Revolution
Page 39
I also suggested that his name for the Concerto in A Minor—the Fireworks Concerto—was inspired by the selfless acts of a young woman named Alexandrine Paradis, who set off fireworks over Paris in the last days of the Revolution, and who’d left behind a diary.
I could hardly say it was because I let him listen to Zeppelin on my iPod.
My thesis, Alex’s diary—they both caused a huge flap. Before I even turned it in, I’d been interviewed about it by Le Monde, Die Zeit, the Guardian, and a lot of other international papers. The New York Times did a piece with this headline: Teenage Sleuth Solves Malherbeau Musical Mystery. The article was nice but the headline was kind of cringey. I mean, Vijay’s still calling me Nancy Douche.
This is how it happened. When Virgil brought me home in the wee hours, after a visit to a Paris emergency room, I told my father and G and Lili, who were all a bit freaked out, that I’d tripped and fallen by the Eiffel Tower. The next day, after I’d slept and recovered a bit, I gave G the diary. I showed him the secret compartment in the guitar case, and the miniature of Louis-Charles. And I told him about the roses in Amadé Malherbeau’s portrait, and how similar they were to the rose on the Auvergne coat of arms. I told him I thought Amadé Malherbeau might be Charles-Antoine d’Auvergne.
G was of course totally blown away. He read the diary immediately. He went to Amadé’s old house to look at the portrait. He took photos of it and compared them to the coat of arms. A few days later, I found myself driving to Auvergne with him and knocking on the door of the old château. We introduced ourselves to the elderly woman who opened it and G explained that we were trying to establish a connection between the last Comte d’Auvergne and the composer Amadé Malherbeau and were wondering if the château still contained any personal effects of the doomed comte and comtesse.
The woman, Madame Giscard, invited us in. She told us that an ancestor of hers had bought the château in 1814 from the Jacobin official who’d acquired it during the Revolution. She said that heating and plumbing had been installed in the late nineteenth century but that little else had been changed. She then brought us into the great hall and showed us several portraits that had been hanging there for as long as she could remember. G immediately recognized some of the people in the paintings, like Louis XIV and Napoléon Bonaparte.
While G checked out the paintings on one side of the hall, I looked on the other. I saw lots of faces and places I didn’t know, and then, to the right of a huge fireplace, I saw one I did know—Amadé’s. He was sitting in a chair, playing guitar. Next to him, writing at a table, was the same woman I’d seen painted in miniature—his mother. Behind them both, standing by a window that opened onto beautiful fields and hills, was his father, the Comte d’Auvergne. He was holding a red rose.
It was good to see Amadé again.
With Madame Giscard’s permission, G called in an art historian from the Louvre. The man studied both portraits—the one in the château and the one in Amadé’s Bois de Boulogne house—and stated that in his opinion, they depicted the same three people.
Madame Giscard also let G rummage in the attic. He found papers that had belonged to the Comte d’Auvergne—including account books with payments made to various music masters for lessons for his son, a receipt for the portrait in the château, and early compositions written by the young Charles-Antoine—some of which bore a striking resemblance to early works of Amadé Malherbeau.
Music scholars from Yale, Oxford, and Bonn came to confer with G, to look at the diary, and to investigate the cache at Auvergne. G’s going to include Alex’s diary in the exhibition on Louis-Charles in his museum. I’m glad. She wanted the world to know what happened. Now it will.
I didn’t end up with a movie deal like Bender, but I did get an A plus. Beezie herself read my thesis. She said it was excellent and that my tracing of Malherbeau’s influence on modern musicians was fascinating. She especially liked my demonstration of the harmonic parallels between Malherbeau’s Concerto in A Minor and “Stairway to Heaven.” She said that Amadé Malherbeau came to life so fully in my thesis, it was as if I’d known him.
Yeah, it was.
I skipped graduation and I’m almost sorry I did. I heard it was a scene. Nick was so drunk he fell off the stage. Which kind of shocked the president of the United States, who was there because he happened to be in Brooklyn for a fund-raiser that day and he wanted to meet Vijay. Mrs. Gupta sent him a copy of Vijay’s thesis and he loved it. He wants V to intern at the White House during his summer break from Harvard.
