Felix Aldric (Book 1)

Full Name: Felix Henri Clément Aldric

Date of Birth: 18 October 2003

Height: 6'0"

Title: His Highness Prince Felix

Voice: He talks the way other people breathe — easily, constantly, to everyone, without any apparent strategy. He is funny without working at it and charming without difficulty, which is the version of charm that actually lands. He asks questions and forgets the answers. He is generous with attention in the moment and does not always remember to bring it back the next day, and the difference between those two things has never once been explained to him.

Appearance: The shortest of the four brothers, and the only one who has never given it a second thought — being shorter than three men who are all conspicuously tall has struck him as a piece of trivia rather than a problem. Dark hair, worn long and shaggy, falling into his eyes and pushed out of them a dozen times an hour. Dark eyes under strong brows. The Aldric features are unmistakably there, but softened: he takes after his mother in the face, and the result is prettier than his brothers — a face that sells magazines, and has.

He dresses like someone going nowhere in particular — a flannel shirt left open over a white tee, dark jeans, a watch on a worn leather strap. All of it expensive, none of it announcing so; he simply has good clothes and wears them the way other people wear whatever was on the chair. He sits down the way most people fall over. Of the four brothers he is the one who photographs as though the camera arrived halfway through a conversation, because it usually did.

Personality: Warm, generous, genuinely likeable, and careless in the way of someone who has never once experienced scarcity — of money, of affection, of second chances. He does not mean harm. He causes it anyway, in small increments, mostly to people who have decided in advance to forgive him.

It shows most in who he dates. He becomes infatuated easily and is genuinely charmed, genuinely invested, genuinely certain — right up until the moment he isn't, at which point he is already halfway toward the next person without any sense of having crossed from one to the other. Nobody has ever held it against him for long. This may be the whole problem.

He is closest to Nicolas, almost three years ahead of him and the one person he calls without a reason. He adores his aunt Mathilde, who calls him her favorite in front of his brothers.

He is not stupid and he is not shallow, whatever the press has settled on. He is twenty-two and has never yet been required to be anything in particular, and nobody around him seems certain whether that is a kindness or a failure.

Background: The fourth son, the tabloids' favorite, and the only one of the brothers with nothing structural asked of him — no succession, no doctorate, no seat in a car that requires him somewhere every second weekend. He is what the family does when it runs out of jobs.

He spends the summers at the Résidence de la Côte, where the household has known him since he was small and has never entirely stopped treating him that way. Everyone who works there likes him. Nobody who works there relies on him.