There are a few (very few) paintings and sketches of Vivaldi (for instance, at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Antonio_Vivaldi.jpg) but I was unable to track down a verifiable image of Anna.
ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Antoine Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne are both real characters, and Antoine did die by the guillotine during the French Revolution after accusations were brought against him. It was one of many tragedies of the time. “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed” is an actual quote from the trial by the judge, and his friend Lagrange did indeed say after the execution that: “It took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century.”
I’ve conveniently ignored the fact that Marie-Anne lived to the ripe old age of 78, ran a scientific salon, and married (evidently unhappily) again.
I have no clue as to whether Marie-Anne and Antoine had a cat.
A wonderful portrait of Antoine and Marie-Anne was painted by Jacques-Louis David (David could have perhaps interceded for Antoine with the leaders of the Revolution, but did not), and can be viewed at http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/resourcesb/dav _lavois.jpg.
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI: I really must apologize to the memory of John William Polidori, for in making him an incarnation of Nicolas Flamel, I also made him rather sinister when there is absolutely no evidence that Polidori was anything more than an honorable physician and writer. Polidori did write the seminal novel of vampires, “The Vampyre,” and was indeed Lord Byron’s physician, though I have conjectured here that Polidori and Byron were acquainted before Polidori received his medical degree, for which there’s no historical evidence. “Emily Pauls” is entirely fictional; there is no one of that name in the historical record. However, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake were all well aware of each other, and Shelley and Mary did run away together in that year.
The “King’s Square” mentioned in this section is now called “Soho Square”—and King Charles II’s statue still stands there, as I know from having visited London in 2012. The statue is no longer in the center of the square, and has been rather much damaged over the years. The square itself is no longer residential, and only a few buildings survive from the time described in the book. Interestingly (well, to me, anyway) at one point Charles’ face was sliced off the head of the statue, though it was cemented back into place when the statue was restored in the 1930s. I couldn’t help but stare at it hoping to see Nicolas’ face appear in its place.
And there really was a Great London Beer Flood in October of 1814. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A42129876—the Great London Beer Flood killed nine people and destroyed several houses. Of course, the Great Beer Flood was actually an accident, not the result of a battle between Nicolas and Perenelle. The British Museum is now only a few blocks down on the same street that was a slum in 1814.
The online National Portrait Gallery of the UK has a Gainsford portrait of Polidori—you can see it at http://www.npg.org.uk/collections searchlargerimage.php?mkey=mw05070
“The Vampyre” is available as an e-book from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087
GUSTAV KLIMT: One of my favorite painters, and one of the darlings of the Art Nouveau movement—in Austria called the “Vienna Secessionist” movement. Emilie Flöge was certainly Klimt’s true muse and most constant companion, though he would never marry her, and some historians question whether the two of them were ever lovers in the physical sense. Certainly Klimt had affairs with several other of his models, some of whom bore children that Klimt acknowledged as his own. But when Klimt was on his deathbed, there was only one person he called for: Emilie.
Vienna, at the turn of the century, was indeed a place of grandeur and pomp and gilt, but it was also a place that had perhaps the highest suicide rate in all of Europe. Their society was obsessed with death as much as it was obsessed with beauty.
There was no Gabriele; she is a fiction. Many of Klimt’s subjects were well-known women in Vienna, but as many others aren’t identified; count Gabriele as among them. And Klimt did like redheads …
There was also no Anton Srna, though there was a photography exhibition, and Anton Srna’s name was plucked from that of two different exhibitors. It seemed to me appropriate that an alchemist would become involved in a process that heavily involves silver and chemistry.
Klimt died of a cerebral hemorrhage (not of a flawed immortality potion) in 1918 at age 55, leaving several works unfinished. Emilie would outlive him by decades; maybe she took the true potion?
CHARLOTTE SALOMON: While Anaïs Dereux, Perenelle’s incarnation in this section, is entirely fictional, Charlotte Salomon is all too real, all too talented a person, and all too poignant a tale, only a portion of which is glimpsed—as always, greatly altered and fictionalized—in what I’ve presented here. It’s true that suicide ran tragically in her family, with both her mother and her grandmother killing themselves by jumping from a high window; judging from Charlotte’s drawings in Life? or Theater?, she feared that she might one day do the same. Luckily for us, she did not, and instead rendered her life in the exquisite pictures of her masterwork. If you google her name and look at the images that are linked there, you’ll have the chance to glimpse some of these. As for Charlotte herself, there aren’t many photographs of her that have survived. If you’re curious, you might look here (http://www.ynetnews .com/articles/0,7340,L-3274438,00.html) or here (http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=734).