I got my diploma from Nathan. He came over to my house to give it to me. We played Bach together for hours. He gave me his Hauser. I told him I didn’t deserve a guitar like that. He said, “No, you don’t, but you will.”
I applied to the Paris Conservatory and I got in. I’m studying with amazing teachers for a degree in classical and contemporary music, and when I’m not at school, I do volunteer work with a group of musical therapists—people who help traumatized children express in sound what they cannot express in words.
I turn onto the Rue Oberkampf now, finally, and pull up close to the sidewalk outside Rémy’s. I cut the engine, take off my helmet, and head inside. The room is warm and smoky and full of people. We’re packing them in. Every Wednesday and Sunday. I make my way through the crowd, scanning faces, searching for someone.
And then I see him. A tall, skinny guy. He’s patting the top of Rémy’s bald head and laughing. Virgil. My heart flips over at the sight of him. Which is schlocky, but true. We’ve been inseparable ever since I moved to Paris.
We went out the next day, Virgil and I—the day after we got out of the catacombs. I showed him Alex’s diary and he read parts of it. He understood the connection I felt to her, the connection I still feel, but he didn’t believe me about my trip back to the eighteenth century. I mean, he doesn’t think I actually went through some kind of time warp. And I can’t say I blame him. Because I’m not sure I do anymore, either.
“It felt real, though,” I told him. We were in his car, stuck in traffic near the Carrefour de l’Odéon, on our way to a café to hear some friends of his play. I had ten stitches in my forehead and a few more under my rib cage. “Paris in the eighteenth century, the catacombs, Amadé—it all felt so real. Even if it was only inside my head. But it’s crazy, right? To think I really went back to the Revolution? Back to something that ended over two centuries ago?”
He didn’t answer me right away. He was looking past me, looking at something outside my window. I followed his gaze and saw what it was—a towering statue of Danton.
“I don’t know, Andi,” he finally said. “In a way it never ended. In a way they’re all still here. Restless ghosts looking over our shoulders. They wanted the best possible things, some of them—liberty, equality, and fraternity for all. It was a nice dream. Too bad they didn’t pull it off. Too bad we haven’t.”
We heard a chorus of honking horns then. The cars in front of us had started to go. Virgil shifted into first. “Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it?” he said. “The one inside, I mean.”
I look at him now, messing with Rémy. I like to do that, to look at him before he sees me looking at him. He’s wearing the usual—jeans and a hoodie. The sleeves are pushed up. I can see a bandage sticking out from under one.
There was trouble in his neighborhood a week ago. He was trying to get home after his shift. There was a fight on the street outside his building. He tried to stop it and was knifed. The attacker was aiming for his heart. Virgil blocked him with his arm. Barely. But barely was enough.
He turns then, and sees me, and his whole face breaks into a smile. For me. And my heart feels so full that it hurts. Full of love for this man I’ve found. And for the brother I lost. For the mother who came back. And the father who didn’t. Full of love for a girl I never knew and will always remember. A girl who gave me the key.
It goes on, this world, stupid and brutal.
But I do not.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Krista Marino, and to Beverly Horowitz, Noreen Herits, Joan DeMayo, Chip Gibson, and all at Random House for believing in me and my story. I feel very fortunate to have had the support and encouragement of my large, boisterous, and wonderful RH family.
Thank you to Gabriel Byrne and Barry McGovern for kindly answering my questions on the actor’s art, and to Natalie Merchant and Anna Wayland for showing me the minor keys, the madness, and the music. Thank you to Thomas Hagen, whose beautiful paintings were the inspiration for Marianne’s still lifes.
Thank you to historian Christian Baulez, Dr. Hal Buch, novelist Valerie Martin, singer Sonia M’barek, and Lionel Morissée, baker at Poilâne, for their expertise, advice, and in Monsieur Morissée’s case, for bread so good it makes me cry.
