Serendipity and Ada Leigh by Imogen Robertson

There are many advantages to living in the modern age -  dentistry, antibiotics - and, for the record, I’m also delighted to have the vote and be allowed a mortgage without my father’s permission. Then there’s the internet and the access to information and individuals it brings sweeping along in its digital skirts.

For most writers the internet is a mixed blessing. It does no one any good to be able to read nasty reviews on amazon, and the endless distractions of the wikipedia vortex are, well, endlessly distracting - not sure why, but I spent part of this evening reading about deers’ milk cheese. Once in a while though the stars line up neatly and something really special turns up. Such a day came, for me, a month ago when I got an email from Michael Armitage of Hawkhurst, Kent. 

I’ve written about Ada Leigh and her Home for Impoverished English and American Girls in Paris before on this blog. Ada was a remarkable woman - conservative, devout, young and unmarried, she fought against the prejudices of her time, class and family to help women who had nowhere else to turn. She raised vast sums of money to offer lost girls a home and a future during the Belle Époque and managed the enterprise herself. I based a character in The Paris Winter on her, very closely, and learned a great deal about the lives of poor English women in Paris from her slim autobiography.  

Since finishing the novel, I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to learn more about her and looked with frustration at my notes from her book. At the time it felt as if I were transcribing most of it, but I was sure there were gems I had missed and wondered if I could track down an expensive copy online or make a couple more trips to the British Library to read it again. How to justify the time and expense? A screenplay, perhaps? But there’s a novel here that needs finishing and… Well, you know how it goes. Time melts away. (Feel free to add a sarcastic comment about deers' milk cheese here). 

Then Michael's email arrived. Michael was walking his dog through the churchyard of St Laurence, Hawkhurst and noticed a grave, previously hidden in long grass. It was a memorial to John Travers Lewis, who died at sea on May 6th 1901 and also to his widow, Ada Maria, born 3rd March 1840, died 10th April 1931, Founder of the Ada Leigh Homes, Paris. He made the connection to Paris Winter and me and on the off-chance I might be interested, sent me an email.

Churchyard of St Laurence (c) Michael Armitage

I was delighted to get it. I knew that Ada married Dr John Travers Lewis, Bishop of Ontario in 1889 and was widowed in 1901, but after that no more. Michael and I have done a bit of research, and it seems one of the Bishop’s daughters from his first marriage, married local land-owner Mr Llewellyn Foster Loyd. The Bishop was on his way to visit them, with Ada, when he died. Ada wrote about it in her biography of her husband:

“The open grave was hung with flowers by his three remaining daughters Mrs. Robert Craigie Hamilton, Mrs. Llewellyn Foster Loyd, and Sister Evangeline and the service was not one of grief, but rather of  triumph.”  

There is also a memorial plaque for the Bishop on the gate.

I find it deeply satisfying to know that Ada was buried alongside her husband in this lovely churchyard thirty years later, and that her role as founder of the homes is recognised in stone. There is also a particular pleasure in the fact that Michael happened to notice the memorial and remember me. He was even kind enough to find and send me a picture of the church from 1909 - 8 years after the Bishop died and the year in which Paris Winter is set.

Another blessing of the internet: After getting Michael’s email I wondered again how much a copy of Ada’s biography would cost me, and began searching online. At some point since I last looked Ada’s biography has appeared on archive.org so it is now at my fingertips and free. I better get on with that screenplay. But perhaps before I do I’ll go down to Hawkhurst, see if Michael and the dog fancy a walk and lay some flowers on Ada's grave. 

(c) Michael Armitage

www.imogenrobertson.com

Americans in Paris by Imogen Robertson

The US edition from St Martin's Press

The Paris Winter came out in US on 18th November and as I was wishing it well, it struck me how many of my guides to Belle Époque Paris were, in fact, American. 

The practice of women artists coming to Paris to study was well established by the time my protagonist, Maud, makes her way over from England to study at the Académie Lafond (a fictional version of the Académie Julian). Abigail May Alcott Nieriker - younger sister of Louisa May Alcott - wrote a useful, if slightly bossy, guide to studying art abroad and how to do it cheaply in 1879. She includes notes on where to buy your colours and how to deal with rude Parisians. You can find it here.

