Tag Archives: Paris

Who Killed the Duke?: Blood Royal

04 Monday Jun 2018

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Review: Blood Royal, by Eric Jager
Little, Brown, 2014. 316 pp. $29

One cold night in 1407, assassins attack Louis, Duke of Orléans, on a Parisian street and leave his dead, mutilated body in the mud. The news shocks Paris to the core, and no wonder. Louis was not only brother to King Charles VI and one of four richest, most powerful peers of the realm. He was also the de facto king whenever Charles slipped into “fits of madness,” what today would be called schizophrenia. Since those fits happened often and could last months or years, Louis was the king’s right hand as well as his nearest blood relative, which makes his murder an attack on the throne itself. Is this an isolated crime, people wonder, or a prelude to more violence, even civil war?

Blood Royal proves the old adage about truth being stranger than fiction. The killers know their man, for they set upon Louis after he makes a regular nocturnal visit to his sister-in-law’s palace. Was he actually sleeping with Queen Isabeau? Could King Charles, in a lucid moment, have decided to kill him in revenge? If so, Charles was one of many cuckolded husbands in Louis’s wake, and though he often got away with it because of the rich gifts he lavished on these men, he was also known to delight in shaming them. A knight from Picardy named Albert de Chauny, for example, swore undying enmity because of an incident that became so infamous that the great nineteenth-century painter Eugène Delacroix memorialized it on canvas.

Delacroix’s painting, The Duke of Orléans Showing His Mistress, 1825 (courtesy Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But whoever plotted to kill Louis could have had any number of motives. The duke of Orléans was power-hungry and flamboyant in displaying his wealth through absurdly lavish entertainments and vanity building projects. To pay for his excesses, he helped himself to the royal treasury, like as not inflicting new taxes that made him extremely unpopular. So if there was one logical suspect in his murder, there were dozens.

The man tasked with unraveling this intricate, politically volatile mystery is the provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville. This is the part of Blood Royal that I like best, the process of investigation that reveals as much about the time and place as it does about the crime. The witnesses include a cross-section of the populace — a cobbler’s wife, water carriers, barbers, an architect’s wife and daughter, a baker, and so on. By examining their testimony, recorded on a parchment lost for more than two centuries, Jager reconstructs the crime as it unfolds; relates fascinating, relevant sidelights about the witnesses’ professions; decides who answers forthrightly and who are trying too hard to save their skins; and why, with so many onlookers, Guillaume has such trouble identifying the assassins. (Hint: Ordinances regarding the nightly curfew and fire prevention are partly to blame.) Most remarkable, perhaps, is that Guillaume prefers to sweat the details of investigation and rely on logic and observation rather than torture the witnesses, which he could easily have done instead.

Throughout the narrative, Jager shows a vivid grasp of everyday life in fifteenth-century Paris, a city of one hundred thousand people. I particularly like this passage describing the Châtelet, where Guillaume conducts his inquiry:

… legal documents lay piled up throughout the old fortress, stacked on wooden tables and writing desks, sorted onto shelves, cubbyholed in armoires, and stuffed into storerooms, along with the various tools used to make them — goose quills widened and hardened by heat, silver penknives, black-stained ink pots, pumice for smoothing parchment, and polished wooden rulers and shiny metal styli for scoring straight lines across freshly cut sheets of white, virgin calfskin. Whole herds of cows and hillsides full of sheep had been slaughtered and skinned to make these records of human misdeeds, entire flocks of geese had been plucked, and huge numbers of oak galls had been laboriously collected and boiled down to produce barrels of ink.

The unmasking of the murderers comes as a slight anticlimax – history is unkind to dramatic convention, here — but Jager more than makes up for it by recounting what happens afterward. The civil war that ensues offers Henry V of England the chance he’s been waiting for to invade, and the reader quickly learns how gross a propaganda job Shakespeare did to glorify “warlike Harry.” Likewise, the powerful duke of Burgundy, whom history knows as Jean sans Peur (John the Fearless) could as well have been nicknamed Jean sans Scrupules.