Thank you to the young musicians at the Bard College Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, and to their teachers, for the love and dedication you give to your music, and for the inspiration you’ve given me.
Thank you to Steve Malk for being my agent and my friend, and for telling me about the Decemberists.
Thank you to my parents, Wilfriede and Matt Donnelly, for giving me a love of books and history, and for not letting me throw the first draft of this book into the pond.
And thank you most of all to my Douglas and my Daisy, for your love, for always being there, and for giving me the key.
PERMISSIONS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “I Wanna Be Sedated,” words and music by Jeffrey Hyman, John Cummings, and Douglas Colvin, copyright © 1978 by WB Music Corp. and Taco Tunes, Inc. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
Hal Leonard Corporation: Lyrics from “Asleep,” words and music by Johnny Marr and Steven Morrissey, copyright © 1986 by Marr Songs Ltd. and Bona Relations Ltd. All rights for Marr Songs Ltd. in the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered by Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved; Lyrics from “Tupelo (Tupelo Blues),” words and music by John Lee Hooker, copyright © 1991 by Orpheum Music. International copyright secured. All rights reserved; Lyrics from “Viva La Vida,” words and music by Guy Berryman, Jon Buckland, Will Champion and Chris Martin, copyright © 2008 by Universal Music Publishing MGB Ltd. All rights in the United States and Canada administered by Universal Music-MGB Songs. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Moebetoblame Music: Lyrics from “My Friends,” by Flea, Anthony Kiedis, David Michael Navarro, and Chad Gaylord Smith, copyright © 1995 by Moebetoblame Music. Reprinted by permission of Moebetoblame Music.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Revolution is a historical novel. It features both real and fictional people, and is set both in present-day Brooklyn—a world I lived in—and eighteenth-century France—one I did not.
Re-creating the lost Paris of Alex’s diary required a great deal of research. A full bibliography follows, but I would first like to acknowledge my debt to several works in particular.
For understanding the causes, major players, and main events of the French Revolution, I relied most heavily on Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History and Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.
Deborah Cadbury’s The Lost King of France: Revolution, Revenge and the Search for Louis XVII provided an invaluable account of Louis XVII’s life and imprisonment, and of the process of DNA testing used to identify his heart. The quote from Dr. Pierre Joseph Desault that appears on page 188 of Revolution was taken from page 160 of Cadbury’s book. Philippe Delorme, author of several books on Louis XVII, is the real-life historian who organized the DNA tests on Louis-Charles’ heart. His website, louis17.chez.com, also provided information on the testing process.
When Andi arrives at G’s house, she reads letters from prisoners condemned to death during the Terror. The excerpts I used are from actual letters and were taken from Olivier Blanc’s Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution 1793–1794.
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, one of my favorite poems, was a major inspiration for Revolution. The epigraph and the lines used at the beginning of each section of the book are taken from the Longfellow translation.
To help Andi write her thesis, I read The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross and online articles including: “My Radiohead Adventure” by Paul Lansky, at silvertone.princeton.edu/~paul/radiohead.ml.html, “Tristan chord” on wikipedia.org, “Move Over Messiaen” at gatheringevidence.com, “What Is It About Wagner?” by Stephen Pettitt at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk, “The Devil’s Music” by Finlo Rohrer at news.bbc.co.uk, and “Greatest. Music. Ever,” an article written by Bernard Chazelle and posted on tinyrevolution.com.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Illustrations by Gustave Doré. Translation by Henry W. Longfellow. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, Inc., 2007.
Ambrose, Tom. Godfather of the Revolution: The Life of Philippe Égalité, Duc d’Orléans. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2008.
Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.
Betham-Edwards, M., ed. Young’s Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Blanc, Olivier. Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution 1793–1794. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Michael di Capua Books, 1987.
Böhmer, Günter. The Wonderful World of Puppets. Translated by Gerald Morice. Boston: Plays, Inc., 1969.
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Delpierre, Madeleine. Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Caroline Beamish. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
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