Ever After - Plot

Plot

In the late eighteenth century, the Grande Dame of France, an elderly aristocrat, summons The Brothers Grimm to tell them the real story of the little cinder girl. She shows them a portrait of a young woman named Danielle de Barbarac, and a glass slipper, and begins her tale.

Danielle, a little girl at age eight, lives with her widowed father, Auguste, who shares with her a love of books and progressive ideas. He brings home a new wife, the haughty Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, who has two daughters about Danielle's age, Marguérite and Jacqueline. He has a heart attack soon after, and with his dying breath professes his deep fatherly love for Danielle rather than Rodmilla, who envies Danielle and treats her like a servant thereafter for the next ten years. Marguérite is as cruel as Rodmilla, but Jacqueline is kind and gentle.

Ten years later, in the manor's orchard, eighteen-year old Danielle catches a man stealing her father's horse. She unseats him with a well-aimed apple, but is horrified to learn that he is Henry, the Crown Prince of France, trying to escape the responsibilities of court. He buys her silence with a purse of gold, which she decides she will use to rescue an elderly servant sold to the Crown to pay the household's debts. She dresses as a noblewoman and goes to court to ransom the servant, where she encounters the Prince again. After the jailer refuses to release the servant, she argues against the injustice and quotes Thomas More's Utopia (book). Henry is so captivated that he orders the man released and begs for her name, but she evades his pleas and leaves him instead with her mother's name, the Comtesse Nicole de Lancret.

When Henry returns the horse to the manor, it's plain that Rodmilla intends to match her daughter Marguérite with the Prince, despite the marriage his parents have arranged with the Spanish royals. The King strikes a bargain with the recalcitrant Prince, telling Henry to choose his own bride before they give a ball in honor of Leonardo da Vinci, who has come to court, or he will choose for him. Henry meets Danielle again by the river, where he is arguing with Da Vinci about love and fate, but again she runs away. While looking for Da Vinci soon after Henry finds Danielle's childhood friend, Gustave, who knows the whole story, and tells him Nicole de Lancret is staying with Rodmilla. When he arrives at the manor, Danielle agrees to accompany him to the library of a nearby monastery. They are accosted by gypsies en route, and in an uproarious turn of events, Danielle rescues Henry and at the end of the night, they kiss. They agree to meet the next day, but she returns home so late she loses her temper in the morning, then punches Marguérite in the eye when she discovers Marguérite intends to take her mother's wedding dress and wear it to the masque. She is beaten by Rodmilla and when she meets Henry later, Danielle is so disheartened that she is unable to tell him the truth and runs away once more.

That same day, the Queen asks Marguérite and Rodmilla if they know the mysterious Comtesse de Lancret, and they realize it must be Danielle. Rodmilla tells the Queen that the Comtesse has gone to marry someone else. When they return to the manor, the Comtesse's wedding dress has disappeared and Rodmilla thinks Danielle plans on going to the masque, so she locks her in the larder. The servants get word to Da Vinci through Gustave, and he frees her and makes her a pair of wings to match her mother's wedding dress and her glass slippers, so she can go to the masque. Danielle arrives just before the King announces Henry's engagement, but before she can tell him the truth, Rodmilla accuses her of plotting to entrap the Prince by masquerading as a courtier. Henry is so shocked he spurns Danielle, saying that she's "just like the rest of them." Tearfully, Danielle flees, losing a slipper along the way.

Henry decides to marry the Spanish Princess, but calls it off when he sees how distraught she is at the ceremony. He begins to go to the manor, but learns from Jacqueline that Danielle has been sold to Pierre le Pieu, a man who seems to have sexual seductive advances on Danielle, just after the masque, so he sets out with Laurent to rescue her, but finds she has freed herself. Realizing that he truly deeply loved her all along, he asks her to forgive him and to marry him, and she agrees happily and they romantically embrace and kiss.

The next day, Rodmilla and Marguérite are summoned to court and charged with lying to the Queen. Without a defense, the Queen strips Rodmilla of her noble title as baroness and sentences her and Marguérite to be banished to the Americas unless someone will speak for them. When Princess Danielle steps forward, Henry introduces her as his wife. She asks that they receive the same courtesy they showed her, so Marguérite and Rodmilla are sent to the laundry to serve out their lives. Jacqueline is matched with Henry's acerbic Captain of the Guard, while Danielle and Henry live happily ever after; and the Grande Dame tells the Brothers Grimm that, "the point, gentlemen, is that they lived."