I could have done without the “must have felt” that intrudes on the narrative. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m with Barbara Tuchman on this one. If the historical record doesn’t say how someone felt, the historian has no business inventing it; let the reader draw the inference.

But Blood Royal is a fabulous book. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Spy Family: Paris Spring

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Paris Spring, by James Naughtie
Overlook, 2016. 320 pp. $27

Will Flemyng, who works undercover for the British Embassy in Paris, is accosted on the métro by an East German agent named Kristof. At first, Will wonders whether Kristof is willing to trade information or change sides, and since it’s April 1968, and talk of democracy in Prague has the Soviet bloc on edge, Kristof’s sudden appearance offers possibilities.

Or does it? A subsequent rendezvous turns testy when Kristof threatens to expose Will’s brother, Abel, who spies for the United States, as a traitor. Will refuses to believe him or be bullied. But he also keeps his own counsel, because this is family, and the Flemyngs are close, matter of state or no. So Will doesn’t tell his boss, Freddy Craven, all he should, and there too lie emotional ties. Freddy’s like a father to Will, an older man in ill health who’s shown him the ropes of tradecraft, and for whom Will would risk anything.

Meanwhile, the student population has fomented rebellion, and the streets are boiling. The embassy is expected to watch these events carefully, and in return, with so much focus on Paris, any diplomatic mistake will quickly become public knowledge. Freddy, like any sensitive soul, realizes something’s up with Will, but he doesn’t know what. A love affair that ended a few months before? The tensions of the job? But before that question can be resolved, Grace Quincy, a world-famous journalist who could pry secrets from a clam without having to open it, blows into Paris. Will, knowing that Grace is trouble and that her flirtatious attentions mean she’s digging for information, nevertheless invites her over. But before that happens, she’s murdered at Père-Lachaise cemetery, of all places, and the police quickly learn that Will’s name is on her dance card. It’s obvious that one side or other had her killed, for reasons of espionage, but who, and why?

Pierre_Mendès_France, the Socialist politician who had helped extricate France from Vietnam, was willing to form a coalition government in May 1968 and listen to the student demands. But the Gaullists increased their power in the next election (courtesy Dutch National Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

Naughtie excels at portraying Paris under siege and the student protests:

. . .the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black.…Someone was cooking oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place looked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the jukebox with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide.

But good as that is, it’s just the vivid background. The real story involves two families. First, it’s the Flemyngs, and how the brothers balance their feelings and ties against the secrecy demanded by their work, which affects a third, older brother, Mungo. Until reading Paris Spring, I didn’t know I wanted an older brother named Mungo, but it helps that this one is supportive, caring, and paternal, without being pushy or controlling, the family mediator. Mungo comes to know Freddy as well, so there’s plenty of warmth to go around in this coldest of cold-blooded professions.

The other family consists of Will’s allies, foremost among them Freddy, of course, but also others encountered during his travails over Kristof. Rivalries exist, to be sure, but even as temporary friends, they stick together. They know better than anyone else what the power of secrets can do, especially those that may or may not exist, except in rumor. As Freddy tells Mungo, who’s a historian, “You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes.”

Naughtie’s grasp of spydom as a brethren echoes John le Carré, and the same could be said of his focus on characterization. Paris Spring fails to emulate the master in that it resolves with a couple turns that may be too neat; another neatness is how indulgent Freddy is with Will, which strains credulity at times. Nevertheless, Paris Spring is an excellent thriller, elegant in the way le Carré’s are — as few moving narrative parts as possible, a focus on motive instead, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. Bravo.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Hustles and Bustles: To Capture What We Cannot Keep

16 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: To Capture What We Cannot Keep, by Beatrice Colin
Flatiron, 2016. 289 pp. $26

Imagine meeting the love of your life on a hot-air balloon ride, and that he happens to be the chief lieutenant to Gustave Eiffel, just then (1886) about to begin construction on the tower that will become famous. This is the engaging premise to a well-plotted, hard-edged romantic novel of literary credentials that vividly delivers both the luxury and seamy side of Paris during the Belle Époque. What more could you want?