I strained my French through the daily newspaper reports of  the floods of 1909, but the best description I found came from another American, Helen Davenport Gibbons. Her first book was The Red Rugs of Tarsus, which described what she had witnessed during the Armenian Massacres of 1909. After leaving Turkey she went with her husband to Paris. The book which resulted from her time there - Paris Vistas - is full of the sort of domestic details that are so vital to a novelist - what they ate, how they heated their apartment and how they got on with their landlady. It is also written with the sort of liveliness and verve that makes you wish you could sit down to supper with her. She writes about the floods, the initial excitement, then the growing fear with clarity and feeling: 

‘We saw strange sights that night, wooden paving blocks floating in a messy jumble; a few restaurants endeavouring to dispel the gloom with candles; soldiers with fixed bayonets guarding the inundated quarters. It was bitter cold and the glare of their fires was weirdly silhouetted in the rising waters, mingled with the shadows of deserted houses.’

I know nothing about Flora Adelaide Mclane Woodson other than the fact she wrote the breathless and delightful ‘Magnetic Paris’ under the name of Adelaide Mack. I think supper with her would be exhausting, but as a guide to what catches the eye in Paris, she is a genius. Her sentences run on in a sort of frantic dash as she describes the street life and street cries, the characters the food, the pets, the telephones, the markets and the way the fashionable Parisienne wears her make up.

When I went to France to walk the streets and wonder what MAud saw and felt, I had the luck to meet up with another American in Paris (and we did get to eat together). David Downie and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris have lived in the city for years. I came across David’s excellent book on the city, Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light  while I was doing my paper research, and when I found out he and Alison gave private tours of the city, I signed myself (and my husband) up. David demonstrated a writer’s eye in his choice of places to take us, and several scenes in the novel grew directly out of that day. 

Images from 'Magnetic Paris' 
drawn by Geo Desains and Charlotte Schaller

So why are all these great guides to Paris by Americans? I have my theories. I discovered when writing about the 18th century that often the most useful texts about a particular place are written by strangers. Strangers notice the differences, the small, subtle bits and pieces that give a city its sense of place (Royale with cheese, anyone?). The people who actually live there don’t notice this stuff. They concentrate on the things that are important to them, which may make for great literature but aren’t as useful to me. This is why the slightly crazed Flora Adelaide Mclane Woodson was a lot more useful to me than Proust. And there are cartoons in ‘Magnetic Paris’. 

What about books by British people living in France? Well, personally I think we are too close to France to see it properly. France is like a sibling we love, but also find rather irritating so a lot of popular books on France by writers from the UK are called things like ‘A Thousand Years of Annoying the French’. Davenport Gibbons and Woodson approach Paris with enthusiasm rather than mild snark, and that makes them much more useful. 

The Paris Winter, unusually for me, does have speaking parts for real people and one of those went to Gertrude Stein. Her book - 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' was an invaluable guide to the art world of the time, and her salons, such as the one Maud visits in the novel, were an essential part of the Parisian art scene. I am not a great fan of her writing in general - I rather feel as Arthur C. Fifield did and expresses in this very famous rejection letter - God, I hope I never receive a rejection like that - but The Autobiography was absolutely vital, and having a scene set at her home at 27 rue de Fleures gave me a chance to have Maud encounter art which confused and challenged her.

So, with grateful thanks I raise my glass to The Paris Winter in America, and the Americans in Paris. 

The UK Cover from Headline

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Seasonal Drinking by Imogen Robertson

My Dad making sure Christmas goes smoothly.

I’m glad to say that my family tend to get on very well, particularly at Christmas. After considering this for some years, I’ve decided it’s because we start the day by drinking Champagne Cocktails. So, on that dubious premise, here’s my personal guide to festive drinking for History Girls:

1. Champagne Cocktail

Now I know this is just a Robertson Christmas tradition, but it’s a great tradition so I feel it only right to try and spread the word. Cocktails are an American invention - thanks, guys - and were regarded with a sort of delighted fascination when they crossed the pond in the 19th century. There is a sort of drooling delight in the way the British papers report on these strange American mixed drinks. In 1884 they list with palpable relish the huge range of cocktails available at the American Bar of the International Health Exhibition, London. A medal was awarded to Plymouth Gin at the same event, by the way. That sounds like my kind of Health Exhibition. Still, the Champagne Cocktail was King. It is described as a ‘capital soother for a sore head and coppery tongue.’ Which is true, and probably why it works for us in Darlington on Christmas morning. 

