... at the Morgan Library. Though the end of Jane's earthly life is evoked in this beautiful exhibition, of course. The account of her last moments, when the only yearning left was for death, the terse expression of Cassandra's sorrow, brought tears to my eyes.

I have been very remiss in not posting earlier about this, but I can't let this exhibition go without mentioning it. For it will be closing on Sunday. It does an excellent job of bringing Jane back to us, though letters and everyday mementos of her life.

One can admire Cassandra's handiwork with the scissors, deftly snipping here and there an offensive word or two, or sometimes boldly amputating an entire corner of a letter. So few letters, so few manuscripts are left... but they are there, all the more precious.

Gillray's crude, unforgiving caricatures of Regency life immerse us in a bawdy world, decades before Victorian mores took over England. And Jane Austen's influence and literary legacy are also reviewed, from the timid succès d'estime she enjoyed during her lifetime to her current immense fame. And yes, the inescapable Colin Firth is there to remind us of the more or less questionable film adaptations of her works.

I have two major regrets regarding this exhibition. The first is that visitors are not allowed to enjoy it in peace, but are force-fed the ever repeating sound track of the Divine Jane film, crafted for the occasion. I soon became absorbed enough by the artifacts on display to be able to shut out those preposterous, pontificating, droning voices (just imagine what Jane herself would have thought of that!) but I would have preferred to do without them altogether. I recommend you take ear plugs with you.

The second, more important peeve is that the Morgan did not find it necessary to print a catalog of the exhibition. It certainly deserved it, and I would have loved to bring back copies for my mother and son, both Janeites (am I fortunate!)

So if you live in or travel to New York, hurry...

Until March 14, 2010, at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

For detailed posts on the exhibition, see Vic at Jane Austen's World and Diana Birchall.

I had a long conversation with my web designer this morning, and am happy to announce that we are on track for the new blog layout to go online before the end of this month! We anticipate a smooth transition to WordPress: same URL, same RSS feed addresses, same links.

Unfortunately one issue could not be ironed out: the email subscribers. They represent a minority of this blog subscribers (around 90 versus 600+ for RSS subscribers) but I don't want to lose them in the process of upgrading this site.

I had a long and stormy conversation with the so-called customer service of GoDaddy, which refuses to give me the email addresses of my blog subscribers. Why? Because, I was told, I could use those addresses to spam you. So nice to find out that my future ex-blog provider has this exalted opinion of me.

Anyway, long story short: dear email subscribers, I don't know who you are! So I you wish to continue subscribing, please send me an email at catherine@catherinedelors.com, and I will make sure you continue receiving my posts.

RSS subscribers will not be affected and need not do anything to continue receiving my feeds.

And to give everyone an idea of the new layout, here it is! My sidebar, which had grown out of control, will be moved to the footer, and we now have seven posts on the home page, magazine-style. Broad categories (18th century life, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, French Revolution, etc.) will be accessible from the top right of the header. And I must say I am particularly proud of my 18th century Twitter bird...

What do you think?

The Academy Awards are barely over, and I have my own acknowledgment speech to give after Saturday's high tea.

Many thanks to the Shakespeare's Sister Company for having me on such short notice, to Kris Lundberg in particular, to all the attendees, one of whom kindly presented me with a copy of Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford. To my publicist, Diane Saarinen, for arranging this. To fellow writer and blogger Elizabeth Kerri Mahon, author of Scandalous Women for coming to this most enjoyable event. To my publicist at Dutton, Liza Cassity, who arranged for three copies of Mistress of the Revolution to be delivered in time for a raffle giveaway.

Kris began the evening by reading from the "Judith Shakespeare" passage of A Room of One's Own, a collection of lectures given by Virginia Woolf at Cambridge. But Virginia, in this short and fascinating book, does not write only about this fictional sister of Shakespeare's, she also mentions a real-life writer who never enjoyed the luxury of a room of her own: Jane Austen.

This led me to the topic of my own presentation, the theme of which was a writer's inspiration. After Kris's reading of A Room of One's Own, the topic was very easy for me to choose: how Virginia Woolf led me to Jane Austen.

I recalled how, as a law student in Paris twenty years ago, I felt I was coming down with the flu and pushed the door to my neighborhood bookstore. I needed to purchase something to while away the unpleasantness to come.

I browsed the shelves and picked up a paperback titled Orgueil et Préjugés, by one Jane Austen, an author I had never heard of. Indeed, for some unfathomable reason, she remains fairly obscure in France. I read the foreword, and that at least was by a very famous writer, one I had read before with great admiration: Virginia Woolf. It turns out that the preface to this French edition was the translation of the Austen lecture of A Room of One's Own...

And what things did Virginia have to say about this unknown Miss Austen!

One after another she creates her fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collinses, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennets. She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug and trying to keep him from the flower-beds” eternally. A divine justice is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.

A novelist who delights in slicing off her characters' heads! These words of Virginia Woolf sealed my choice, and in a way my fate. I went home with my germs and my paperback. The former were gone in a matter of days, but the latter would never leave me. I read Orgueil et Préjugés in one sitting, engrossed by the artistry, the brilliance, the wit, the irony of Jane Austen. Then I reflected that it was but a translation (I was not yet a translator, and in my youthful arrogance disdained the achievements of that craft.) What if the English original were still better?

Once recovered, I went to my library, and there I found the complete novels of Jane Austen waiting for me in English editions. I began, of course, with Pride and Prejudice. At first I was a bit distrustful of my high school English, but soon forgot my misgivings as I became immersed into Jane's prose. Her English became the only one I felt I knew.