Newspaper caricature of Gustave Eiffel, reflecting the storm of criticism for having compared his as-yet unbuillt structure to the pyramids (Le Temps, February 14, 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Caricature of Gustave Eiffel, who compared his unbuilt tower to the pyramids (Le Temps, 14 February 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Well, a couple things, actually, but I don’t want to carp, since I thoroughly enjoyed To Capture What We Cannot Keep and suspect that you will too. Even so, let’s get one thing out of the way, the unfortunate title, which evokes All the Light We Cannot See. Authors don’t always decide their titles, and if this one sounds like pandering, Colin succeeds in at least one respect where Anthony Doerr, her presumed predecessor, failed. There’s no treacle here, nothing that even remotely resembles it. The only obvious similarity is that both books take place in France.

Caitriona Wallace (a histrionic name, I think), is a thirty-year-old Scottish widow reduced to playing chaperone for the beloved niece and nephew of a wealthy Glaswegian industrialist on their grand tour of Europe. Shortly before the trio are to leave Paris, Caitriona, known as Cait, takes that fateful balloon ride and meets–or sort of meets–Émile Noguier, an engineer whose direct appraisal seems less than wholly gentlemanly and thus very exciting.

And so things turns out, but, as in any worthwhile romance, the course of true love never does run smooth. The memory of Cait’s marriage pains her, but where most people assume that her husband’s untimely death is what troubles her, that’s not what hurts most, the details of which take a good while to emerge. More importantly, though Cait recognizes the unfairness behind the sexual double standard and dislikes corsets and bustles, she feels bound to uphold propriety, especially since her two young charges are determined to find trouble. As for Émile, he too feels pressured, with a domineering mother and a family tradition on one side, and a taste for Montmartre artists’ models on the other.

I like how Colin uses Paris, a city she understands and loves, to embody her characters’ outlook and desires:

Children threw rocks into dirty brown puddles, while girls only a few years older, with strings of imitation pearls around their necks and jewels of rain in their hair, waited in doorways for customers. It had shocked Cait at first, the poverty, the brazenness with which young women sold themselves, the casual attitude toward destitution and morality.

For Émile, building the tower, to him a work of art unlike any known before, requires a lot of ugliness before beauty can arise:

The men had quarried down through damp clay and wet sand, through mud studded with broken crockery and shards of glass, with splinters of animal bone and flakes of flint, and now the air reeked of decayed things, of sulfur and rot. Cutting across everything, however, making your eyes water and the world intermittently gray and indistinct, were clouds of woodsmoke. The fires seemed to burn day and night, purifying and polluting in equal measure.

With prose like this and a keen eye for psychological moments, Colin conveys the fullness of her protagonists’ inner lives and how convention keeps them from seeking what will make them happy. Several secondary characters also emerge in full, such as a conniving beauty of easy virtue and a gift for manipulating the naive, and Eiffel himself–narcissistic, generous, but always looking out for number one. Colin turns a few clichés inside out and keeps you guessing as to the resolution; “no; and furthermore” flourishes here.

But sometimes to resolve the obstacles she places, she leans on a minor contrivance or two of her own, most particularly the cardboard niece and nephew. Alice is a twit of great beauty but no culture or manners who seems completely obsessed with getting engaged at age nineteen. If she’s to be a twit, at least she can show some individuality about it. Ditto her brother Jamie, a spendthrift wastrel who causes a great deal of harm without even trying.

Finally, I wish Colin had fleshed out one point of history, a scandal regarding an attempt to build a canal in Panama, which ruined Ferdinand de Lesseps, entrepreneur behind the Suez Canal, and almost dragged down Eiffel too. The failure bankrupted an entire swath of French society, involved government bribery–causing no end of trouble for the still-young Third Republic–and incited a wave of anti-Semitism. I understand why Colin didn’t want to get enmeshed in the Panama affair, yet I think she might have hinted at how deeply the scandal roiled the country, beyond mere mention of lost fortunes and how Eiffel suddenly lost his social cachet.