Mr Gladstone was offered one in 1888 when he visited the United States Exchange in the Strand. After drinking it he offered a general invitation to the people of the Republic to write to him, giving his address as ‘Mr Gladstone, England’. Which is the sort of thing I do after a cocktail.

2. Mulled Wine

Ok. Back to more traditional Christmas fare. Well-ish. It is the mulled wine that Fred lifts to drink the health of his Uncle Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’, and it’s certainly associated with Christmas now, but basically I think the British were always up for the idea of mulling something whenever the weather got chill. 

John Hutton’s Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1859 defines to mull as to spoil or destroy, which seems a bit harsh in this context, though maybe that depends on what you think of posset. 

Let me explain. For Elizabeth Raffald in her mid-eighteenth century cookbook, mulling wine involves a lot of egg yolks as well as sugar, nutmeg cinnamon and optional orange peel, to create a drink that is ‘hot and pretty thick’ to be served with toast, so her mulled wine is basically boozy custard.

Please tell me there's booze in that cup.

By the mid-19th century recipes are offered with or without eggs, so the ‘egg-nog / posset’ tradition separates from the ‘adding spices and sugar to anything alcoholic’ tradition of mulling as we know it now in the UK. Possets were regarded as health drinks, which is perhaps why in the early 19th century mulled wine seemed to be the drink of choice for men who went in for ultra marathons. Well, at least it was for a Chairman named Spence who in 1801 went 42 miles in the space of eight hours at a ‘kind of trot or half-run’.  He had three rests of a quarter hour each when he took a little mulled-wine. In 1806 a Shropshire man was similarly sustained during his attempt to walk 142 miles in 30 hours. Neither news item states this is the 'with egg' version of mulled-wine, but it would make sense. Obviously it was the drink of champions - a sort of 19th century version of those protein shakes beloved by modern sports fiends.

3. Punch

Now degraded to a nasty neon concoction left at office parties to provoke the prankster and trap the unwary, it was the high holiday drink of the 18th century country squire. In 1792 he was already thought of as a creature of a former age, mourned over thus in the Annual Register: ‘[He] never played at cards but at Christmas when a family pack was produced from the mantle piece, was commonly followed by a couple of grey hounds and a pointer and announced his arrival at a neighbour's house by smacking his whip or giving the view halloo. His drink was generally ale except on Christmas, the fifth of November or some other gala days when he would make a bowl of strong brandy punch garnished with a toast and nutmeg.’ Again with the toast! Reminds me of my days drinking in Russia, when the locals repeatedly told me vodka could do you no harm if you had a bite of black bread after every shot. They were wrong.

4. Spiced ale / Wassail!

Laurie Graham has got ahead of me in this excellent post, but I can’t resist adding this 1784 account from a correspondent to The Gentleman’s Magazine: 

‘In that part of Yorkshire near Leeds where I was born, and spent my youth, I remember, when I was a boy, that it was customary for many families on, the twelfth eve of Christmas […] to invite their relations, friends and neighbours to their houses, to play at cards and to partake of a supper, of which minced pies were an indispensable ingredient; and after supper was brought in the Wassail Cup, being a large bowl, such as is now used for Punch, filled with sweetened ale and roasted apples. I have seen bowls used for this purpose that held above a gallon. A plate of spiced cake was first handed about to the company, and then the Wassail Bowl, of which every one partook, by taking with a spoon, out of the ale, a roasted apple and eating it, and then drinking the healths of the company out of the bowl, wishing them a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. […] I am of opinion that the custom was very ancient, but from whence it arose, or why the mixture was called Lamb Wool, I do not at present pretend to account.’

Karel Van Mander III

5. Nappy to finish

I apologise, ‘nappy’ was just slang for strong ale, but mentioning it here means I can quote this, and having found it, I must. It’s from a volume called ‘The Oxford Sausage’ of 1772.

Meanwhile then, make us Statesmen happy 

This Christmas with a Cup of Nappy: 

Bring forth your punch, your strong, and stale 

The shivering Newsman's sure regale: 

Nor let the authors of these rhymes 

Find your hearts - harder than the times.  

