"This Novel Will Destroy Me" Part 2

More from my 2008 research trip to Paris for The Queen of the Night.

Before I left for Paris, I had a meal with a music scholar and a scholar of French history, married to each other, almost as if fate had arranged for the Amherst faculty to help me. “It seems as if Eugénie took over the running of the Empire near the end, and that she is blamed for what happened,” I say. When he agrees, and expands on that idea, I feel a sense of relief.

Napoleon III had what was often referred to as a mysterious ailment, which I always take to be a euphemism for something sexual, and it may have been. At his death, he was diagnosed with a kidney disease though it was not considered his cause of death. “The case of Napoleon III is a typical example of the influence the bad health of a sovereign can exercise on the destiny of his country.”

This is Part 2 of a story about my research for my second novel, The Queen of the Night. If you missed part 1, click here.

While I don’t recommend the Internet for research alone, I did find the letters of Lillie Moulton, an American opera singer living in Paris at the time, married to a British aristocrat who did not want her to sing professionally. She did sing at the Empress’s Monday salon and was a close friend of the imperial couple—she met them while ice skating and even taught them to skate, at their request. The Emperor called her over after seeing her skate near them so confidently in the Bois. Her name, yes, was uncannily close to my narrator’s—my heroine is Lilliet—and this resemblance was a coincidence I enjoyed all the same. The letters are extensive, unexpurgated and presumably uncensored, written to her mother and her aunt, and they include references from her time in the Compiégne palace and the frustration of the women guests made to wait for her while she did things outside of her usual responsibilities, like sitting in on the meetings concerning affairs of state. This was in the lead-up to the Franco-Prussian War, which brought the Empire down.

Moulton also describes a skit that I regarded as a warning, even a taunt, from the Prince and Princess Metternich, close friends of the Emperor and Empress who seemed all the same to be flaunting Prussia’s strength to the French court. I dramatized the skit from inside of my narrator’s POV, using some dialogue I attribute in the acknowledgements to the lyrics described in the letter.

I will say Moulton had a novelist’s eye for detail, and she was, as she knew, a witness to the history being made around her. The books about the Empress did not include descriptions of the kind she made regularly, like this account of a ball with costumes made for her and her guests by the designer Charles Worth:

For the private fancy-dress ball at the Tuileries last Monday, to which the guests were invited by the Empress, Worth alone made costumes to the tune of two hundred thousand dollars, and yet there were not four hundred ladies invited.

To begin at the top, the Empress was dressed as the wife of a doge of Venice of the sixteenth century. She wore all the crown jewels and many others. She was literally cuirassée in diamonds, and glittered like a sun-goddess. Her skirt of black velvet over a robe of scarlet satin was caught up by clusters of diamond brooches. The Prince Imperial was allowed to be present; he was dressed in a black-velvet costume and knee breeches; his little, thin legs black-stockinged, and a manteau Vénitien over his shoulders. He danced twice, once with Mademoiselle de Châteaubourg, and then with his cousin, Princess Anna Murat, who, being made on Junoesque lines, and dressed as a Dutch peasant with enormous gold ornaments over her ears, and a flowing white lace cap, towered above her youthful partner. He is only seven years old, and rather small for his age, which made the contrast between him and his colossal partner very striking. Princess Mathilde looked superb as Holbein's Anne of Clèves. She wore her famous collection of emeralds, which are world-known.

Princess Clothilde had also copied a picture from the Louvre; but her robe of silver brocade, standing out in great folds about her waist, was anything but becoming to her style of figure. Princess Augustine Bonaparte (Gabrielli) was in a gorgeous costume of something or other; one had not time to find out exactly what she was intended to represent; she was covered with jewelry (some people pretended it was false, but it did not look less brilliant, for that). A fancy ball is an occasion which allows and excuses any extravagance in jewelry; whereas, at an ordinary ball it is considered not in good taste to wear too much. I just mention this casually, in case you should want to make a display when you lunch at Miss Bryant's some Sunday.

Countess Walewski had powdered her hair and wore a Louis XV. amazon costume, a most unbecoming yellow satin gown with masses of gold buttons sewed on in every direction. This was not very successful.

Marquise de Gallifet, as the Angel Gabriel, with enormous real swan's wings suspended from her shoulders, looked the part to perfection, and most angelic with her lovely smile, blond hair, and graceful figure.

Princess Metternich was dressed as Night, in dark-blue tulle covered with diamond stars. Her husband said to me, "Don't you think that Pauline looks well in her nightgown?"

Countess Castiglione, the famous beauty, was dressed as Salammbô in a costume remarkable for its lack of stuff, the idea taken from the new Carthaginian novel of Gustave Flaubert. The whole dress was of black satin, the waist without any sleeves, showing more than an usual amount of bare arms and shoulders; the train was open to the waist, disclosing the countess's noble leg as far up as it went incased in black-silk tights.

