The Fourth Baudelaire

THE BAD BEGINNING

If you like stories with happy endings, you would prefer reading another book. This is because not a lot of happy things happened in the lives of the four Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, Camille and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, very charming but also very resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, sadly they were mostly unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was filled with misfortune. I'm sorry to tell you this but this is how the story goes.

Everything began one day at Briny Beach. The four Baudelaire children lived with their parents in an enormous mansion in the center of a dirty and crowded city, their parents normally gave them permission to take the rickety trolley alone the seashore, where they would spend the day as a sort of vacation as long as they were on time for dinner. This specific morning was gray and cloudy, which strangely didn't bother the Baudelaires, see most people believe that beaches and cloudy days don't go together, but Briny Beach was particularly crowded with tourists on sunny days and it was impossible to find a place to lay a blanket and sit. On the gray and cloudy day the Baudelaires had the beach to themselves to do what they liked.

Violet Baudelaire was the eldest, like most fourteen-year-olds, she was right handed and she rather used her right hand to skip rocks, an interesting activity she liked to do in Briny Beach, she was looking at the horizon with her hair tied up in a ribbon, which whomever knew Violet well could understand that she was thinking hard and was trying to keep her hair form distracting her. She had a real knack for inventing things and building strange artifacts.

Klaus Baudelaire, was the only boy, at Briny Beach he liked to examine creatures in tide-pools. Klaus was a little older than twelve, although he seemed to be thirteen and he wore glasses, which made him look intelligent. Well, he was intelligent. The Baudelaire family had an enormous library in their mansion; Klaus of course being only twelve, had not read all of the books but he had read a big amount of them, and not likely of a twelve-year-old he could be found more often in his parents library than in his own room.
I forgot to mention Klaus shared a particular characteristic with only one of his siblings.

Camille Baudelaire was Klaus' twin, so they were quiet similar, with Violet and Klaus she was also very intelligent, their parents always said that Violet was the family's inventor, Klaus was the researcher, Camille was the entertainer and Sunny was the biter.
Camille as the same age of Klaus was young for the amount of things she knew, unlike her siblings she was a capable musician and great with anything that had to do with entertaining a crowd, she could act, dance, sing and could play the piano and the harmonica which she always took with her.

Lastly but not least Sunny Baudelaire, the youngest child, she liked to bite things. She was an infant and very small for her age, however what she lacked in size she made up for her amazingly strong and sharp teeth. Sunny was at an age where one mostly speaks in an a series of unintelligent shrieks. Except from when she said words like "mommy" or "bottle" or "bite" most people didn't understand her.

For instance this morning she was saying "Yeck" over and over, which probably meant "look at that mysterious figure emerging from the fog." The eldest children noticed about it too, at the beginning the figure seemed scary. Klaus as we know was very wise and in this particular instance he said a very wise thing.

"It only seems scary..." he paused for a second before he continued... "because of all the mist." He was right because as the figure reached they understood that there was nothing to be scared of, it was someone they knew: Mr. Poe.

Mr. Poe was a friend of Mrs. and Mr. Baudelaire. So the children had met him multiple times at dinner parties. They remembered him because he always had a cold and he often excused himself to cough into his handkerchief.