Then I moved on to Emma, which I liked still better than Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion. There was no going back. I read and reread those novels dozens of times, and they led me to other great works of English literature: the novels of George Elliott, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and many others. I would never have met those but for my encounter with Jane Austen.

I took me many years to find my own inspiration and pen my first novel. I hesitated between writing it in my native French or my acquired English. But again Jane's novels were there by my side. I knew them almost by heart, and whenever I hesitated on the turn of a sentence, I knew one of them would be at hand help me out of my dilemma.

I hasten to say that my own novels, in themes and characters, have little to do with Jane's. But on occasion, while writing Mistress of the Revolution, I caught myself writing bits of dialog with her in mind. Those were cut from the final version because the novel was deemed too long, but they remain among my favorite passages, and I may post them here some day.

So, with all due humility, affection and admiration, I can say that Jane Austen taught me to write in English.

Like Madame d'Haussonville, I will be back in New York. One of the differences between the Comtesse and I is that my return was not planned until right now. Hence the short notice.

I will be speaking at the Shakespeare's Sister Company's Literary High Tea & Book Swap. All details can be found on its website. The Company supports women in the theater with literacy development, women empowerment workshops and mentorships for children.

If you are in New York and wish to support a worthy cause, enjoy a luscious high tea, or meet me in the flesh, you are most cordially invited. And three copies of Mistress of the Revolution will be offered at a raffle. See you there...

Saturday, March 6th
7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Lady Mendl's Tea Room
56 Irving Place between 17th and 18th Streets
New York City

The Right Honourable Miss Moppet, heroine of the Misadventures of same name, has a post on the deleted chapter of Mistress of the Revolution. Not only that, but Miss Moppet puts my own Gabrielle in the company of Sergeanne Golon's Angélique, Sandra Gulland's Joséphine B, and Françoise Chandernagor's Madame de Maintenon in the magnificent L'allée du roi (The King's Way in the - deliberately and shamefully incomplete - English translation). I am honored and humbled.

This deleted chapter was one of my first blog posts. By the way, I like to think of a writer's blog as a "Bonus Material" DVD on steroids. I can show you all I had to cut, discuss my characters, give you background information. I could dig out other deleted chapters, come to think of it. Oh well, we'll see.

I digress... Back to Gabrielle's tarot reading. I wrote at the time of the publication of Mistress that I did not regret editing it out. Neither do I now. I don't in the least regret having written it, though. Sometimes writers write things for their own selfish enjoyment, and they are, like anyone else, allowed to have fun. This doesn't mean that the passage in question "worked" with the rest of the book. Foreshadowing is a wonderful narrative trick, it builds a sense of anticipation, projects the reader forward into the story, but it has to be used sparingly, deftly. In this passage I had crossed the line.

So only the Knight of Swords made it to the final version. Now in the published novel, the cook remembers the tarot reading one year later and says, speaking of certain young physician Gabrielle has met: "He’s clever and resolute. He speaks well. He commands attention wherever he goes. But he can be arrogant,even cruel. Remember what I told you about the Knight: he spells doom for his enemies, and God knows he has many. And remember how he wields his sword, the sword of justice? He will show his foes no mercy, and receive none.”

Was Josephine right? Soothsayers often are in novels...

Madame d'Haussonville (she was not yet the Comtesse d'Haussonville when this portrait was painted, circa 1842) has returned home after a three-month stay in sunny California, at Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum. She awaits the pleasure of your company on Wednesday, March 3, at 6 in the evening for a free lecture at The Frick Collection.

To quote the Frick website Edgar Munhall will cast a fresh look at this iconic image. Situating it within the artist’s vast oeuvre and introducing its little-known subject as one of the more remarkable women of her time, he will also trace the fitful evolution of the portrait, illustrate its varied sources, and consider the significance of its myriad details that make it, as one early critic noted, “one of those images that appear in dreams.” No reservations are necessary; lecture seating is first come, first served.
New Yorkers have little excuse not to attend. For the rest of us, a few words on the painting and the model. The ancestors of Madame d'Haussonville, née Louise de Broglie, were directly linked to the history of the French Revolution and Napoleon's reign. Her great-grandfather was Jacques Necker, the last Comptroller General of Finances of the Ancien Regime, immensely popular at the start of the Revolution. Her grandmother was the great novelist, and fierce opponent to Bonaparte, Germaine de Staël.

Do not assume, based on this supremely elegant image, that Louise d'Haussonville was simply a pretty face or a mere socialite. She was also a writer, and left biographies of Robert Emmet, Marguerite de Valois (the Reine Margot) and Lord Byron. Her husband was also a historian, as would later be her son. Incidentally, her grandnephew Louis de Broglie would go on to receive a Nobel Prize for Physics. To say that the family had a strong intellectual tradition would be an understatement.

The painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (yes, the French love those long names) was no less interesting a character. He was then in his sixties. He would continue painting for another 25 years, until his death at the age of 87, and his last works are among his most famous and accomplished. Though one cannot tell from this work, Ingres hated painting portraits. "Accursed portraits that prevent me from marching on to great things.. such a difficult thing a portrait is."

