Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth,in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle"s inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beaute in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.