All the same, To Capture What We Cannot Keep will satisfy legions of readers.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

How Not to Write a Mystery: Death at the Paris Exposition

13 Thursday Oct 2016

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Review: Death at the Paris Exposition, by Frances McNamara
Allium, 2016. 253 pp.

The Paris Exposition of 1900 was a landmark, a great show of scientific, artistic, technological, and cultural marvels. It marked the turn of what many people believed would be a century of unheard-of progress, peace, and inventiveness. Its great engineering feat, the Eiffel Tower, has become an internationally known symbol, and the exhibit halls built for the fair remain among the city’s finest.

Lucien Baylac's image of the 1900 Paris Exposition, digitized in 2007 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lucien Baylac’s image of the 1900 Paris Exposition, digitized in 2007 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

So any novel titled Death at the Paris Exposition has much thematic material to draw on, a milieu tailor-made for fiction, and enough potential characters to fill every café on the Champs-Elysée. Unfortunately, McNamara makes little use of the resources available, and the result, at times, reads like a primer on how not to write a mystery–or any novel, for that matter.

The premise works well enough. Bertha Palmer, a Chicago socialite, has been named to the American commission to the exposition, the only woman to hold that post. Mrs. Palmer names Emily Chapman, a university lecturer, as her social secretary, so that Emily, her physician husband, Stephen, and their three children occupy part of the splendid house the Palmers have rented. More to the point, you can’t attend the formal luncheons, dinners, or soirées without the proper clothes, so Emily gets a new wardrobe at the world-famous House of Worth, on Mrs. Palmer’s dime. I like how McNamara conveys the couturier’s way of doing business, and the complex etiquette involved in fitting a client for a dress.

It’s at Worth that Bertha’s splendid pearl necklace disappears, and from there, the crimes multiply. Before long, a young woman is found strangled, and the French police suspect Mrs. Palmer’s son, Honoré, for the theft and the murder. Emily, who has solved cases in Chicago (this is McNamara’s sixth novel about her), sets about finding the truth. And the first place to look seems to be the confluence between fortune-hunting Europeans and Americans hoping to land an aristocratic marriage partner, a time-honored theme straight out of Henry James.

But Death at the Paris Exposition fails to deliver. Not one of the characters has angles or edges; everyone behaves true to form, which subverts any mystery. Honoré lives up to his name–respectful to ladies, dutiful to his parents, moderate in habits–so he can’t possibly be guilty, no matter how many times McNamara has Emily pretend to consider it. Conversely, another character acts and sounds like a fake–he’s clearly not an aristocrat–yet nobody seems to notice. And when he’s finally exposed, he drops the mask and reverts to “criminal” type, showing a “feral” expression, a cliché that thuds almost as loudly as the group scene convened for the purpose.

As a detective, Emily repeats rote, clunky phrases like “I needed to make the inspector turn his attentions away from Bertha and her family”; and whenever she mulls the case, she goes in circles, restating facts the reader knows. I’ve always thought that the pleasure of reading a mystery is matching wits with the sleuth. But if she doesn’t have any, where’s the challenge?

Nineteen-hundred was historically rich, and Paris is, well, Paris. Yet here, time and place are missing in action. McNamara spends paragraphs describing the clothes, but not a word on how it feels to wear them, aside from whether the women think they look attractive in them. Amazingly, even the exposition gets short shrift. Nothing in the story says, “This is 1900,” either in daily life or current events. No one breathes a word about the Boxer Rebellion, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the assassination of the king of Italy (one of many by anarchists in those years), the American war in the Philippines, or McKinley’s reelection, to name only a few current issues that might have gotten Emily’s attention. As for contemporary mores, I can believe that she’d buy an English translation of an Émile Zola novel, but she’d have known that respectable women weren’t supposed to, and yet that never occurs to anyone. And since when do men wear hats in a Catholic church, as one character does at Notre Dame?