It took him around three years to complete this painting, with sixty recorded studies for the gown only. The result is captivating: a complex harmony of blues: the satin of the clothing, the gems on the ring and bracelet, the velvet mantel top, the walls, the cord to call the servants. The scant other notes, the red of the ribbons in Louise's hair, the yellow of her shawl, become almost strident. The textures are so smooth as to foreshadow modern photography. The right arm is anatomically incorrect, which, coming from Ingres, hardly results from an oversight. See how he uses the mirror to give us a view of the back of the young woman, an idea he had already applied in the much earlier, and also iconic, portrait of Madame de Senonnes. Ingres aimed at giving "une idée complète de son modèle", a complete idea of his model. And he did...

If you want to learn more, you will need to go to that lecture.

Karin, the Alien Parisienne, has a lavishly illustrated post about her visit to Versailles. Check out the pictures, they will transport you there. Selfishly I picked this one: see, a blue damask background, as on this blog and my website... Ah!

This Portrait of Citizen Jean-Baptiste Belley by the famous French artist Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, caught my eye, even though I knew nothing of the model. This painting is - literally - revolutionary.

Not because it represents a Black man. Representations of men and women of African descent in early-modern European paintings were not uncommon, as explained by Carlyn Beccia. But, with exceptions such as Juan de Pareja, assistant to Velasquez (thanks to Susan Holloway Scott for the link!) these had no name. They were simply "generic" Blacks, usually depicted in a subservient position.

In this portrait not only does Citizen Belley have a name, but he also holds high public office, as attested by the tricolor sash tied around his waist and the tricolor plume on his hat. Who was this Belley? I wanted to know.

The most detailed information I was able to find about him was on the site of the Association de Généalogie d’Haiti (in French.)

It seems that Belley was born on the coast of West Africa in 1746 or 1747. Around the age of two, he was abducted and sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti.

Little is known of his life as a slave, except that he was allowed to pursue a trade and earn enough money to eventually purchase his own freedom. He clearly received an education, either before or after his emancipation.

After the Revolution burst out in France in 1789, the inhabitants of Saint-Domingue followed the news from Paris very closely. The ideals of liberty and equality resonated deeply with slaves and free Blacks alike. The latter were enfranchised in 1791. Soon the slaves demanded the same rights, revolted against the plantation owners and seized power.

Belley became one of the leaders of the insurrection. When elections were held in Saint-Domingue in 1792, Belley was elected as a Representative to the Convention Nationale for the island. He became the first man of African descent to hold national elective office in the new French Republic.

He sailed for Paris and cast his vote in favor of the historic decree passed by the Convention on February 2, 1794. It is terse, much more so than the American Emancipation Proclamation almost seventy years later:

The National Convention decrees the abolition of the Negroes' slavery in all of the Colonies. Therefore, it orders that all men, without any distinction of color, domiciled in the Colonies, shall be free citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Commissioners of the Republic had already proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Haiti a year earlier, but now that measure was extended to all French territories. As for Belley, he continued fighting in Paris the influence of the lobby of plantation owners, who had regained hope of a reinstatement of slavery after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and the ensuing reaction.

This portrait of Belley was painted in 1797. The marble bust behind him is that of the Abbé Raynal, a priest and prominent 18th century abolitionist. There is no doubt that both Belley and Girodet were making an anti-slavery statement here, and a powerful one.

Then in 1799 Bonaparte seized power. He had married Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie, born into a slave-owning family from the Martinique. Were his views on race influenced by his wife? Some say so, but I have yet to see convincing evidence of it.

What is sure is that Bonaparte reinstated slavery in May 1802. This was soon followed by a flurry of racial laws. The most disgraceful was the dismissal of all Black officers from the Army. This measure affected twelve Generals, including Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the great novelist, and countless other officers. Interracial marriages were now outlawed, and persons of African descent were even denied the right to reside in continental France.

It must be noted that, under Napoléon, the situation of Blacks became still worse than it had before the abolition of slavery. Under the Ancien Régime, slaves brought to continental France by their owners could, and did sue for freedom before Admiralty Courts. This is a point made with great clarity by Annette Gordon-Reed in her remarkable book, The Hemingses of Monticello.
So how did Belley, like any prominent Black person, fit in Napoleonic France? He was already emancipated before the Revolution, so he could not be shipped back to his former master. Bonaparte had him imprisoned, without charges or trial, in the fortress of Belle-Ile.

We know Belley wrote letters from jail as late as 1806, and then we lose his trace. Did he die in prison? Probably, but we don't know when. His death went as unrecorded as his early years.

Fortunately Girodet's beautiful portrait is here to remind us of Citizen Jean-Baptiste Belley.

Susan Holloway Scott has a great post on masks in the 17th century. They protected ladies' complexions from the attacks of the sun and cold, but they were also most convenient for discreet assignations...

In 18th century France, their use became limited to the balls and celebrations that marked the revelry of Carnival. This is an 18th century snuff box from the collections of the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris.

And, speaking of Susan, I have a treat in store for you: an interview about her last novel, The French Mistress. Stay tuned!

I have to express again my gratitude for your input in the redesign of this blog and my website. For the latter, see how I picked this lady absorbed in her reading for the From unpublished to published section, and the wonderful Boilly for the Contact & Blog section. Now the site has been optimized and should load much faster, and you can begin to browse in the For the King section. It is unfinished but there is an excerpt of the novel there already...

But now there is a new twist: a member of Historical Fiction Online (by the way if you are at all interested in that genre and are not yet a member, you should sign up there) has made a bold suggestion. Bolder than anything I had envisioned, but I think it has a great deal of potential. It would be, while keeping the current look, to offer the posts in a format much closer to what you find in news blogs, such as Slate of the Huffington Post, among many others.

