a fool
when the treachery was known
that the wicked lady had brought about
through the exchanged letter
[···]

THE HEIRS OF VERLANGENS: REVIEW

I have the Springtime Lake - Summer Lake 'verse I have created (feudal yet LGBT fantasy: no large communities or technology from before the 1850s; the presence of pegasi, werebeasts, dragons, and fair folk... yet queer, interracial, and subversive characters, and issues like speciesism and realpolitik play a relevant role)...
and its female ruler Radegunde in mind. To loyalists of the old regime, she's the wicked stepmother or the usurper, "an evil-disposed woman"..:

"she concealed the malignity of her heart under the mask 
of friendliness..."

But she has also got supporters at court, who know the truth about their warrior queen's rise to power: she's actually an upstart of the gentry from the provinces, sent to court and betrothed at an early age against her will (by a powerful widowed mother) to an adult child with a penchant for strong drinks and fair maids... She's actually a well-intentioned usurper, something like Catherine the Great. She led a conspiracy of army officers against her own husband. I took inspiration from Catherine and from this text (aside from the Clever Princess, one of my favourite characters):

<< Not all of us became Christians ; and one of our 
orders in particular, which had learnt from a Greek the 
philosophy of Epicurus, still held to its doctrines.

 A light and godless race they were, thinking 
nothing worth their care but how to appear in colors 
gay ; and to their sensual maxims true, they would 
drink deep of ambrosial dew, and then for hours would 
sleep... By their uncer- 
tain zig-zag flight, dear child, thou well may'st see, that 
they have drunk more than is right, and their senses 
clouded be. 
These were the confirmed old topers, who 
had imbibed so much of the ambrosial dew that their 
bodies had grown fat and unwieldy, and had very large 
stomachs. and so whenever one ap- 
proached, each bent aside its calyx bright in mockery 
of the uncouth wight. Or if by chance one clambered 
up to reach the blossom's nectar-cup, its stem would 
bend beneath its weight, and down the-awkward creature 
straight would go, and all its members dislocate.
ir evil deeds they did under the cover of the 
night. When every flower was soundly sleeping, they 
came like midnight robbers creeping — ^then drew them 
softly to the ground, and sucked from their lips their 
nectar breath ; so that many a flower at morn was found, 
lying pale in death, and sinfully robbed of all its wealth, 
that had closed its leaves in rosy health. 
and emptied the pitcher with a satyr- 
like expression of countenance. 

The liquor seemed quickly to affect him ; for almost 
as soon as he had swallowed it he manifested his satis- 
faction by fantastic leaps, and all kinds of ridiculous 
antics. Overpowered by 
fatigue, and the strength of the liquor he had drunk, he 
gradually sank down by the stream, and fell asleep. 

" Those who had drunk deep by day, roused by it 
could not sleep away the ill effects of their carouse, so 
they with aches and fevers rose.

<< In the first tumult of their ire some of our fiercest 
spirits did conspire their monarch's blood to spill. They 
tore the thorns from the stem of the rose, and the strongest 
and longest and sharpest they chose to work their wick- 
ed will. Beneath their mantles green they hid the 
spears; and sought their king, the curse-beladen one, 
who again in the tulip lay alone in sorrow and in tears. 
Wildly they the stem ascended, and in their rage they 
struck the deadly blow ; they pierced him till his heart's 
blood forth did flow and with his life his sorrow ended. 

Whether it 
was the effect of the too hastily swallowed drink... he lay dead.

And her only son Kyle, allegedly (according to the old regime loyalists) a bastard, is later revealed to be gay... a direwolf and a white female cat he met in the wide world (a thick fir wood,), revealed to be werebeasts (the werewolf is the rightful heir Henri, and Kyle's lover!), follow Kyle back home... What will happen at court? Will war return to the lands of Verlangens? Will the "usurper" fall?
There is a scene where a whole army is turned into the cutest little boys ever, inspired by this story:
...he caused his whole

army to draw up on the plain, and commanded them to 
watch day and night, that no one whatsoever should 
approach the tower. 

As he 
came nearer to them, he remarked that they grew 
gradaally less and less, and that their lines contracted; 

and when he got so near that they could bear 
him speak, he perceived, to his no small astonishment, 
that all these formidable soldiers, and mustached gren- 
adiers, had shrunk into children of four years old, so 
that he cried aloud to them : — " Yield this moment, or 
you shall all be whipped." 
Then the whole army began to cry, and ran away...

To as many as he could catch, he gave sugar-plums, 
whereupon they immediately swore to obey him. 

 ...................................................................................................HERE'S MORE INSPIRATION

...to the open plain, and began to strike, his sword here and 
there in the ground, and in. a few minutes there stood 
on the plain many thousand well armed combatants, 
and the youth himself, richly armed and adorned, sat as 
their leader on a noble horse decked with gold embroid- 
ered housings and a lustrous bridle. The young general 
led his troops against the foe, and a bloody battle was 
fought. Unceasing death-shots thundered from the 
commander's hat, and his sword called up one regiment 
after another from the ground, so that in a few -hours 
the enemy was vanquished and scattered, and the flag 
of victory waved above the conquered camp. The victor 
pursued and conquered from his foe a considerable por- 
tion of his country.

The realm beyond which the wide world begins is the isle of Verlangens,

located in the middle of Springtime Lake and with the misty Summer Lake in the middle.

It's a feudal land without settlements, only castles, villages, and marketplaces.

There's a monarchy and several vassal dynasties. 

The ruler is Radegunde (disabled and pardoned, abdicates) then

replaced by Kyle and his two disenchanted companions as a ménage à trois.