orichalcum

A Fable by Avianus (translated according to the Loeb)

Once, there was a peasant woman who had a whiny and quarrelsome baby. Losing her temper, she shouted at him, "If you don't quiet down, I'll give you as a morsel to the wolves!" Outside her hut, a hungry wolf heard her, and decided to sit outside the hut and wait for the baby to be delivered to him. The baby cried and cried for hours while the wolf waited patiently, but he did not receive the promised food. After many long hours of waiting, the wolf slunk home to his mate, his ribs poking through his emaciated skin. His mate asked him where the food was for dinner, and he told her that the peasant woman had reneged on her promise, and there was no food, and his mate was very angry. The moral is: Never trust in a woman's sincerity.

So my dad got me Tracy Chevalier's _Lady and the Unicorn_ for my birthday, which was an awesome present idea, as it's all about the Cluny Unicorn Tapestries which I love and have inherited small pictures of. Except - no spoilers here - but it's a profoundly irritating book in a couple of ways. The first, and most major, is that it's a book entirely about a work of art, which has _no_ picture of any of the six tapestries anywhere in it. I came home and looked at the ones on my wall, but come on! When you spend several pages talking about the significance of which way the lady's head is turned, it's nice to actually be able to look at it.

The other is that it has the problem of what I call the Unsympathetic Main Character. The only thing Nicolas, the main character, has going for him is that he's a good artist. Other than that he's totally worthless, and I am uninterested therefore in his life. He's not even a good villain.

I wanted to like this book so much...