La Bella Dame Sans Merci

**La Bella Dame Sans Merci**, also known in abbreviation as La Bella Dame, was the ghost haunting the Palace Theater.

## In life

### Professional career

La Bella Dame was born Doris Blower at the turn of the twentieth century, later changing her name to Marianne de Sèvres as she began stage work. She put on popular escape routines, all of them involving an innocent female lead, scantily clad, shocking the audience and defying death. Her listed performances include *The Captive Mermaid*, *The Hangman's Daughter*, and the one she died in, *The Sultan's Revenge*.

### Personal life

Marianne de Sèvres was a vain and sadistic woman who had multiple married men wrapped around her finger who she would discard whenever she felt like it. Multiple men committed suicide over her, and she viewed it as "life imitating art." De Sèvres' nickname, "The Beautiful Woman without Mercy," stemmed from this behavior. Her promiscuous ways drew the hatred of the wives of the men she fooled around with, and it is speculated her death was sabotage by one of these women.

### *The Sultan's Revenge*

De Sèvres' final performance followed the story of an unfaithful queen who is sentenced to death: put in a coffin and run through with fifty swords. If the show went as planned, she would go down through a trap door to avoid the blades and pop back up after they were done. Unfortunately, the person operating the mechanism missed their cue and she was left in the coffin. She died a violent and gory death, leading to her understandable agitation as a ghost.

## In death

### Previous behavior

As a ghost, La Bella Dame has "vampiric tendencies," targeting vulnerable men and drawing them in with her beauty to kill them. Her first victim was Sid Morrison, a close-up magician and employee of Tufnell's Theater (the circus act currently occupying the Palace Theater) who had been slighted by a trapeze artist he was in love with. Sid was in the theater too late in the evening and she found him. He died of fatal ghost-touch. La Bella Dame's second victim was Charley Budd, a frail youth with a chronic lung condition. He too encountered her in the theater and was saved from death by Sarah Parkins, the stage manager. Although he survived the ordeal, the ghost snared Charley's mind and began to sap his will to live.

### Investigation

La Bella Dame reenacts several of her shows while the Lockwood and Co. team is investigating. She draws the members apart and targets each one individually, testing their reactions to her tricks. She is especially drawn to Lucy and Lockwood, who at that point had both visited the Other Side. When Lucy encounters La Bella Dame, she falls under the ghost's spell and opens her mind to her. It takes a hard pinch from George to get her to see past the glamour, but the damage is already done. With Lockwood at the forefront of Lucy's mind, the ghost targets him over everyone else. La Bella Dame snares his mind like Charley Budd's and it takes an flare-ridden intervention from Lucy to save him.

### Resolution

La Bella Dame's Source is the tiara she wore during her final performance. It was kept in an iron box in the prop room for a century, but the stage manager Sarah Parkins had taken it out and unleashed it on Sid Morrison, who she was in love with. His infatuation with the trapeze artist brought her to hate him, so when Parkins found the tiara, she thought it a perfect tool with which to exact her revenge. Why she left it out after Morrison’s death is a matter of speculation; it is thought that “her private misery had morphed into a dull hatred for the world in general.”

1. ↑ *The Empty Grave,* p. 106
2. ↑ *The Empty Grave*, p. 107