Cheers! 

Merry Christmas, folks. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Killing your darlings (then resurrecting one) by Imogen Robertson

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio

The Paris Winter is out in paperback this week, so while I’m copy-editing my next book, part of me is also wandering the boulevards, peering in at the shop-windows and watching the young women climbing the stairs to their studio to continue their training as artists. It is one of the great pleasures of writing for a living that you get to swoop mentally across a city, checking the waters rising, being a ghost at Maxim's or Bal Taberin or examining diamonds in the jeweller’s shops on rue Royale. You start watching your characters and as they and the plot develop you start noticing something like a novel taking shape. It can be very exciting. There are also moments though, when rather than wafting around the world you’ve created, you find yourself slamming into a brick wall.

Writing a novel involves any number of highs and lows, and normally at least twice in the process I feel like throwing the laptop out of the window and finding something more sensible to do for a living. Then I remember I’m not trained for anything else, and being self-employed for this long has turned me too feral for office work so I have to sit back down and get on with it. There were some real highs writing Paris Winter, there were some brick wall moments too.

The helpful cat

When I first delivered the manuscript to Headline, and to my editor there, Flora Rees, it had a modern narrative running through it. There were bits of it I was very pleased with, but after getting my notes back from my Flora (and getting married - though I’m not sure that had anything to so with it), and re-reading the manuscript I had to admit that it just wasn’t working. I was on my extended honeymoon in Portugal at the time and I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as I skyped Flora, my mother-in-law’s cat curled up next to the keyboard, to say I thought it all needed to come out. Flora had, I think, come to the same conclusion some time ago and was gently hinting me in that direction, so I suspect she wasn’t surprised. I also remember she seemed a lot less worried than I was about throwing away a third of the book. The next few days involved a real slaughter of the darlings, as scenes and characters melted away and left no trace behind them in the manuscript. Once that painful decision was made though, the novel blossomed. Suddenly there was room for the story to breathe and I’m afraid I began to forget all about my modern characters and their stories. Playing with the cat helped. Also having an understanding husband and a shop down the road that sold a decent white wine for one euro a bottle turned out to be very important. 

The understanding husband

I entirely rewrote the book in a month and it was incredibly satisfying. In the general slaughter though, I also killed one of Flora’s darlings. It was a scene towards the end of the novel, a key one, and I entirely rewrote it so it was seen from a different character’s perspective, and took place in a different part of the city. Flora, while of course understanding my reasoning, was sorry to see it go. Which brings me back to the paperback. As well as having a lovely quote on it from Manda Scott and a banner announcing it was short-listed for the CWA Historical Dagger, it also has a bonus track. We have put in that missing scene as an extra at the end of the novel. Has anyone else every done anything like that? And if you had the chance to resurrect a lost scene like this, adding to the end of the novel as an sort of ‘alternative reality’ for your readers, would you? And as readers, would you be interested is discovering bits of what might have been? 

The Paris Winter (with bonus track) is available from Thursday.

Home (is where the stories are) by Imogen Robertson

Forgive me, fellow History Girls! It’s going to be a short post from me this month. I’m up in my home town of Darlington celebrating my parent’s Golden Wedding Anniversary and between the champagne and the buffet preparation I haven’t had a lot of time to think about writing historical fiction.

That’s not entirely true. My parents have lived in the same house since they married in 1963, and have filled it with photo albums, letters, furniture and assorted ephemera from both sides of the family. The original inspiration for Paris Winter was an album of pictures belonging to my father’s mother taken while she was on holiday in Vienna before the First World War. 

Last night after dinner my father fetched another folder from one of the cupboards. It contained my grandfather’s notes about the business he hoped to start when he got out of a prisoner of war camp. He was captured at Ypres in 1917. The folder also contained a very beautifully printed programme, complete with photographs and full text, of a play the French prisoners put on in the same camp. It was a reminder of the difference between the way the officers and men were treated once they were captured during that terrible slaughter. 

My grandfather eventually became a furniture remover in Darlington, he came here to recover from the Spanish Flu under the care of his sister who was the first Lady Doctor in the town. Dad took over the company when he was 21. He also took over his father’s employees, including a man who had been forced to work in the salt mines as a prisoner during WWI. He never lost the profound stutter he developed during the war. Perhaps I haven’t done with the family archives yet.