The young Count de Choiseul, who had blackened his face to represent an Egyptian page, not only carried her train, but held over the head of the daughter of Hamilcar an umbrella of Robinson Crusoe dimensions. Her gold crown fell off once while walking about, and Choiseul made every one laugh when he picked it up and put it on his own black locks. She walked on all unconscious, and wondered why people laughed.

My costume was that of a Spanish dancer. Worth told me that he had put his whole mind upon it; it did not feel much heavier for that: a banal yellow satin skirt, with black lace over it, the traditional red rose in my hair, red boots and a bolero embroidered in steel beads, and small steel balls dangling all over me. Some com-pliments were paid to me, but unfortunately not enough to pay the bill; if compliments would only do that sometimes, how gladly we would receive them! But they are, as it is, a drug in the market.

The Emperor was in domino—his favorite disguise—which is no disguise at all, for every one recognizes him.

Her tone is catty, smart, knowing. Her description of the Countess Castiglione alone thrilled me. The Countess was known for wearing much less than her social counterparts at these balls.

The Comtesse, wearing more clothes than usual, in a painted photograph titled La Frayeur, which means roughly “The Fright.”

The original photograph. Both images courtesy of the Met’s Open Access collection.

The 200,000 dollars tab Moulton mentions at Worth for the ball’s costumes, in 1863, the date of the ball, would have been about 6 million dollars today, though she does not cite her source for the sum. Her letters let me know that my sense of scale, and of the private world of the Emperor and Empress, needed to be raised. The opulence, the decadence of the Napoleon III court was on another level. When I went to Paris in 2008 to see the clothes, I was sorting all of these thoughts.¹

*

I spend part of an afternoon drawing the Tuileries. The drawings are not so great but I am there to commit it to memory and to imagination both, if you can call it that—drawing something as a way to remember it, to imagine it, to see inside, if it is possible.

Researching a novel can feel like learning to dowse for water, especially when you are looking for something from the past. So you go to the buildings, you go to the places now vacant of the lives that were once there, you hope for signals. Something that pulls your readings into shape.

The year previous I had found an archive online of the Tuileries palace after the after the Germans had shelled it during the Siege of Paris and and after the Paris Commune and the murder of the Paris Communards. These were some of the first acts of war committed to photography. I do know that much of what I might have wanted to see is gone so I am really there in a kind of secular seance, conjuring ghosts around the lines of my pen as tourists crisscross the park and the late warmth brings some autumn roses to the gardens.

*

As I walk to meet my friend Brandon in the Marais I come across a building that triggers a series of these connections I am looking for. I have been reading my way toward a kind of legibility. I found it interesting when reading about the Empress for example that she was prevented from having lovers because of the danger of her bearing a false heir. Her husband however had many lovers, enough for a small parade. He was also distracted by a mysterious ailment. Napoleon III was a ruler who advanced the art of spycraft and surveillance during his reign such that George Sand believed her puppet theater at Nohaunt was under surveillance. A few favorite stories stay with me: he had the Empress under careful watch once he proposed marriage to her and she undertook some kind of ill-advised communication with an old beau that was intercepted and disappointed him before the marriage, but they still went through with it. He was angered as he had loved her enough to defy his advisors who thought she was a bad match for him; he liked to think of her as his Josephine.

She was seen as lacking the skill to be a ruler. When Queen Victoria came to visit in 1855, the Empress reportedly had paintings from the Louvre brought to the Tuileries to decorate the Queen’s guest apartments, offending the officials at the museum and embarrassing the palace staff as well. Because Queen Victoria knew the paintings from a previous visit to the museum and said as much.

That she wore her flannels under ermine robe at times, like an actress in a community theater production of the Second Empire, that detail alone told me she was holding on to something fiercely amid all of these less visible defeats. It was not hard then to eventually imagine a lover no one else could. One she might hide in plain sight. And so as I passed that doorway in the Marais, I thought, Oh. There. This is where they would meet.

*

I spend time in some of the little museums of Paris—the Musée Carnavalet, the Musee Cognac-Jay, the Musée Jacquemart-André—yes, for some reason they all rhyme—and find each of them to be differently and uniquely contrived to help someone like me write my historical novel about an opera singer in Second Empire Paris. The pieces of this history are filling in, whether it is the fan with the chain that connects to a wallet for visiting cards or a photo of a Communard, taken after death.

The week passes quickly and my friends there–Brandon, his boyfriend Pascal, Antoine–are full of suggestions.

The proposed weekend trip would not technically be research but this will be my first visit to a chateau.