For instance, my last post recapped four older posts on seasonal topics: Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday and Lent. Instead of just linking to those, this new format would allow me to have all four entries on the home page of the blog, just as you would find different articles on the home page of a newspaper.

This would not, by the way, affect the blue background and the header picture of La Conciergerie, which I love, and which seem to please you as well. Yet it would revolutionize (ah!) the presentation of the middle part of the site by allowing several articles there at the same time.

The downside, apart of course from your possible disapproval, would be the cost of a complete customization of the template. My web designer has not yet given me the bad news, and I won't pursue it if there is no enthusiasm on your part.

Is this only a vanity project? Or would it be a real plus to the reader? What do you think?

Yes, Tuesday was Mardi Gras, yesterday was Ash Wednesday and we have now entered the season of Lent. An opportunity to look back at last year's posts on these topics:

- The boisterous celebration of Carnival in Paris,

- The hardly more decorous happenings in Versailles, where, under Louis XV, the Ball of the Yew Trees saw the Dauphine dance all night with a cook, and the King pay much attention to an ambitious young woman, who would soon be known as the Marquise de Pompadour...

- The penitential mood of Ash Wednesday, Mercredi des Cendres,

- And last but not least, the religious scruples of dear Madame Victoire during Lent.

To introduce Elena Maria Vidal's new novel, The Night's Dark Shade, I will be content to quote the opening words of her preface:

The Night’s Dark Shade is a novel of thirteenth-century France. The Middle Ages was an era of intensity. People applied themselves with great ardor to every endeavor, be it art, poetry, warfare, love or religion. They were particularly fervent in regard to matters of faith. Religious convictions were not subject to indifference, as they tend to be today; rather every nuance of doctrine was of vital interest to all. Fanatics appeared from time to time, and the blood of innocents was shed. Heresy was viewed as a capital offense, for it was seen as leading to the death of the soul, which was for the medievals more to be dreaded than mere bodily death. Too often, battling heresy became an excuse for pillage, as wars arose. This is the story of the conflicts which raged in individuals, as well as in families and kingdoms, amid the tumult of the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian Crusade and the story of the Cathars resonate deeply with me, because it shaped the destiny of France, and also because some of my ancestors were, if not Cathars themselves, prominent supporters of that faith, and took part in the Crusade, on the losing side.

Elena tells this story through the eyes of the orphaned Lady Raphaëlle, a devout Catholic who leaves her home in the mountains of Auvergne (a place dear to my heart) to marry a nobleman in a remote castle in the Pyrenees. There she encounters members of the mysterious Cathar sect who challenge her most deeply held beliefs. As she seeks her path, she discovers hatred and betrayal, as well as abiding friendship and unexpected love... Elena kindly agreed to tell us more about the novel and its background.

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Elena, welcome to Versailles and more! It is an honor to have you here upon the release of your third novel, The Night's Dark Shade. It takes place during the Albigensian Crusade, in 13th Century France. After Trianon and Madame Royale, why this continued attraction to French settings and French characters?

Thank you,Catherine, it is a joy to be interviewed on one of my favorite blogs. In high school and college, I took French classes; the language, history and culture of France all captivated me. I have to say that the times I have visited France, I have always felt very comfortable there, in spite of any number of misadventures that can happen when traveling. I suppose I enjoy writing about a place that I love.

This is a complete change of era, from the late 18th and early 19th centuries to the Middle Ages. What are the challenges of working with a medieval setting?

For me, the Middle Ages is the easiest era to write about. I am very much at home in the Middle Ages.As a teenager, I wrote stories with a medieval setting and researched every detail, trying to make my stories authentic. I was constantly reading novels with medieval-type settings, such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Kathryn Kurtz; the Middle Ages were part of the air I breathed.

The challenge of writing The Night’s Dark Shade was not the medieval setting but in finding accurate information about the Cathars. The sect is either totally glorified or totally demonized. I wanted to find what the daily life of the Cathars was like and how their beliefs and rituals affected the larger community. The book which gave the most balanced portrait of life in “Cathar country” was Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Forgotten Land of Error. I noticed in his book that, contrary to what I was previously told about women being “freed” by Catharism, the Catharist belief that sex  and marriage were abominations actually led to many women being used and exploited, especially poor women.

Indeed Leroy Ladurie is one of my favorite French historians and his works are a wonderful resource. I knew, of course, of the Cathar movement and its insistence on purity, but I was intrigued to catch at times in your novel almost a foreshadowing of the theories set forth in The Da Vinci Code. What are the origins of the Cathar faith and, in your opinion, the reasons for its success with the populations of southern France?

Some of the ideas about Christ expressed by Dan Brown in his books were believed by the Cathars. I began researching the Cathars in the mid-80’s at SUNY Albany and came across what the Cathars called their “secret doctrine.” This was, of course, long before The Da Vinci Code. The Cathars were essentially a gnostic sect, believing in two gods. Gnosticism predated Christianity by several centuries. When Christianity rose to prominence, the gnostics veiled their beliefs with Christian terminology, and using even the names of Christ and His Apostles, although what they taught was very different from what most Christians believed.

The Bogomils were one of the gnostic sects which flourished in Bulgaria in the tenth century. From Bulgaria they traveled to western Europe where they became known as the Cathars, or “Pure Ones.” The word “bugger” comes from “Bulgars” which is what the Bogomils were called; they were said to favor sodomy over procreative sexual relations since they believed that begetting new life was evil. They believed the entire material world was created by the evil god. They believed the God of Israel mentioned in the Old Testament was really the devil, an idea that later appealed to the Nazis, which is why some Nazis made expeditions to Cathar castles, hoping to discover their lost secrets.