But it’s the prose that gives me the strongest sense of carelessness. When McNamara’s Parisians speak English (and a surprising number do), they sound like cartoon Frenchmen who have no real grasp of their native tongue. Sadly, that linguistic misery has plenty of company in the overall narrative. The author repeatedly confuses who and whom, writes sentences whose clauses fail to connect (sometimes humorously), and uses commas as if they were taxed. If you care about the art and craft of writing, a book like this can only be painfully disappointing–and I think McNamara’s editor bears a good part of the blame.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Is Not a Book Review

15 Friday Jul 2016

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This past Tuesday night, my wife and I dined at a small Parisian restaurant we’d stumbled on almost thirty years ago, and which, I’m happy to say, is just as good as it was then. Since we were feeling romantic and happy with the world, I told the maître d’ how his establishment had figured in our lives. Our first visit happened the same week I asked my wife to marry me; our second, some years later, occurred when she was pregnant with our elder son.

The maître d’ thanked us profusely. “What you’re telling me gives me goose bumps,” he said. He added that what mattered most to his colleagues and him was the passion to prepare and serve food the way it should be done. I said that what was on the plate proved the point; he beamed and said he was touched.

Two days later, back in Seattle, we read about the massacre at Nice. I can’t tell you how revolted, heartsick, and incredulous I feel, how outraged. Among other things, to me, France represents the love for and appreciation of the beauty that makes life more fulfilling. It’s as the maître d’ said, the understanding that even a snippet of the everyday should be created just so, as if there were no excuse for ugliness. Not that there’s no ugliness in France; of course there is, and plenty of it, not least the bigotry and xenophobia that poison public discourse. But you’ll also see there the passion this man was referring to: a moment, an interaction, a way of being that says, This is what life’s about.

During our trip, we encountered many examples of this. A Tunisian market-stall merchant in Dijon urged us to sample his olive oil, easily the best I’ve ever tasted, and when I said so, he wound up telling us about his life and why he’d emigrated to France. An elderly couple who run a bed-and-breakfast in Bourges embraced us when our three-day stay ended and said they’d miss us. Why? I think it’s because we expressed admiration for their city and the care with which they renovated the ancient building that’s their home.

The Paris métro, like any other hole in the ground through which trains run incessantly, is noisy, grimy, and sooty, and the ads are loud and garish, like ads everywhere. But take a closer look at them, and you’ll see that their borders are ornate ceramic tile. Who thought to bother, and why? Who decided, way back when, to name the stations after historical figures or events and decorate them accordingly? Then again, back further when, who thought that a cathedral spire needed meticulously carved ornaments so high above the ground?

The terrorists’ response? Blow it up. Run it over. Shoot it. Hate it. Like any sociopath who fears himself impure and worthless, they see only filth, depravity, sin, which must be wiped out. A café, for instance, isn’t a social hub but a place where men and women mingle freely over alcohol. But it takes a particular sickness to translate that belief into action, to decide that a certain lifestyle, and the freedom to choose it, aren’t merely different or new but an insult, one that can be assuaged only by murder.

I grieve for Nice, for France, for the world we live in.

Deception: The Paris Winter

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $26

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But Maud Heighton, the protagonist of this excellent thriller set in 1909, can’t help herself. She’s slowly starving in Paris, garden of earthly delights, while learning to become a painter at l’Académie Lafond. All Maud’s classmates are women, which keeps predatory bohemians out, but Lafond charges his female students double what he would if they were male–the image of respectability costs extra, you see.

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Not that anyone of the male persuasion believes in that respectability; Maud’s brother, a lawyer back in England, disapproves of his sister’s choice to live in that sinful city, and many men freely offer their opinion that art is a masculine preserve. So as Maud’s meager funds drip away to finance her education, and as she covertly lunches on the tiny cakes served at class sessions, she’s terribly alone. She loves Paris, but it’s out of reach–and so is Maud, a proper Englishwoman who keeps her distance, living in her books and sketch pads.

