Playby: Felicity Jones
Character Basics
Full Name: Gaëlle Faustine Beringer
Age: 24
Magical Status: Witch
Relative Ability Was Inherited From: Mother
Level of Skill: Beginner
Prophecies Recorded: The outcome of a tough Quidditch match in a small Parisian league (1989), a series of cauldron accidents in Lyons (1993), and the healthy birth of a foal on a neighboring family's farm (1994)
Country of Citizenship: France
Profession: Store clerk at Les Poètes Maudits in Bergues, France
Appearance: The first things people notice about Gaëlle are her bright green eyes that are always wide with curiosity. She has soft, dark brown hair that she usually wears down around her shoulders. Only rarely or if it's a busy day in the shop does she pull her hair back and into a ponytail. She's an average height for a woman, around 5' 4'' and wears what would be called "cutsey" clothes when she isn't wearing her beloved overalls which she wore on her family's farm when she lived in France
Magical Ability
Mother's Magical Status: Witch
Father's Magical Status: Muggle
Strongest Ability: Divination
Weakest Ability: Defense spells
Wand: Poplar, peacock feather, 9 1/8 inches
Character Story
Personality: Gaëlle is a very, very quiet girl. She keeps to herself mostly and she is very easy to impress and entertain. She thinks even the lamest jokes are funny since she believes she's not very funny herself. She's not confident in her skills as a witch nor as a seer. Gaëlle often fears her sights and tries her best to stop them. She loves helping others, however, and is the picture perfect representative for customer service which makes her a valuable member of the Maudits team.
Strengths: Curious, open-minded, polite
Weaknesses: Indecisive, cowardly, absent-minded
Previous Employment: She worked in the farmer's market in Anjou, France where her family's farm was located. She sold fresh beef from their cattle and various crops.
School Attended: Beauxbatons Academy of Magic
Graduation Year: 1990
Ability Manifestations: Gaëlle recently discovered her abilities and she uses that term loosely. Her first premonition came when she was sixteen, a year before she graduated from Beauxbatons. She was doing work until a headache suddenly came upon her. Her headache last for two hours until that's when it happened - she received a vision, foggy, of the winning team for the Minor League of Paris Quidditch final. Ever since then, her other two other premonitions have also started with massive migraines. These leave her incapable of interacting with people and she requires total silence and isolation when she receives a vision.
Personal History: Gaëlle Faustine was born to Benoît and Chantal Beringer on April 30, 1972 on their farm in Anjou, France. Gaëlle grew up knowing all about farm animals and other things that required the farm to be successful and never let them grow hungry. From a young age, as with her other siblings, she woke up every morning at five and began the day's work. She helped feed the chickens, milk the cows, and care for the baby goats. The goats were her absolute favorites in her work. She was also homeschooled. Her father knew about her mother's special abilities as a witch and they were only used briefly around the house - if Chantal was feeling particularly rushed about dinner while having to take care of seven children, she always charmed some objects in the house to keep the children entertained while she finished cooking. Her mother, though, was an even rarer specimen in the magical community. Chantal was a Seer, an ability that apparently ran through the women in her family. It only affected one of the girls if there were more than one daughter born. Gaëlle had an older sister.
After years of being homeschooled and spending time on the farm and making occasional trips into the town to sell their produce and meat, Gaëlle joined her brothers and sister at Beauxbatons Academy of Magic in the south of France. It was a very different culture for her, coming from such a humble background where getting dirty was considered part of your day's work. Here everything was clean and cleanliness was adored. It was safe to say that it took Gaëlle a few good years to get a hang of things there. She was a quiet girl and made acquaintances, but she could hardly call anyone her friend. It wasn't that she didn't like any of them; she just didn't find anyone she could click with. From the beginning, her professors and her parents could see that divination was her strong suit. It was definitely the Seer blood running through her, but Adelaïde was just as good. Gaëlle could tell that her mother and her grandmother were waiting to see whom it was that got the Seer ability.
Nothing came of their expectations until Gaëlle's sixth year. Up until that point, her mother had been fretting that maybe neither of her daughters had inherited the ability which was certainly going to cause a problem. Both she and Gaëlle's grandmother had received their abilities when they were twelve or thirteen. But it came for Gaëlle when she was sixteen years old. She was sitting her a table in her common room, doing homework, when she suddenly got a pounding headache. The girls in the room took her to the infirmary where she got a potion to calm it, but the potion didn't work. Gaëlle's headache started to get worse and worse until it became hard for her to even see. She threw up a few times during the course of this headache. At the peak of it, when she thought her head was honestly going to explode, Gaëlle received a vision: the favorite team in the Parisian Quidditch minor league final was going to lose big time to the underdog opponent. After her vision, the headache slowly subsided until she slept the rest of it away.
Chantal was so happy that finally one of her daughter's showed the gift, but Gaëlle was anything but happy. Now that she was a confirmed seeing, having gone through registration in the French Ministry of Magic, people stayed away from her. They were afraid that she'd predict their deaths or other misfortunes. They didn't understand that Gaëlle could neither stop nor influence her visions. After she graduated from Beauxbatons, she moved back in with her parents. It was an okay thing, but Gaëlle found herself not able to be around her mother. She was the one who'd cursed her with this "gift." She had to get out of that house. Adelaïde, whom was thirty and married at the time, had long since moved out of the farm and went to university. Muggle things always attracted Adelaïde so the girl really took a shine to banking and economics. Now Gaëlle found her sister in Bergues, a city on the Belgian-French border with a degree and a job at a Swiss bank. Her husband was a Muggle and a very prominent business figure as well. Since the two of them stayed in Switzerland during the busy season and only visited their home in Bergues in the summer, Adelaïde told Gaëlle that she could stay there. There were plenty of spaces in town where she could get a job.
The move was daring, but Gaëlle did it. She packed up what little belongings she had and went up to northern France and settled down. At her young age, she began looking for work and found it in a small, family-owned bookshop. It was quiet enough for her to enjoy it and not get caught up in busy city life. Foolishly, she thought that maybe she wouldn't be too good of a Seer and she went a few years without another vision until one in 1993 and then one following in 1994. Both times she'd been plagued with migraines that left her unable to remember chunks of her days those years.
