The Secret Garden - Mind map AF

The Secret Garden

Index

Author and main themes

Characters

Plot, genre and setting

Vocabulary

Main themes

Family legacy Religion

AND

G.K. Chesterson

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Characters

Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris police

Ivan, Valentin’s servant and inspector

A noble English men who is very cautious about his daughter’s future and marriage; alongside the other Galloway, despises Commandant O’Brien. He is the person who finds the body in the garden..

Very devoted to serving his master and doesen’t doubt him for just a second; if Valentin works on the public aspect of his job, Ivan works on the private parts such as keeping the castle going and even doing private investigations.

He is a professional French inspector who, even if he doesen’t like them, arranges executions for the criminals who he ruthlessly pursuits. He is a politician known for his mitigation on sentences for the criminals and one of the great humanitarian French thinkers. He doesn’t like the Christian religion.

Lady Margaret, Galloway’s daughter

Dr. Simon, a French scientist

Father Brown

A young lady with a noble etiquette who stands up for herself and doesen’t turn her head when she see injustices. She is the witness who protects O’Brien from the accusations made against him.

He represents the realistic side of the French freethinkers, as we can see when he talks with father brown towards the end. Other than that, he helps with the autopsy of the dead bodies

He is not very relevant at the start of the story, he plays a very passive role and shows to be unemotional to most circumstances. Only towards the end does he become a medium to get to the truth of the case.

Commandant O’Brien

Julius K. Brayne, an American multi-millionaire

An Irish man who went to France after some economic problems. He had known the Galloways by the youth but it is not told why they despise him.

He is known for being a weird figure in terms of what religion he supports, since he had made donations to different religions such as Christianity. He likes anyone who is “progressive” by his point of view.

Plot, genre and setting

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Valentin lives in an old house surrounded by high walls with only one entrance and exit to get in and out of the house. One night he his having guests over for dinner, he unfortunately arrives late since he was coming back from an execution. The guests are: the Galloways, Commandant O’Brien, Dr. Simon and Father brown.

Between them there is a special guest, Julius K. Brayne who is known for recently having donated some money to different religion groups. Worried that O’Brien was tampering with her daughter, Lord Galloway arrives at the garden in the back of the house while passing by his daughter. There he sees O’Brien going in by a window but then he notices that there is a beheaded corpse of an uninvited guest in the garden. Every man is called to help with the situation and Valentine uses is professionalism to tell everyone what to do. Ivan thought he had recognized the face of the beheaded man. After they bring the corpse inside, he decides to call O’Brien to understand the situation, but the daughter of Lord Galloway speaks in his defences and so every suspect is lifted from him.

However, O’Brien had left his sword and scabbard on a table earlier that night and now the sword was missing. Shortly after it is discovered that Julius Brayne had escaped from the house leaving O’Brien’s sword in some bushes near the road to Paris. The mystery gets even more confusing when they find Brayne’s head in the Seine. The truth is hard to find since it’s impossible that the dead guest got inside the house passing by Ivan who always watches the front hall where the entrance is located. Then, out of nowhere, Father Brown gets enlighten by an unknown entity about what happened that night. Valentin despised the catholic church and, discovering that Julius Brayne wanted to make some donations to it, he wanted to kill him. So he lured him in the garden, distracted him with some sword play and then beheaded him with a clean cut. He then used the criminal’s head he got from the execution he did yesterday and replaced it with Julius’s head. He then threw the head and the sword out of the wall.Clarified what happened, they decide to go search for Valentin in his office, only to find that he had killed himself with some pills that probably contained cyanide.

Vocabulary

The phrases tend to be a bit long and have some divulgations in them, whether with comas or lines. The vocabulary isn’t a common one, some words used are older and typically not used in a day to day conversation.

The secret Garden is a crime and drama novel that takes most likely place between 1900 and 1910, seeing as telephones already existed and the death penalty was still legal in France.

He was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, a literary and art critic. Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and wrote on apologetics.