There was no Anaïs in her life, no relationship with anyone like her, and no attempted rescue of Lotte and Alexander from the clutches of the Nazis. Lotte and her grandfather were interred at the Gurs camp for a few months in 1940; they were released due to her grandfather’s ill health and both were allowed to return to Nice—which saved Lotte for enough time for her to create Life? or Theatre? However, not long after Lotte married Alexander Nagler (after the Germans took over the Nice region following the Italian surrender), they were both gathered up as so many others were and transported away from France, the majority of them to die in the camps. There is no direct record of Charlotte’s death; it seems she was one of the many women culled from the transports as “useless” (because of her pregnancy) and sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz, while Alexander was placed in hard labor.
As for Nicolas in this time period: unlike the case with Polidori, in this instance I think I may have done Nicolas the injustice by giving him the identity of Alois Brunner, who was unfortunately a very real character and was directly responsible for the death of thousands of Jews, including Charlotte Salomon. I couldn’t possibly make Nicolas as vile as the reality: if there is evil in the world, Alois Brunner was a significant manifestation. He vanished for a time after 1945—and in my fictional world, that was Nicolas changing identities once more. In reality, he resurfaced in the 1950s and took refuge in various countries in the Middle East. According to the Jewish virtual Library, (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Brunner.html), he was interviewed in 1987 by telephone for the Chicago Sun Times, and said then: “The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again …”
DAVID TREADWAY: It should go without saying that there is no real David Treadway, Camille Kenny, or Timothy Pierce—well, there may well be a David Treadway, Camille Kenny, or Timothy Pierce somewhere in the world, but I’m not aware of them and the David, Camille, and Timothy in the book have no connection to them at all. Those characters, and those around them, are made entirely of fictional cloth.
Except for one. The Frenchman named as “Etienne” in the section where Camille walks around early morning Paris and encounters Etienne feeding the birds in the Tuileries—he is based on a real person. Denise and I encountered him in Paris, sitting on a chair in the Tuileries and feeding the birds as I describe him in the bo
ok. No, I didn’t talk to him, and I don’t know his story or his real name. I watched him for a long time and took a few photographs. He was the kind of character that you see, and who immediately starts you imagining what his life might be like and why he’s doing what he’s doing. I knew I would use that imagined person in a story or a novel one day … and now I finally have. Here he is, as I saw him that day many years ago:
Books and major articles read in the course of writing this novel which have brought light and vision to the proceedings:
THE LIVES OF THE MUSES: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose. Perennial, 2003. A lovely book about a few of the women who inspired (and were inspired by) artists: well-written and well-researched, and worth your effort to find and read! While I didn’t actually use any of the muses Ms. Prose outlines, I took away from the book many ideas and a sensibility.
PARIS IN THE MIDDLE AGES by Simone Roux, translated by Jo Ann McNamara. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. An entrancing look at Paris in the 13th–15th centuries, in the middle of which Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel were living.
LOST CRAFTS: Rediscovering Traditional Skills by Una McGovern. Chambers Harrap Publishers, Edinburgh, 2008. This is an essential research book for anyone writing of past times, if you want to know how things were actually done “back then.”
A DISTANT MIRROR by Barbara W. Tuchman. Albert A. Knopf, New York, 1978. A re-read, actually, since I read this one ages ago. But since a portion of the book is set at the end of the 14th century, and Tuchman was such a wonderful writer, I read it again, especially the section discussing Étienne Marcel.
ARTEMISIA by Alexandra Lapierre. Translated by Liz Heron. Grove Press, 2000. A book on the life of the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Even though this is subtitled “A Novel,” the book is intensely researched and heavily annotated by the author’s reading of original texts as well as scholarly research on the life of Artemisia. Essentially, the author has written a biography, but has fictionalized some of the scenes—it reads somewhere between the two genres. Well worth picking up if you’re interested in Artemisia.
However, even though a few scenes with Artemisia were written, and though Artemisia is one of the most fascinating artists of the Italian Renaissance, I made the decision to cut her from the book. Still, I’d urge you to google Artemisia and check out some of her paintings. I’ve always found her “Judith Decapitating Holofernes” (http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Artemisia_Gentileschi_Judith_Decapitating_Holofernes_c1618.jpg) to be incredibly striking, and far superior to Caravaggio’s depiction of the same scene.
And hey, while in London, I was surprised and delighted to find her famous self-portrait in the Georgian apartments of Hampton Court.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANTONIO LUCIO VIVALDI by Jim Whiting. Mitchell Lane Publishers, May 2004. A biography of Vivaldi that gives a good look at the details of his life.
HAWTHORNE: A LIFE by Brenda Wineapple. Random House, 2004. Exactly what you think it is: a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a fascinating look at an American author who’s more complex (and darker) than I realized. The first draft of this novel contained a long (and complete) Hawthorne section with Perenelle as his wife Sophia, but that was abandoned during revision, as it no longer fit.