The Cathars flourished in the south of France because the secular leaders there were tolerant of the heresy; many nobles embraced it. Catharism appeared to be more rigorous than Catholicism but only for the Perfecti elite; the ordinary Cathar believers were not bound to fast or abstain from meat or from carnal relations. Individuals who were already drawn to a hedonistic lifestyle found that Catharism relieved them of guilt. When everything is sinful then nothing is sinful.

You do not try to hide the horrors of the religious strife that ultimately led to the destruction of the Cathars. Were you at times tempted to rewrite history? Could you imagine a different ending to this dramatic era of French history?

No, I was never tempted to rewrite history. Only the reality of the past can help us to understand the realities of the present. I believe that we need never be afraid of the truth of history, no matter how ugly it might be, because we have to learn from it. Yes, innocent people were massacred in the name of religion. People were burned alive. As the Dominican friar says in the novel, preaching may be more effective than the sword and the stake.

But it is generally forgotten that the Cathars struck out in violence first by murdering the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208. The violence escalated from there. Ultimately, the war became a conquest of the south by the north. The fight against heresy was just an excuse for war and political strife, since many Catholics fought other Catholics as well as Cathars.

My favorite secondary character was Simonette, the mistress of your heroine's uncle, a man whose wife has become a Perfecta, a Cathar religious leader. I see Simonette too, in her own way, torn between her faith and difficult circumstances. With her liveliness and good cheer, she counterbalances the stifling, nightmarish atmosphere of the Chateau of Mirambel. Who would be your favorite secondary character?

Yes, Catherine, you are right about Simonette. She is indeed torn and trying to make the best of a bad situation. Her warm earthiness is a foil for Lady Esclarmonde’s cold religiosity.

My favorite secondary character is Esterelle the hermitess. She is based upon a friend of mine who lives an eremitical life in a valley in an old house full of icons and cats. Esterelle has a great deal of wisdom and insight into earthly matters and yet at the same time she has already stepped over the threshold to the other side.

What have you learned from writing this book?

So much, I would not know where to begin. It has been a long journey, writing, looking for a publisher, rewriting. The main thing I have learned is that no matter how good a book may seem after the first draft it can always be better, much better. Itis important to rewrite until you feel you have stretched your creativity as far as it can go, all the while pruning away what is excessive or redundant.

A selfish question, from a historical novelist to another: you are self-publishing this book with Lulu.com. What are in your experience the pros and cons of this option,compared to standard publishing?

I have to say that publishing with Lulu.com has been on of the best decisions I ever made. I worked on the manuscript of The Night’s Dark Shade for two years or more with some editors from a publishing company who were helping me to get the book into shape for publication. We disagreed, however, about the main characters and where the story was going. I would not make the changes they wanted. Ultimately, every writer needs to be faithful to his or her unique inspiration. The story has to be yours, not someone else’s, even if it means self-publishing.

Publishing with Lulu.com gives the author complete control over the creative process, from choosing fonts to designing the cover. There are professional editors on staff to give assistance if you need it. And the author gets most of the royalties.

On the other hand,when one self-publishes there are not the same resources to promote one‘s book, to get it into bookstores, as there are when one has a typical book deal. It is all up to the author to make it happen. This can be a challenge, even if you already have a well-established readership, but it is an exciting challenge. If you are a first time author, I do not know if I would recommend self-publishing, although there are people who have done it with eventual success.

I am anxious to know about your next project… What can you reveal?

My next novel is based upon the lives of my Irish ancestors and the hardships they endured in their native land and in coming to Canada. It is going to tell the story of several generations at once with flashbacks to the past, showing how individual lives are like the interconnected links of a chain, especially the lives of a family. It will be the first book that I will not have first peddled around to publishers since I will be going straight to Lulu.com with it, and from thereto my readers. I write better when I know I am writing for the enjoyment of my readership, not to win over an editor in order to get a book deal. Overall, I love the freedom of self-publishing.

Thank you, Elena, for joining us for this illuminating discussion, and best wishes for the success of this remarkable novel!


A note on the photographs: the cross-shaped window is from the Cathar chateau of Termes, the view just above from the Chateau of Peyreperthuse, another Cathar fortress.

Every marriage is complex, this one more than most. At first glance, the 26 year old General, with his angular face and brusque manners, and the graceful queen of the brilliant but corrupt demi-monde of the late Revolution seem to form an odd couple.

Dominique de Villepin, in Le soleil noir de la puissance, notes that they have much in common. Joséphine and Bonaparte are both uprooted aristocrats, torn between their respective native islands and France, between the nobility and the Revolution, both are consumed by ambition.

In 1795 Bonaparte meets Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, from a slave-owning family of the Martinique nobility. She is a widow with two adolescent children. Her husband, General Alexandre de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she herself went to jail then.

She is now the mistress of Barras, the nobleman turned revolutionary who rules France. And Barras is tiring of this spendthrift brunette on the eve of middle age, and not sorry to pass her along to his young military protégé.

Rose and Bonaparte become lovers. She, after years of unhappy marriage and various liaisons, takes things with quite a bit of detachment. But Bonaparte is enthralled, possessive. He cannot abide the name Rose, used by her prior lovers, and calls her Joséphine, after her second given name of Joseph.

