Diable, Etienne

[Etienne Diable]

ABOUT THE CHARACTER

Name:
Etienne Diable

Age:
39

Gender:
Male

Class:
Potions

Celebrity:
Marc Warren


Facial Properties:

Etienne has chiseled features, set in a face that hovers between beauty and ugliness. He has a rather weak chin but compensates with strong facial structure higher up.
His hair is sleek and blond, and lays very fine on his head. He has managed to keep all of his hair up to this point, a fact that he is quite proud of.
Etienne's eyes are pale blue and very deep set. He has a slightly haunted look and the skin around the sockets is quite sunken. He gives the impression of a man who has not been able to get much sleep.
He has a reasonable suntan for his colouring, but has lost a lot of his colour since he moved from his much hotter country.


Physique:

Diable is not especially weedy or especially brawny. He is of average and unremarkable height, standing at around 5' 10''. He doesn't teach sport so his muscle tone isn't fantastic, but he could never be called fat, leaning much more towards a 'skinny' height/weight ratio.
He thinks himself too short and tries to wear robes to hide this face whenever possible. Black being the preferred colour.

Personality:

Etienne is not what many would call handsome, but he has a very attractive way about him. He is never without a cheeky smile and flirts with most of the female teachers in school. If he had owned any other personality, he would have fallen into the background very quickly. He is a pretty arrogant character at best. His walk can be more of a strut on most occasions, especially when he is trying to make a striking impression on people. He is the archetypal 'devil' character. Each move is calculated, and it is his belief that he can bend anyone to his will and way of thinking.

Most of this cheeky-devilish act is his way of hiding a very bruised soul. His upbringing was not a very happy one and the only way he could get people to give him the attention he had never really received at home was to be interesting all of the time. He does relax and show his true colours more often with his closest friends, but with those he doesn't consider buddies, he keeps up the act.

This rings true much of the time with the students he teaches. He is not a nice teacher, and never real feels any empathy with the children in his classes. He is so unlike them all he just sees most of them as annoying brats. He likes to bring down pupils a notch or two when he feels they are getting slightly too cocky. Most of his lessons are conducted in absolute silence, mostly because he likes to hear the sound of his own voice as often as possible, and so he doesn't have to deal with teenagers on any level that doesn't involve his subject.

But if anything, Etienne is fair. He despises bullying in any form and can catch a bully in the act as fast as blinking. Unusual for a devil, he will admit when he is in the wrong. But of course, le fantastique Etienne (!), is of course hardly ever wrong. For the hard life he's had, he has turned out quite well. At any rate he is a good teacher and is very knowledgeable about Potion-Making and Alchemy. He is good at making the hardest principles simple, but he can still get impatient very quickly.

[/b]

[li] Going out with his friends and getting absolutely hammered. A trait he has perhaps picked up from his father.
[/li][li] Giving detentions when he is in a bad mood. It always makes him feel ten times better. Especially if the student has done nothing wrong but is too scared to say anything.
[/li][li] Honeydukes chocolate, he really wants to know the potion they put in that stuff.
[/li][li] Walks on the beach. He has missed the warm coasts and white sand of his old home and feels that the coast that surrounds the British Isle doesn't deserve the name 'beach'. He spends most of his holidays near the sea and would love to take up the old muggle tradition of sailing if he ever had the time.

Dislikes:

[/li][li] Etienne has never liked people who moan. It's not that he thinks other people shouldn't be unhappy when they have a right to be, it just makes him so angry when extremely lucky witches and wizards whine about how awful their life has been. He always said at school - "If they could just be me for one day; coming home to a dad who's hardly noticed you left in the first place."
[/li][li] He's never really been a fan of cats either. He thinks they are elegant creatures but doesn't like the way they fix you with a stare. Leglimency has been performed on his once before - a horrible experience - and he would not like the sensation repeated because a cat happened to be looking at him.
[/li][li] Most students. They annoy him in all their vacuous giggliness. They just seem to have no ambition above securing a boyfriend or girlfriend. And their idea of fun revolves around buying sweets and passing stupid notes around the classroom. He has no favourite students, he hates everyone equally.
[/li][li] The fact his fortieth birthday is in three months.