My parents gave excellent speeches, and took great delight in telling their groaning younger relatives that they bought this large and lovely house for £4,500 and a free removal. Having got married last year though the thing that really stung me was the bill for the reception photographed below. Yes, the total for feeding and watering 140 guests was just over £186. Thought it might be handy for anyone writing about high life in the sixties. Cheers!

Suzanne Valadon by Imogen Robertson

The Hangover  (Portrait of Suzanne Valadon)
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

I normally steer clear of using real characters in my fiction. I find myself so caught up in trying to make a portrayal accurate that it silts up my imagination, but there is always an exception to any rule and the artist Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) plays a significant role in The Paris Winter. I just couldn’t resist her. Mind you, she was one of those people round whom stories and legends seemed to grow like weeds even within her lifetime, so I feel sure she wouldn’t mind me involving her in the fictional adventures of my characters. After I posted about women artists of the Bell Époque last week, someone foolishly suggested I write more about some of them, so I'm delighted to have the chance to write about her again.

Maurice playing with slingshot
- Valadon 1895

Valadon was born in Bessines, but her mother left there for Paris soon after Suzanne was born and, apparently seduced by the sight of the windmills on the hill, her mother picked Montmartre as the place to live. Suzanne, grimy, mischievous, unteachable ran wild there. Sometimes she’d follow funeral processions in the hope of tips from mourners, at others she’d get other children to model for her and draw their portraits on the pavements, once she stopped a runaway horse. She also said that as a young child she saw Renoir painting and told him to keep working at it and not be discouraged. She became a circus performer (possibly) and a model  certainly. She appears in works by Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec and Degas, and was mistress and muse of Puvis de Chavannes. 

La Poupée Abandonnée -Valadon 1921
(The National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington)

She also began to draw and paint herself and Toulouse Lautrec was her first customer and advisor, though he treated her as an equal. Her work has a boldness - strong lines and fierce, deep colours. There is also an clear-eyed honesty to her work. Her paintings are frank studies of family relations, sexuality and ageing. She had a great deal of success with her work, allowing her to keep her ramshackle family of mother, alcoholic son, lover, goats, dogs and friends afloat for years. Apparently she claimed to feed her bad drawings to the goats. The alcoholic son’s fame as a painter in the end eclipsed her own. Maurice Utrillo used his empty cityscapes to pay his bar bills, even when his works were selling for thousands in the commercial galleries of the city.

His parentage is uncertain. One story says that his official father, Miguel Utrillo, agreed to acknowledge paternity, because who, after all, wouldn’t happily sign their name to a work of Renoir or Degas? Suzanne was also at one point the lover of Erik Satie, in fact he was so devastated when she left him he never had another relationship.

Andre Utter and his Dogs - Valadon 1932

At the time of The Paris Winter, late 1909, Suzanne had just given up an experiment with bourgeois living. She had moved to the suburbs with a banker for a while, but the comfort of such a life was no replacement for artistic cut and thrust of Montmatre and she returned to live there with her new lover, another artist who was three years younger than her son called Andre Utter. They stayed together until 1934.  

She had a great line in telling people what she thought. One year when her work was shown in the Paris Salon alongside a more academic painter with a similar name, he wrote to her suggesting a way they could sign their work to avoid confusion. She wrote back a note saying, fine or you could just sign yours ‘merde.’

I’ve linked to a few more of her works below, and I recommend June Rose’s biography of her, Mistress of Montmartre. She is not as celebrated as she should be, but they still know who she is in Paris; if you’ve ever taken the funicular up the hill to Sacre Coeur, you caught it in the tiny but perfectly formed Suzanne Valadon Square. 

Works of Suzanne Valadon 

Women Artists in Paris by Imogen Robertson

An early reader of Paris Winter made the mistake this week of asking me if there really were many female artists training in Paris during the Belle Époque. Five minutes later they staggered away just as I was getting into my stride.