Let us read this letter of his, from December 1795:

I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures have left my senses no rest.

Sweet, incomparable Joséphine, what a strange effect you have on my heart. Are you angry? Do I see you sad? Are you worried? My soul breaks with grief, and there is no rest for your lover; but how much the more when I yield to this passion that rules me and drink a burning flame from your lips and your heart? Oh! This night has shown me that your portrait is not you!

You leave at midday; in three hours I shall see you.

Meanwhile, my sweet love, a thousand kisses; but do not give me any, for they set my blood on fire.

B.

A month later, in January 1796, Bonaparte proposes. Joséphine has no money of her own and enormous debts, but she brings, courtesy of Barras, the best dowry an ambitious general can dream of: the command of the Army of Italy, the doorway to glory.

On March 9 1796 they wed in a civil ceremony. Here is the marriage certificate. Note a few interesting details. The bride states her birthdate as 23 June 1767 (in fact she was born in 1763). Josephine is indeed six years older than her husband, and she does not wish to advertise this fact. See her neat signature at the bottom: M.J.R. (Marie-Joseph-Rose) Tascher. And next to it, the groom, Napolione Bonaparte, signs as well. Nobody dreams of Napoléon yet, not even he himself. Barras is of course a witness, as well as other dignitaries of the regime. As for a religious ceremony, no one seems to think of it at the time.


Bonaparte, only days later after this hurried wedding, must rejoin his command in Italy. Thanks to blitzkrieg tactics, he achieves unlikely victories and garners fame at the head of his ragtag army. He writes his bride passionate letters:

November 21, 1796

I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image… I cannot wait to give you proofs of my ardent love… How happy I would be if I could assist you at your undressing, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied in a scarf à la créole. You know that I will never forget the little visits, you know, the little black forest… I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Joséphine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.

Joséphine's feelings seem to be of a milder sort. She does not write much, if at all, and finds comfort in the arms of Louis-Hippolyte Charles, a dashing young officer of Hussards. Bonaparte's brothers, who do not like their sister-in-law, are only too happy to report the bad news to the groom. He is torn between furious jealousy and enduring passion, and writes:

I don’t love you anymore; on the contrary, I hate you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut. You don’t write me at all; you don’t love your husband; you know how happy your letters make him, and you don’t write him six lines of nonsense…

Soon, I hope, I will be holding you in my arms; then I will cover you with a million hot kisses, burning like the equator.

But the magic is gone. Joséphine is no longer the goddess of his dreams, she is a pretty woman like any other, and an unfaithful one at that. So much for the (foolhardy, in my opinion) theory that making a man jealous is the best way to increase his love. Bonaparte takes mistresses, and makes no mystery of it. Now it is Joséphine's turn to become jealous, and her bitter scenes only drive her husband further away.

In 1798, Bonaparte, now campaigning in Egypt, writes his elder brother Joseph, I am much distressed by domestic matters. Divorce may already be on his mind, long before dynastic concerns make it a matter of political expediency.

He returns to Paris, where Joséphine awaits him. Their common ambitions effect a reconciliation: she is instrumental in the preparations of the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799, which brings him to power. He now sees her not only as a valuable political ally, but also as his bonne étoile, the lucky star of his amazing career.

In 1804 he crowns her Empress, an honor denied most Queens of France, a token of his gratitude and their partnership on the arduous road to supreme power. Joséphine chooses the eve of the grandiose ceremony to reveal to the horrified Pope that he is going to anoint a couple that, in the eyes of the Church, is not married. The Pope, predictably, demands that a religious marriage take place that very night, to Joséphine's immense relief.

Joséphine is now in her forties, she is as graceful as ever, but she has given up hopes of presenting her husband with the heir he so wants to ensure the continuity of the Empire. Her daughter Hortense has - very reluctantly - married Louis Bonaparte, Napoléon's brother. The new Emperor is giving serious thought to the adoption of the couple's eldest son, who is both his nephew and Joséphine's grandson (gossip even has it that Napoléon, not Louis, is in fact the father, but this has never been proven). In any case this plan collapses, along with Joséphine's hopes, when the child suddenly dies at the age of seven.

By then Napoléon no longer shares his wife's bed, and he resolves at last on a divorce. The Senate decree that effects it is but a formality, and the religious marriage, contrary to Joséphine's expectations, turns out to be no hurdle. An annulment, of dubious validity under Canon law, is granted by the diocesan tribunal of Paris in a matter of weeks.

Joséphine retires with sadness and dignity to her country house of Malmaison. She follows from afar the arrival of the new Empress, Marie-Louise of Austria, the birth one year later of Napoléon's long awaited heir, then the collapse of the Empire and the first restoration of the Bourbons. She dies at the age of 50, apparently of pneumonia, after a walk in her beloved gardens of Malmaison with an illustrious visitor, Czar Alexander I.

Like many true romances, this one has no happy ending. It remains that Napoleon's very last word, on his deathbed on the faraway island of St. Helena, was Joséphine...

It is snowing on Paris and much of France, and my readers on the East Coast are facing extreme weather. What better way to keep warm (apart from a bowl of hot chocolate) on a day of bitter cold than looking at 18th century art?

So I will post this Fragonard, L'hiver (Winter) from the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is an early work (1755) and his manner is still very close to that of Boucher, though there is already Fragonard's trademark sense of movement and ability to capture the moment.


PS: For the chocolate, stay away from the loathsome instant versions! I use pure unsweetened cocoa, dissolved in hot milk.