In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. . . . The streets were almost empty–only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in the Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

But Maud can’t remain impervious and aloof forever. Tanya Koltsova, a wealthy Russian classmate from Lafond’s, befriends her, determined to show her a good time and feed her enough to restore color to her cheeks. Naturally, Maud’s too proud to accept charity, but through Tanya, she learns of a situation as a lady’s companion. Sylvie Morel, a pale, blonde beauty with a sensual face who could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones, is very sickly, and her older brother wants someone to coax her into the world and help her gain her strength. How perfect for Maud; it’s precisely what she needs for herself. In return for her room, board, and a princely wage, all she need do is entice Sylvie away from her sickbed, teaching her English and giving her drawing lessons.

There are complications, however. As Morel confides, Sylvie is addicted to opium, which he indulges within limits, hoping to wean her off the drug. Yet he praises Maud’s efforts to get her out and about and insists that he can see real progress.

Then a madwoman pounds on the door one day when Morel’s out–as he usually is–and forces her way into the apartment. Morel’s a thief, the woman declares, and Sylvie’s not his sister but his wife. The Morels have ruined her life, besmirched her good name. Naturally, Maud can’t believe a word and is horrified that she couldn’t ward her off; luckily, the concierge and her husband arrive in time and threw the madwoman out.

I probably don’t have to tell you that things unravel quickly from there, and that the Morels aren’t who they seem. The Paris Winter tells a gut-wrenching, dark story while exploring the theme of how money imprisons people who have too little or too much of it. I like the storytelling very much–Robertson makes skillful use of “no; and furthermore”–and most of her characters, who come from all walks of life. Tanya’s poor-little-rich-girl act wears at times, and I wish the author had given her more than a good heart, a taste for beautiful dresses, and a quest for what it means to marry for love. A worldview, maybe? But the weak link here is the Morels, who seem like sociopaths (especially Sylvie), and, as I’ve said before, I dislike thrillers or mysteries in which the villainy comes purely from psychological distortion.

Even so, I enjoyed The Paris Winter immensely.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Art and Seduction: Paris Red

07 Thursday May 2015

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Olympe, Edouard Manet, 1863. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Olympe, Edouard Manet, 1863-65. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Review: Paris Red, by Maureen Gibbon
Norton, 2015. 282 pp. $26

In a Paris still reeling from the recent war of 1870, two young women, teenagers still, share a tiny apartment and work as silver burnishers. It’s a demanding job but steady work, and Louise and Denise (called Nise) count themselves lucky to have each other’s friendship and a sound alternative to working the streets, however meager their wages. But they also dream of more, of being noticed, picked out from among the crowd.

One day, they pose before a shopwindow, holding drawing tablets, pretending to sketch what’s inside. A man approaches them, and a triangular flirtation begins. At first, Louise and Nise are careful not to push themselves forward, each concerned with not hurting the other; besides, they must at least pretend to play hard to get. But beneath the teasing, Louise senses a strong attraction between herself and the man, who calls himself Eugène, who has some money, has apparently seen the hard side of life, and who sometimes speaks with disarming, if not shocking, directness.

It all happens so easily, it seems, and yet Louise is the type to reflect on why, which is why I like this book:

 

It is about us. Something specifically about us. And I think we should not be surprised. It is what we wanted. With our tablets and our scheming, all the trying not to be ordinary–didn’t we want someone to notice us? To see we were different? . . . Because I do not feel ordinary. Or because I feel ordinary and different at the same time.

 

His name, as she finds out, is really Édouard Manet. Louise Victorine Meurent becomes his mistress, his model, and, to some extent, his muse. I didn’t recognize her name, but I certainly knew what she looked like, because she’s in two of my favorite Manet canvases, Olympe (on the book jacket) and Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Lunch on the Grass). Both created a stir for their frank sensuality and shocking directness. Having dug around a little, I also learn that Meurent became a painter too. Unlike what the novel suggests, she gravitated toward an older, more accepted style than his, which, ironically, earned her more favor than he from the official Salon.

