[MUSIC]
Harper Audio presents A Series
of Unfortunate Events,
Book the First: The Bad Beginning
by Lemony Snicket.
[MUSIC]
If you are interested in
stories with happy endings,
you would be better off
listening to some other program.
In this story,
not only is there no happy ending,
there is no happy beginning and
very few happy things in the middle.
This is because not very many
happy things happened in
the lives of the three
Baudelaire youngsters.
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire
were intelligent children,
and they were charming, and resourceful,
and had pleasant facial features,
but they were extremely unlucky,
and most everything that
happened to them was rife with misfortune,
misery and despair.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but
that is how the story goes.
[MUSIC]
Their misfortune began
one day at Briny Beach.
The three Baudelaire children lived
with their parents in an enormous
mansion at the heart of a dirty and
busy city, and occasionally their parents
gave them permission to take the rickety
trolley alone to the seashore, where they
would spend the day as a sort of vacation
as long as they were home for dinner.
The word "rickety," you probably know,
here means "unsteady" or
"likely to collapse."
This particular morning it was gray and
cloudy,
which didn't bother
the Baudelaire youngsters one bit.
When it was hot and sunny,
Briny Beach was crowded with tourists and
it was impossible to find a good
place to lay one's blanket.
On gray and cloudy days,
the Baudelaires had the beach to
themselves to do what they liked.
Violet Baudelaire, the eldest,
liked to skip rocks.
[WATER] Like most fourteen-year olds,
she was right handed, so
the rocks skipped farther across
the murky water when Violet
used her right hand than
when she used her left.
As she skipped rocks,
she was looking out at the horizon and
thinking about an invention
she wanted to build.
Anyone who knew Violet well could
tell she was thinking hard,
because her long hair was tied up in
a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes.
Violet had a real knack for
inventing and building strange devices,
so her brain was often filled with
images of pulleys, levers, and gears,
and she never wanted to be distracted
by something as trivial as her hair.
This morning, she was thinking about
how to construct a device that could
retrieve a rock after you had
skipped it into the ocean.
[OCEAN WAVES] Klaus Baudelaire,
the middle child and
the only boy,
liked to examine creatures in tide-pools.
Klaus was a little older than twelve and
wore glasses,
which made him look intelligent.
He was intelligent.
The Baudelaire parents had
an enormous library in their mansion,
a room filled with thousands of
books on nearly every subject.
Being only twelve, Klaus, of course,
had not read all of the books
in the Baudelaire library, but
he had read a great many of them and
had retained a lot of
the information from his readings.
He knew how to tell
an alligator from a crocodile.
He knew who killed Julius Cesar.
And he knew much about the tiny,
slimy animals found at Briny Beach,
which he was examining now.
[SHOVEL SCRAPING] Sunny Baudelaire,
the youngest, liked to bite things.
She was an infant, and very small for
her age, scarcely larger than a boot.
What she lacked in size,
however, she made up for
with the size and
sharpness of her four teeth.
Sunny was at an age where one
mostly speaks in a series of
unintelligible shrieks.
Except when she used
the few actual words in her
vocabulary like "bottle," "mommy," and
"bite," most people
had trouble understanding what
it was that Sunny was saying.
For instance, this morning,
she was saying "Gack!" over and over,
which probably meant, "Look at that
mysterious figure emerging from the fog!"
[MUSIC]
Sure enough, in the distance along
the misty shore of Briny Beach there
could be seen a tall figure striding
toward the Baudelaire children.
Sunny had already been staring and
shrieking at the figure for some time
when Klaus looked up from the spiny
crab he was examining and saw it too.
He reached over and touched Violet's arm,
bringing her out of her
inventing thoughts.
>> "Look at that."
>> The figure was drawing closer and
the children could see a few details.
It was about the size of an adult, except
its head was tall, and rather square.
>> "What do you think it is?"
>> "I don't know, but
it seems to be moving right toward us."
>> "We're alone on the beach.
There's nobody else it
could be moving toward."
>> Violet felt the slender, smooth stone
in her left hand, which she had been
about to try to skip as far as she could.
She had a sudden thought
to throw it at the figure,
because it seemed so frightening.
>> "It only seems scary
because of all the mist."
>> This was true.
As the figure reached them,
the children saw with relief that it was
not anybody frightening at all,
but somebody they knew: Mr. Poe.
Mr. Poe was a friend of Mr. and Mrs.
Baudelaire's, whom the children had
met many times at dinner parties.
>> "A toast, please.
To your bright eyes."
>> One of the things Violet, Klaus and
Sunny really liked about their parents was
that they didn't send their children away
when they had company over, but allowed
them to join the adults at the dinner
table and participate in the conversation
as long as they helped clear the table.
The children remembered Mr. Poe, because
he always had a cold and was constantly
excusing himself from the table to have
a fit of coughing in the next room.
[COUGH] Mr. Poe took off his top hat,
which had made his head look large and
square in the fog, and stood for a moment,
coughing loudly into a white handkerchief.
Violet and Klaus moved forward to
shake his hand and say, how do you do?
>> "How do you do?"
>> "How do you do?"
>> "Fine, thank you."
>> The children wondered what Mr.
Poe was doing there at Briny Beach when he
should have been at the bank in the city
where he worked.
He was not dressed for the beach.
>> "It's a nice day."
>> Sunny made a noise that sounded
like an angry bird, and
Klaus picked her up and held her.
>> "Yes, it is a nice day.
I'm afraid I have some very bad news for
you children."
>> The three Baudelaire siblings
looked at him.
Violet, with some embarrassment,
felt the stone in her left hand and
was glad she had not thrown it at Mr. Poe.
>> "Your parents have
perished in a terrible fire."
>> The children didn't say anything.
>> "They perished in a fire that
destroyed the entire house.
I'm very, very sorry to tell you this,
my dears."
>> Violet took her eyes off Mr.
Poe and stared out at the ocean.
Mr. Poe had never called the Baudelaire
children "my dears" before.
She understood the words he was saying but
thought he must be joking,
playing a terrible joke on her and
her brother and sister.
>> "Perished means 'killed.'"
>> "We know what the word 'perished'
means."
>> Klaus did know what the word "perished"
meant, but he was still having trouble
understanding exactly what it was that Mr.
Poe had said.
It seemed to him that Mr.
Poe must somehow have misspoken.
>> "The fire department arrived,
of course, but they were too late.
The entire house was engulfed in fire.
It burned to the ground."
>> Klaus pictured all the books in
the library, going up in flames.
>> [COUGH]
>> Now, he'd never read them all.
>> "I was sent to retrieve you here,
and to take you to my home,
where you'll stay for
some time while we figure things out.
I am the executor of your parents' estate.
That means I will be handling
their enormous fortune and
figuring out where you children will go.
When Violet comes of age, the fortune
will be yours, but the bank will take
charge of it until you are old enough."
>> Although he said he was the executor,
Violet felt like Mr.
Poe was the executioner.
He had simply walked down the beach to
them and changed their lives forever.
>> "Come with me."
>> Mr. Poe held out his hand.
In order to take it, Violet had to
drop the stone she was holding.
Klaus took Violet's other hand, and
Sunny took Klaus's other hand, and
in that manner, the three Baudelaire
children—the Baudelaire orphans,
now—were led away from the beach and
from their previous lives.
[SOUND]