I am beginning to see many Valentine's Day posts on the blogosphere... This one by Arleigh at historical-fiction.com, via Tea at Trianon, stands out by the amount of work, and knowledge of the field of historical fiction, that went into it. Yes, blogging is a labor of love.

As for me, with your permission, I will be keeping my Valentine's Day post under wraps until Sunday. Just a hint: it will be related to the characters and historical setting of For the King. As last year's, it will be a romance, of course.

In the meantime, I will let you admire this painting depicting one of the unions mentioned by Arleigh: the wedding at Notre-Dame of Napoleon and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, Empress of the French and twice grandniece of Marie-Antoinette.

Painting by Georges Rouget, 1811, Versailles, Musée National du Château et des Trianons

I first thought of the view of the Conciergerie as a background for my website and posted it with this idea. Then Elena Maria Vidal of Tea at Trianon and other readers, on and off the blog, suggested using it as a header. I tried it, and it worked! As Elena remarks, it fits my first novel, since the heroine of Mistress of the Revolution is jailed there, and the second one, since Roch Miquel, my protagonist in For the King works at the Préfecture de Police, then located at the back of the building (towards the center of picture, to the right of the single round tower).

It is an iconic view of Paris, and it conveys the urban feeling I am seeking. It had changed very little between the Revolution and the time of the painting (1858) and amazingly enough, since then. Only the ramshackle Préfecture has been demolished to make way for a more stately building. Look at this modern view:

The medieval origin of the building is obvious from the architecture of the towers. Indeed in the Middle Ages, this was the royal palace, the Palais de la Cité, after the island of the same name in the middle of the Seine River. It was home to King Louis IX, later Saint-Louis, who had the jewel-like Sainte-Chapelle built within its grounds.

It was also the seat of his grandson King Philippe IV le Bel, who put an end to the worldly (but not literary) existence of the Friar Templars. We owe Philippe the magnificent Salle des Gens d'Armes (Hall of the Men in Arms), one of the most impressive examples of lay Gothic architecture still in existence (left.)

But in the course of the 14th century, French Kings abandoned the Palace of the Cité, which, though no longer a royal residence, retained administrative functions, such as the Treasury. It became the seat of the Parliament of Paris, the highest court of justice in and around Paris until the Revolution.

The Parliament was abolished in short order, and the Revolutionary Tribunal settled in its former courtrooms. Thus it was convenient to transfer prisoners whose trial before the Tribunal was imminent to La Conciergerie beneath.

Men and women were housed separately, and those who could afford it were offered individual cells with modest furniture and the option of ordering catered meals. The rest of the prisoners made do with the dismal prison fare and the pailleux (collective cells with straw on the floor). In particular the Hall of the Men in Arms became a huge cage holding over a hundred male prisoners.

Women were housed around a yard with a fountain (visible on this picture to the right, behind the gates) where they could do a bit of toilette and wash any spare clothes. The women's cells were left open during the day, allowing them the use of the yard, and communication through a gated corridor with the men's quarters. All people could do was hold hands through the bars, but, as I note in Mistress, romances were brisk in this grim setting.

Marie-Antoinette herself spent the last months of her life at La Conciergerie. She was isolated from the other inmates, but the most amazing thing is that an escape attempt almost succeeded, and she was caught only after she had already left the prison, and was walking out of the courthouse. Security procedures were then severely tightened and she was kept to a cell with a high window opening onto the floor of the Women's Yard, under constant surveillance.

Likewise all the revolutionary leaders who ended on the guillotine transited through La Conciergerie: Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Chaumette, Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Coffinhal and other Jacobins.

Today La Conciergerie is open to the public. The Hall of the Men in Arms has lost nothing of its medieval splendor, the Women's Yard has barely changed since the French Revolution, and one can still follow the steps of the prisoners on their way to the guillotine. We don't know which cells precisely housed Marie-Antoinette, but a memorial chapel was built during the Restoration.

The rest of the former royal palace is now the Palais de Justice, the main courthouse of Paris, housing the Superior Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. One can (I should say must) also visit, through a different entrance, Louis IX's Sainte-Chapelle. A place where history comes to life...

First things first: I owe all of you who offered suggestions, via comment or email, in response to my call for help on website redesign many, many thanks. It is easy to run away with one's ideas, something for which an open, constructive conversation provides a wonderful cure. Based on your advice, I will now go to work with my designer on this all important project. But this is only a small part of the promotion of For the King.

As you probably know, many traditional media have cut down on their book review sections (sad, it was always the first section I read in my Sunday paper). Fortunately for writers and readers alike, literary bloggers have stepped in. We now have many more outlets, run, often without any expectation of profit, by people who are passionate about books. This means that the traditional "brick-and-mortar" book tour is becoming a thing of the past, and that much of the work of book promotion is shifting towards blog tours and online reviews.

And this is where I am right now, not touring yet, because For the King will not be published until July, but beginning to organize my blog tour. Fellow writers will know precisely what I mean. Robin Maxwell just wrote an article in the Huffington Post on this topic: Publishing Revolution: Historical Fiction Evolves in Digital Age.

This is definitely turning into a catch-all post, but why not? I received my copies of the German edition of Mistress of the Revolution, titled Die Braut des Jakobiners, The Jacobin's Bride. Why the change in title? It simply sounded better in German, and I was told the term Jacobin was very evocative of the French Revolution for the German public. In any case, I do like the cover. A beautiful Liotard, La belle lectrice (The Fair Reader). One of these days we will have to come back to Liotard, a gifted 18th century Swiss pastellist with an amazing sense of color.