[/li][/ul]

History:

Etienne, and almost all of his family before him, was born in France. He was born on the outskirts of a small town near the Mediterranean Coast called Grasse; he stayed there until the age of 11 when the long awaited scroll of parchment with the Beauxbatons seal arrived at his cottage.

This so far may sound as a pleasant upbringing, but all was not so. He lived with his father, Jaques Diable, alone and with no other relatives really coming over to visit. This made for an unhappy childhood as his father was an alcoholic and was to be found most nights, paralytic, screaming abuse at his young son. Jaques Diable had once been a kind and admired man, but after the death of Etienne's mother (Francois) had fallen into deep depression.

The loss hit him hard and at a time when he thought everything was going right for him. He had just been promoted (he worked in the head office of a large racing broom manufacturer), he was newly-wed to a beautiful girl from Paris and she was about to give birth to a baby boy. However, Francois became ill in the last stages of her pregnancy, and the labour was long and hard. She had been muggle-born and refused to have a birth assisted by magic, despite her husband's desperate pleadings. She died a few hours after giving birth, and lived just long enough to name her child.

Jaques never loved Etienne, the nurses had to shout at him to make him even take him home after he was born. He saw him always as the reason his wife had been taken from him. He keeps this as no secret from Etienne, and he has always known that the only reason he wasn't dumped off of the edge of a cliff, was in memory of his mother. Maybe someone else would have thought the child a last reminder of the mother who had passed on - but some wounds just run too deep to be healed completely. Jaques was the kind of man who needed to pass the buck to make sense of anything. His old self was gone, if Francois had still been alive, she wouldn't have recognised him as the man she used to be married to.

It couldn't quite be said that Etienne was not affected by his father's neglect. Some nights he would weep bitterly at the hardship of having no-one to love him. But he was naturally hardy, and he just simply had to learn most of his lessons the hard way. As he grew up he just stopped caring, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference anyway. He had his friends at school, and his girlfriend, Grace, gave him all the love he needed. His father still fed him and made him as comfortable as he could, but his drink problem squandered what little money they had left. They were never anything more than poor.

After Etienne left Beauxbatons, with top grades, he decided to take a break from the path his father wanted him to follow. Grace wanted to work with muggles, so they parted ways, and Etienne went travelling. Like most people his age, he was trying to find himself. He hated the ideas of being just another brick in society's wall, he wanted to do something a little more memorable. He would rather be a drunk like his father than spend the rest of his days in a tiny office, lecturing his work-colleagues on cauldron-thickness.

He spent about three years travelling around Thailand and The Philippines. There, at long last, he found his vocation; being of course, teaching. He had always thought he was of average intelligence, but as he explored different networks of wizards he discovered he was distinctly above average. Potions, having always been his favourite lesson at school, was the obvious choice. When the position came up for grabs at Hogwarts a few years ago, he couldn't believe his luck.


Resume:

Etienne is fluent in many languages including English, German and Italian. French is of course his mother tongue.

During his school career, Etienne was a prefect and went on to be 'Head Boy' in his eighth year. (Students in France stay on for one year longer, which is like Sixth Form in the Muggle World. It's optional and only a few subjects may be taken.)

In his final exams at Beauxbaton, he received the French equivalent of straight 'Outstandings' in almost all of his subjects. This is excluding only Divination, where he received an equivalent 'Acceptable'.

After school, Etienne spent five years travelling the world before he settled on the occupation of teacher. During his travels, he picked up many skills, muggle and wizarding, and has collected extensive knowledge of the Dark Arts from his year in Russia. He also spent a further six months as the student of the great Ein Blokohov, famous discoverer of uses of dragon blood and final attainer of the 'Philosopher's Stone'. This being the dream of all alchemists to create, a stone to turn all base metals to gold and producer of unlimited quantities of 'The Elixir of Life'.

Under Blokohov's study, Etienne learnt much about Potions, which had always been his favourite subject at school. It is because of the knowledge he collected that he finally settled on becoming a Potions Teacher.





ABOUT YOU
Name:
Jennie (I also play 'Tory Bloom'.)