For the picnic, Brandon and I arrange to meet at an intersection near the Chatelet RER station. An ancient cathedral sits there, a sand-colored stained Gothic creature, the windows smoked with age and even broken. To me it looks like an ancient spaceship that landed and then was abandoned, a little aloof from the need to be explained. They knew how to build churches like this for a hundred years before they did this, Brandon told me the day before. But they thought they were ugly and so they didn’t do it. On this street, it’s like a ghost of old Paris sternly reviewing the new.

Brandon is easy to spot as he is tall, slim, pale with dark hair and the sort of commanding presence that turns heads. He always looks carefully put together and pulls off things I would never think of like gloves and a dapper jacket. But he is never fussy, catlike and graceful instead. He’s American, in the process of becoming a French citizen—a French housewife, as he likes to joke of it. His husband, Pascale, is Greek and French, differently elegant, with the easygoing masculine elegance fashion magazines often get wrong. They are a study in contrasts, and they have an enviable durable chemistry. They have been immensely helpful to me in the writing of the novel, full of ideas of places for me to go, conspirators in my research. Pascale is the one to tell me about the zoo during the Commune, the animals there who eventually became delicacies to the starving population.

Brandon and Pascale emerge from different directions out of the four steady streams of pedestrians, cinematically to me at least. As we’ve left a slim margin for error, we run, navigating the stairs two at a time to the ticket machines which are mobbed. Brandon is frantically getting the exact train information from Antoine, who is already on the train with his new boyfriend, having boarded at another station. It briefly doesn’t look possible, and then it’s done, and we are on the train, slack with relief. I pull beers from my bag and pass them out. Pascal exclaims, happy. Antoine and his boyfriend Cédric emerge from the stairs, smiling, and for the hour’s ride we take turns having conversations mostly in French or mostly in English, until we arrive, and then we take turns with the one taxi in Melun, getting out to the palace.

“You may have had its brie,” Antoine tells me of Melun. He has packed some for our picnic—a forbidden picnic, as he’d explained on the train—no outside food and drink are technically allowed in the gardens. There’s a restaurant by the entrance, he tells me, but the gardens are open to the public at night. A picnic would be more beautiful. Antoine has the French schoolboy charm of a character from a French New Wave movie, and Cédric does as well—a gangly elegance, offhand, floppy hair, pale skin that seems never to have tanned.

I don’t know what I expected, but from inside the taxi, the long drive lined with towering trees gives way to my first view of the chateau, and I notice something oddly seductive mixed in among the grandeur of the steeply pitched rooftops, the decorative moat and the formal gardens.

This was no ordinary chateau, I suppose I’d say, not that I was in the position to know.

The legend of Vaux-le-Vicomte is that it inspired Versailles out of envy. Nicolas Fouquet, the finance minister to King Louis XIV, purchased it in 1641, along with three surrounding villages, and he tore them down to create the 1235 acre estate he debuted on August 17^th, 1661 with a glamorous 3-day affair capped by the debut of Molière’s play Les Fâcheux there in the gardens. The king, a guest that night, was allegedly so jealous of the style and beauty of Vaux-le-Vicomte—It made the Louvre Palace seem tatty by comparison, as my friend Brandon said—that he left without staying the night, despite the royal guest room built especially for him, and later he even had Foucquet arrested. He seized the chateau for himself, and when this failed to assuage his offended pride, he built Versailles, using Fouquet's architect, decorator, and garden designer. What we have come to call the Louis XIV style in many ways begins here with Fouquet. With King Louis XIV’s need to outdo him.

Now that I see this place, I can recognize that I’m in the presence of style. Foucquet, you could say, still knows how to throw a party. And I have to say, I understand why Louis did it. I have a feeling I never feel on tours of historic homes and palaces.

I want to live here too.

As we walk the garden Brandon explains to me how at each major turn the view is composed, like a picture you would make. I want to lie down at the top of the farthest hill with a bottle of wine and look down across the lawns and the moldering fountains into these constructed views and never leave.

Later, during the house tour, in the upstairs part of the tour, we stand in front of a statue of the writer La Fontaine, a friend of Fouquet's and a frequent visitor. The bust changes its expression when you light it differently, which the palace staff has done, the shifting light on a timer. I find Pascal staring at it. It's amazing, he says, as I stand next to him and try to see what he sees.

Both expressions are serious and one is very sad. It seems to me that this is too often the mode in which writers are thought of by their readers. I try to imagine my face there. I might make too many jokes for this sort of legacy but that will never be in my control.

In the hallway around the corner, we find a display of the robes of priests made from the gowns of brides. Brandon points this out to me. In the 17th Century, the brides' gowns were always done with the finest embroidery and colors. And after the marriage, the embroidery panel was cut from the gown and then given to a priest, who had it made into his robe, which he wore during ceremonies.