And speaking of foreign rights, Artemis, a Turkish publisher with a growing list of English-speaking authors, has purchased the rights to both Mistress of the Revolution and For the King. Either one would have made me happy, but this two-book deal is still better. I am anxious to see those covers...

Finally, you may have noticed changes in the design of this blog. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. My old template was discontinued by GoDaddy, which made this switch unavoidable. This is actually my first post under this template. It has some drawbacks, in particular it is less customizable. I also believe the post titles stand out less, but the general feel may be cleaner, less cluttered. What do you think? 

It is time for me to update my website, catherinedelors.com for the July release of my new novel, For the King. For the content I will include, as I had done for Mistress of the Revolution, an excerpt, a bibliography, a Q&A session and a book club section. That's the easy part. Now, about the design?

I love the deep red background wallpaper I had chosen for Mistress, which you can also see on this blog, but it clashes with the cover of For the King, which its shimmering turquoise gown. Also, as much as I like the visuals of this cover, it doesn't scream "historical thriller." So why not use the wallpaper of the redesigned website to convey an urban noir feel?

Easier said (or written) than done. So I went to the sites of authors of historical thrillers I enjoy. I visited the site of Louis Bayard, author of The Black Tower, also set in Paris, very close in time to my own For the King. Plain black background. You can't get more noir than that, can you? It is simple and striking, but Louis has a lot of red in the rest of the page design to liven it up. And again red won't go with my cover. I don't think this kind of background would work for me.

So I moved on to the site of David Liss, author of Conspiracy of Paper and other acclaimed novels in the Benjamin Weaver series. Historical thrillers/mysteries all right, and though his 17th century London is not my 1800 Paris, it is close enough to give me ideas. It turns out that the colors of Mr. Liss's background (brown and old gold) fit the cover of For the King AND convey the somber mood I would like to impart. Do you agree?

Now, dear readers, I need your help. Should I, like David Liss, use brown without any pattern (except for the goldish squiggly on top, which I like) or should I go for a figurative background? A few suggestions: an 18th century printed or handwritten document? an image of the Rue Nicaise attack, the starting point of the novel? an image of Paris at the time, like this view of the Conciergerie?

Any other ideas? I am listening...

I had long wanted to post on this extremely interesting figure, who makes a cameo appearance in my first novel, Mistress of the Revolution. Then a discussion began at Ellen's Eighteenth Century Worlds on the topic of Grace Elliott and her Journal of my life during the French Revolution. Ellen kindly summarized the discussions in a post at Reveries under the sign of Austen.

Lady Elliott is often remembered both as the author of the Journal, and as the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and King George IV. She even registered her daughter at birth as the Prince's illegitimate child. The latter did not dare deny officially his paternity, though he was not utterly convinced (neither was public opinion, for that matter).

Grace later moved to France in the 1780s as the mistress of the Duc d'Orléans, future Philippe Egalité, who later voted for the execution of his cousin Louis XVI. Thus she was a direct witness to many major events of the Revolution. She was already quite familiar with the country, as she had been educated there in a convent school.

Ellen mentions a biography of Grace Elliott by Jo Manning, titled My Lady Scandalous: The Amazing Life and Outrageous Times of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, Royal Courtesan. I haven't read it, but I did read Lady Elliott's Journal. The context of its writing is interesting: Lady Elliott was recounting (with substantial embellishments and omissions, as we will discuss later) her adventures in revolutionary France to the English royal family in 1801. Then she wrote down those narratives upon the request of King George III, who must have found them interesting and entertaining. Which they no doubt are. They were apparently not meant for publication. The style of the Journal is consistent with a quickly jotted down verbal narrative, without much writerly self-editing.

Grace tailored the story of her life to fit her audience. Some things in the Journal are obvious lies (such as Marie-Antoinette trusting and befriending her, the mistress and confidante of her arch-enemy the Duc d'Orléans) though some do ring true (her arrests, for instance). Some of the prison scenes were not lived by Grace herself, but were transposed from the experiences of two of her friends. So this is a hybrid between a memoir and fiction.

I suspect Lady Elliott's politics during the Revolution were in fact much closer to those of the Duc d'Orléans, which is to say radical, than she cared to admit to her royal listeners across the Channel a decade later. She was also careful to leave out the fact that she was a British spy, though one can guess at it from the Journal, for instance when her correspondence with Fox is discovered and leads to her arrest and subsequent release.

The text of Grace's Journal was further "arranged" by her granddaughter when it was ultimately published in England in 1859. As early as 1861 it was translated in French, with multiple following French editions. Fresh from our group reading of the Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew James Edward Austen Leigh, I suspect a Victorian bowdlerization of the life and writings of a Georgian ancestor. 

Grace Elliott's life during the French Revolution was also the topic of a remarkable film, released in the US under the title The Lady and the Duke, by the recently deceased and deeply regretted French director Eric Rohmer. This film shows Grace as far more than a royal courtesan, which is as it should be, though in my opinion it takes her Journal too much at face value. It remains one of the best renditions of the French Revolution on screen, and deserves its own post at a later time.



Note: Both portraits reproduced here are by Thomas Gainborough, both were painted around 1778, and both are now in New York City, the full-length one at the Met, the one just above at the Frick Collection.

Linda B. Congratulations!

Everyone else, I will have other giveaways soon. Stay tuned...