Years of Experience:
One

Sample Post:

Even after having been at Hogwarts for five years, this being her sixth, Alice couldn't help but feel sentiments of homesickness. She missed the familiarity of walking into the Logan kitchen, her nostrils immediately catching the scent of cinnamon, the cinnamon of the candles. Her mother would always burn candles when she cooked; it was something that had become a normal occurrence, and now the young witch missed that smell, that familiar feeling of home. She hadn't seen her mother or her father in quite awhile now, nor had she gotten the opportunity to write to them. Things had just been so busy. So busy that she didn't even have time for her family? Alice questioned her own motives and only ended up with an unsettling feeling in her stomach. She wasn't fond of feeling queasy, so gathering a piece of parchment and a quill, the young woman decided to quell her misgivings by writing her mother.

Dear Mother,
How are you? I'm sorry that I haven't written much, especially due to my absence this summer. I dearly miss you and Father and desperately wish to hear from you soon...

As the couple lines were tidily scrawled on the page, Alice paused for a moment, putting down her quill. Why was this so incredibly difficult? It wasn't as if her parents had disowned her; they just hadn't seen her in awhile. Alice had always been an emotional individual, and such feelings seemed to be taking hold of her at the current moment. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes and she quickly wiped them away. Why can't I do this? she thought silently to herself, gazing at the largely blank sheet of parchment that sat in front of her. They're my parents. They love me. Yet try as she might, Alice couldn't push the unsettling feeling that lurked in her stomach away. Thus, she signed the short message with Love, Alice and tied it with a small piece of gold ribbon. Something was better than nothing.

Wiping her eyes one last time, the young Hufflepuff climbed out of the common room through the portrait hole, instantly hearing the click of her Mary Jane shoes in the corridor. Everything else seemed dead silent, and truthfully, it unnerved her. She knew that plenty of other students were around, yet it most certainly didn't seem that way. Click - click - click. As she made her way to the Owlery, her footsteps seemed to become rhythmic as her mind whirled with a myriad of thoughts. She was only mailing a letter, for Merlin's sake! Why was she acting so paranoid? Perhaps it was because that so many things had been bothering her lately and she was forced to keep aforesaid things hidden. Or perhaps it was just her nature. Either way, Alice had now reached the stairs leading up to the Owlery. Quickening her steps, she practically ran until she reached the top.

Great wizards, it was even quieter up here. Not being able to stand the silence, Alice hastily adhered her message to a tawny barn owl that she usually assigned delivering her messages to. He always completed his job, yet not without an ornery goodbye. As she turned to leave, the owl nipped at the young woman's fingers, then proceeding to fly off. Alice didn't want to linger any longer - she carefully headed back down the seemingly endless flight of stairs in pursuit of heading back to the Hufflepuff Common Room. However, that was halted by her lack of focus; in her hurry, she neglected to watch where she was going. Thus, she ran right into someone...a someone that she hadn't talked to in years. "Um..hello Alice."

Severus Snape. Alice hadn't conversed with him in what seemed like ages, a fact that she somewhat regretted. They had dated briefly around four years ago, but that had only lasted until Severus had broken it off. Alice was still a little bitter about that. "Severus," the young woman spoke stiffly, her eyes raising to settle on his face. He had changed - they both had. "What are you doing here?"

Other:
*edited*
[/blockquote]

[Abbie Chalk]

Very good except that Beauxbatons is an all-girls school.
How could he have gone there?

[Etienne Diable]

I'm afraid you're mistaken. There's plenty of references in the books to there being boys at Beauxbatons. Parvati and Padma Patil take up with a whole group of them when they get bored of the rather preoccupied Harry and Ron at the Yule Ball.

Oh and I've corrected all the annoying typos...

[Abbie Chalk]

Taken From Wikipedia:

In the film adaptation of The Goblet of Fire, it is implied that Beauxbatons is an all-girls' school. This differs from the book: male Beauxbatons students are clearly mentioned in The Goblet of Fire novel[1]. Hogwarts student Parvati Patil even briefly dates a Beauxbatons boy.

You are correct.

Accepted