Gibbon has imagined the artist-model relationship in fine emotional detail. I particularly like how she traces the currents that run between them, which don’t always follow the expected route. For one thing, Manet isn’t the absinthe-sodden, self-absorbed, irresponsible artist of lore, which allows him to appreciate Louise for herself, not just as an object. He’s always willing to listen to her, something that takes her by surprise. Just as important, as with the shopwindow scene, you can’t necessarily pinpoint who’s seducing whom, or what it’s for. As Louise observes, “It is not always so clear what someone wants, or what money can buy, or who exactly pays.” Without saying too much, I can tell you that between these two people, it’s more about art than sex, though there’s plenty of both.

The beginning feels a little romanticized, like a sepia photograph that’s been airbrushed. The Paris of Paris Red isn’t nearly as seamy as that of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s Painted Girls, and Louise, though she stints herself at times, seems relatively safe. The key word is relatively, however, because just as Louise has abandoned Nise, which troubles her (somewhat), she worries that Manet will abandon her. She may not starve or have to go on the street, for she has a skilled trade to fall back on. But she will lose her dreams and the connection to Manet on which they depend. As she says, money figures into it, but it’s not everything.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fiction That’s True: An Officer and a Spy

09 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2014. 425 pp. $28

As one character observes in this electrifying novel, “There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.” The fight he’s referring to concerns what may be the most infamous intelligence coverup in history, one that divided a nation and still stirs passions more than a century later.

This is the subject of An Officer and a Spy, not just a political thriller, but a primer on how to write one. History unfolds as it happened (mostly), and all the characters existed, which ups the stakes for the author. I’ve studied both the era and the case in detail, so while I read, I knew what was coming. Yet the novel drew me in so completely that I could hardly bear the tension.

In 1895, a captain attached to the French General Staff is convicted of having sold military secrets to Germany, for which he’s stripped of his rank in public and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The army, which has conducted its prosecution behind closed doors, is satisfied, though many officers wish that the law still allowed the guillotine for treason.

One or two connected with the case wonder whether the defendant received his legal due, strictly speaking. But nobody doubts that he’s guilty, and, well, he’s Jewish and has money, so to them, he’s doubly suspect. France has long been a hotbed of antisemitism–the word dates from the 1880s, of French coinage–and the army takes it on faith that Alfred Dreyfus was born to be a traitor.

Colonel Georges Picquart, 1906 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Colonel Georges Picquart, 1906 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Major Georges Picquart, who narrates the novel, is no exception, a career officer of impeccable credentials who believes fervently in the army he has served for almost twenty-five years. What’s more, he remembers Drefyus, whom he taught at the war college and never warmed to–the condemned man is priggish and arrogant, plainly ambitious, not above currying favor. For his minor role in the arrest, the prosecution, and the degradation ceremony, Picquart is promoted to colonel and given charge of the so-called Statistical Section, whose real work is counterintelligence. Even if you’ve never heard of Dreyfus, you just know Picquart will eventually run across something that changes his perspective. But you’ll have to wait, because Harris draws this process out like the thinnest, tautest wire.

Picquart, though ambitious himself–at forty, he’s the youngest colonel in the army–doesn’t want his new job. He thinks spying is dirty and loathsome, and he shudders at having to read Dreyfus’s private correspondence. But as a man of literary and artistic taste, he appreciates the style of these letters, and slowly begins, against his better judgment, to wonder whether the man’s protestations of innocence may, in fact, be genuine. Meanwhile, there’s dissension in Picquart’s office, which he at first ascribes to jealousy, but, over time, gathers there’s more to it. Just what it is, he can’t tell, until a new document comes through his hands.

I could probably tell you the whole story, and it wouldn’t matter; that’s how good this book is. It’s not just that Harris has a pitch-perfect sense of the time and place, or that he sets up reversals, the no-and-furthermore, at every turn. It’s how he sets them up, getting beneath the skins of major characters and minor, no matter which side, so that you see their motives, why they hold the principles they do, and how far they’re willing to go to uphold them–which is pretty far. So deeply does the Dreyfus case grip the country that there’s no such thing as a secret, a casual encounter, or an easy conversation among friends.

The corruption that seeps through everywhere, like the sewage that smells so rank in warm weather, all starts with a false assumption by military intelligence, responsible to no one but itself. Sounds familiar, no?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.