Summary
Gaston was a solder from Normandy in the Hundred Years War who settled in the small village in France. A merchant whose daughters were beautiful had lost his fortune in the fighting and was forced to move to their country home in the village. When one of his ships had made it to port unexpectedly, the merchant left to get his fortune back. His daughters made requests for rich gifts except for the youngest who requested a rose. It was winter. She seemed to think the journey would take months. It did, but for the wrong reasons.
The merchant was unable to recover any funds from the ship, and being unable to give the gifts to his older daughters, the merchant set out to give his youngest the one gift he could. A rose. The merchant got lost deep in the woods. He found a castle surrounded by a garden of thorns and flowers and fruits. The strangeness was, the hedge was half covered in eternal winter snows while the other half glimmered in eternal summer sunlight.
But there was a rose.
The daft bastard plucked the rose and was attacked by a bestial thing that called itself the Prince. This was no vampiric leader though. This was the Prince of Summer, apparently. Some horned and furred once-human thing. It took the first creature to greet the merchant on his return home as the price for the rose.
That was his youngest daughter, a girl named Belle, which means beauty.
She became the bestial Prince of Summer's prisoner, and though the villagefolk tried to free her, it was all for naught. Most of the village's men were fighting, what was left were women and older men and young boys. They were in the Castle after Gaston shot the Beast. The Castle, the girl, the beast and most of the town vanished. Gaston fell from a great height as the Castle vanished, and, as the story goes, died.