As I try to imagine being a man of God, wearing on my back the gown of a newly married woman, we go down the stairs and the staff is lighting the candles in the chandeliers—the chandeliers were never modernized. I stand for a moment in the library, under a frieze of Hercules being received by the gods, and I want to sit with a snifter of armagnac and read a novel for three hours by the light of a candle-lit chandelier.

I sense Pascal feels it too, and ask him and he agrees. Soon, as we walk the palace, which is lit with candles, we are joking with Brandon, Antoine and Cédric, about how we would redecorate, where we would dine or nap, what we would keep and what we would throw away.

We exit the palace and re-enter the gardens, the candles now lining those splendid geometries in the dark. We sneak away to the snack bar, closed for the evening, and unpack our forbidden picnic: that Melun brie, a rabbit rilette, a Mont D’Or, bread, and wine brought by another friend of Anton’s and her date, luckily enough the son of a wine-making family who make excellent wine.

By now it's dark and we toast the unfortunate Fouquet. We can’t help ourselves, I imagine saying if we are caught. Whatever it was Louis XIV wanted to capture, he failed. But maybe the curse of Vaux-le-Vicomte is that you feel too much at home.

We pack up and all climb into the car of the scion of the wine family who joined us for the picnic, and he drives us to the train station for the train back to Paris.²

*

On the day after the visit to Vaux-le-Vicomte, nothing else seems as rich or beautiful. The memory of Vaux finally fades but the feeling of it will eventually spread across my novel.

I go to visit the hunting chateau of the Emperor Louis Napoleon and his wife Eugenie, and I spend two days there, studying the layout of the gardens, of the apartments, of the Imperial theater, the way you would escape from the music room out to the garden and then through the gardens to the train. If you had to. I photograph that part especially.

The mannequins of her in her clothes staged throughout the palace for the show are like strangely vivid ghosts with answers to my many questions.

Brandon wrote a very formal and correct letter for me to the director of the museum, asking for an interview and a tour, but it is ignored. So I am sneaking around, trying not to attract the attention of the guards, and this is, in the end, helped me conjure the feeling of someone who, like my main character, was also sneaking around the palace.

In the museum at the hunting chateau, I examine drawings of the Tuileries interiors. I find a room in the museum at the chateau apparently devoted to the Emperor's two most important mistresses, Harriet Howard, the British actress he threw over to marry Eugenie, and the Comtesse, who made Eugenie take to bed for a month in protest, eventually my novel’s antagonist. The rooms are tricky—they are renovated according to different centuries. It's strange to visit a place I've been writing about for two years per accounts I've read and through photos. Many of the things I thought were true are true, but some are wrong, and so I'm glad of the trip for that alone.

*

When I get back to Paris I go with Brandon to get a fancy drink. We decided we wanted fancy drinks, something epic or just incredible. We go past the hotel bars in the Palais Royale to the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, and I look at the epic kitsch surrounding us on the walls as we sit down. I open the menus. The cocktails are 25 and 40 Euros. Everywhere, eery smiling photos of Hemingway. I'm reminded of the statue of La Fontaine. Brandon is quiet and I notice he appears to be keeping back his revulsion.

This is like the Hard Rock Cafe of writers, I say. It's insane.

I didn't understand why you came in and sat down, he says.

We stand and leave swiftly and head to Harry's, the Bar where Hemingway actually drank. We have two okay drinks in the historic bar and while we finish the second drink, we hear this woman from the front of the bar ask loudly, "What's French for mojito?"

Brandon offers a swift, obscene possibility and we leave, getting Korean food at a place he knows, and then we finish up with beers at The Duplex, my favorite bar in Paris.

*

In the end, the trip feels too short. I feel, on the plane, a swift revulsion at the idea of returning as well as a peculiar homesickness for Paris, which after just a day had felt like home. I will learn I feel this way often when I leave the US and travel in just about any country. I fear how the election is going to turn out and when the pilot says, “prepare for landing at Newark International Airport” I don’t want to prepare. There seems like a strong chance that the country will elect a Black former Constitutional law professor and writer to the most powerful office in the land, but as I walk out and stand in line for the immigration, I still don’t or can’t believe it.

When the election comes two and a half weeks later, Brandon tells me, The cafes in your neighborhood were open all night with people celebrating. By this he means, Les Halles, where I was staying. I experience again not just the homesickness for Paris but also wish I could have been dancing all night excited. But by the time I leave for Portland, OR, on Thursday, to take four of my students with me to Wordstock³, I feel like I've finally moved to a new country. I just don’t know what it will be.

1. This of course is a demure cost when compared to Jeff Bezos’s upcoming 600 million dollar wedding.

2. The section at Vaux-le-Vicomte originally appeared online in a different version at Travel and Leisure but has since been taken down. This section is greatly revised and edited using.

3. This is now the Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. I had the students apply for funding from the dean, keep receipts and taught them to network. At least two of them are now authors, Ben Goldfarb and Anna Brenner.