INTO THE DARKNESS LAUGHING: The Story of Modigliani’s Last Mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne by Patrice Chaplin. Virago Press Limited, 1990. The tragic story of Jeanne Hébuterne and Amadeo Modigliani is more tragic than any fiction—I urge you to look it up, even though in the end I deleted my fictionalized version of it. For what it’s worth, it was a picture of Jeanne that was the initial impetus for the idea that would eventually become this novel. (That story’s here: http://sleigh.livejournal.com/303541.html)
I had to search a bit to find this one … The book is less a biography of Jeanne than the author’s search for her own obsession, but it’s still an interesting volume and a fascinating glimpse of the Jeanne/Modi relationship. As I said above, it was a picture of Jeanne that first sparked the long cascade of serendipitous connections that would lead to this novel.
“Missing Person in Montparnasse: The Case of Jeanne Hebuterne” by Linda Lappin, Literary Review, Summer 2002. A long, well-written, and interesting article on Jeanne and her life with Modigliani. A different perspective from the Chaplin book.
A photograph of Jeanne is here (http://esquimalenator.wordpress.com/), and one of Modigliani here (http://cortomalteze.wordpress.com/2007/07/14/amedeo-modigliani/), and an array of pictures of both of them here (http://community.livejournal.com/retroaesthetics/4419.htmlcutid2). Modigliani painted at least two dozen portraits of Jeanne. If you google “Modigliani & Jeanne” you’ll come up with tons of images …
GUSTAV KLIMT: Painter of Women by Susanna Partsch. Prestel Publishing, New York, NY, 2006. A gorgeously-illustrated short book that contains many of Klimt’s paintings and drawings of women, along with a detailed biography of the painter as well as that of several of the women who served as his models, especially Emilie Flöge, who was certainly Klimt’s primary muse. I was tempted to have Perenelle be Emilie, except that for the purposes of that section, I needed someone who vanishes quickly and none of the models that Klimt used who are identified really fit the fictional needs—Emilie lived long after Klimt, staying very visible in Vienna. Therefore, I invented a model who could serve as Perenelle. And since Klimt died young and suddenly, it seemed only logical to make him another of Nicolas’ subjects for the flawed elixir.
A NERVOUS SPLENDOR: Vienna 1888/1889 by Frederic Morton. Atlantic—Little, Brown, 1980. I’ve used this book as reference material twice before with other novels, and when I decided to use Gustav Klimt, well, there it was once again, since Klimt is mentioned several times in the text. I love this book, which is an utterly fascinating view of fin de siècle Vienna, with some gorgeous touches of atmosphere. You feel as if you’re there, walking along the Ringstrasse.
VIENNA MODERNISM 1890 – 1910 by Isabella Ackert. Federal Press Service, Vienna, Austria, 1999. This is available on the internet as a PDF, and covers Gustav Klimt as well as several other artists, writers, musicians, architects, and thinkers responsible for the flowering of “Vienna Modernism” at the turn of the century. The short book is interesting for its glimpses into the personalities of the era and its speculations as to why such a movement coalesced in Vienna.
TO PAINT HER LIFE: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner. University of California Press, 1997. An intense biography of Charlotte Salomon, murdered in a Nazi death camp, but who left behind a tremendous magnum opus entitled Life? or Theatre? Felstiner supposedly dedicated ten years to researching and writing this book—while I wish (for my purposes) that it had been a more straightforward biography, it’s a worthwhile read on its own.
I also spent a substantial amount of additional research time on the various historical eras and characters depicted in the book, the majority of that research web-based. The list, I’m afraid, is far too long to give here (even if I could remember it all myself).
CHARACTERS—IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE, BY SECTION
(* indicates a genuine historical character, bold indicates an identity used by Perenelle, italics an identity used by Nicolas)
—•——•— TODAY—1: CALLIOPE—•——•—
Camille Kenny
Perenelle’s identity during current times.
Ink
Bouncer at the Bent Calliope
Morris Johnson
One of Camille’s artistic entourage—sculptor
Mercedes Vargas
One of Camille’s artistic entourage—writer/novelist
Tom
A bartender at the Bent Calliope
David Treadway
A photographer who becomes Camille’s lover
Rashawn
One of Camille’s artistic entourage—painter
Kevin
/> One of Camille’s artistic entourage—drummer & composer
Joe
One of Camille’s artistic entourage—playwright
James
One of Camille’s artistic entourage
Edward Weston *
A photographer in the famous “f/64” group
Ansel Adams *
A photographer in the famous “f/64” group
Charis Wilson *
Model for, and lover of, Edward Weston
Helen Treadway
David’s wife.
Robert (Bob) Walters
Private investigator hired by Camille
INTERLUDE ONE, Perenelle & Nicolas Flamel
Perenelle Flamel *
The POV character, and the “origin” character for all POVs
Marianne
One of the maidservants in the Flamel household
Cosme Poisson
Perenelle’s father, an apothecary and alchemist, died 1344
Marlon Cantrell
Perenelle’s first husband, died in the Black Plague in 1349
Nicolas Flamel *
Alchemist, scrivener, manuscript seller, and Perenelle’s second husband
Telo
Nicolas’ apprentice
Benoît Picot
Immortal Muse Page 54