Women were not admitted to the École des Beaux Arts until 1897, but by that time there were already other opportunities for women to train and these independent schools continued to flourish. One of the most important studios was the Académie Julian and it is still training artists today. Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907) was an accomplished painter, but it was as the owner and manager of a number of ateliers for both men and women that he excelled. He came from a poor background, and though he became successful it seems he was always sympathetic towards the plight of the starving artist. That said, the women always paid a great deal poor than the men for their tuition. It was expected they would have a male relative to support them financially. At first Julian allowed women into the male classes, but it was 'awkward' and 'disagreeable' and soon he was operating women only classes. Men and women working from the same nude model seemed to be the cause of the problem. One of his earliest and most influential pupils, Marie Bashkirtseff, was happy to work in the women only classes because the teaching was the same and apparently the men smoked too much. Julian's wife and former pupil, Amélie Beaury-Saurel, was a successful portrait painter in her own right and helped him run his various schools. She obviously helped enhance his reputation. Lady's Realm in 1900 recommended her to English readers as 'an excellent teacher and, in addition [she] possesses a most charming personality.'

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio 1881

Julian hired teachers who had excellent reputations, many were winners of the Prix de Rome, and the focus of the training was on life-drawing and figurative draughtmanship. Students had to show they were expert at drawing plaster casts before they were allowed to work in oils or with a model. There were regular competitions in which the male and female students competed on equal terms and for cash prizes and his students, again both male and female were regular fixtures in the official Salon. It seems the attitude to the work was serious. The Académie was fairly open about who was allowed to pay their fees and take a place in the studio, but if they did not produce work showing talent they would not stay. According to one woman quoted in Catherine Fehrer's 1994 article in Burlington Magazine '...everything was done to discourage her... There would come a day when she would not be in her accustomed place. No one knew what happened, but whatever it was, it was kindly done and effective.' That sounds a little frightening to me, but though there were certainly rivalries, there were also friendships and given the students were encouraged to continually draw quick caricatures of themselves and their teachers, I'm sure there was some Parisian lightness of spirit there too. His pupils came from across Europe and America, some disappeared and some excelled and their works which spanned extraordinary changes in the art world from the Victorian to the Modern are still greatly admired today.

Of course there were dozens of other female artists who were in Paris but did not study with Julian, but you had better not get me started on greats like Suzanne Valadon, or we'll never get out to enjoy the sunshine at all...
Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is a wonderful study of the artists and their work, and you can find a partial list of the artists, male and female, who trained with Julian here.

  

The Paris Floods of 1910 by Imogen Robertson

When I tell people that my new novel is set against the backdrop of the Paris Floods of 1910, I tend to get blank looks. What floods? Well, these ones. 

I saw some of these images online around the time of the centenary and, as these things do, they burrowed deep into my mind when I was thinking about writing a new book.  Paris at this time was the city of the future, a place where nature had, it seemed, been firmly put in her place. The new métro was being extended; there were telephones and electric lights; hotels proudly proclaimed they had gas on all floors; there were cars on the streets and the first Paris Air Show held in 1909 proclaimed that man now had control of the skies as well as the earth. 

The floods of late January 1910 showed how quickly that apparent control could disappear as many of Paris’s innovations were turned against her. The swelling river found ways to break through the embankments via forgotten waterways and the new sewers and métro tunnels, causing flooding in areas that were a good way away from the river. The pavements gave way leaving sink holes gaping in the middle of Hausmann’s elegant and ordered boulevards. The Chamber of Deputies was reachable only by boat and what seemed on the first days to be a mild diversion, a few streets turned into a little Venice on the outskirts of town, became a frightening and disastrous threat. The sound of wreckage hitting the Paris bridges was said to sound like artillery fire. The electricity began to fail and the municipal clocks all stopped as the water fought modernity and won. There were reports that the Eiffel Tower itself was shifting and in danger of collapse. The glories of the Louvre were saved only by the heroic actions of workers and soldiers who raced to keep building up the embankment, protecting the Palace as the waters continued to rise and rise. Paris was awed and, perhaps briefly, humbled. Saint Sulpice was thrown open to shelter refugees flooded out of their homes, the theatres held special benefits to collect contributions for those affected and in the end there was a sense of the city, so divided by inequalities in wealth, coming together for support and comfort. The waters did not care if you were rich or poor, and though as always the poor suffered most, they did not this time suffer alone.

The image of the city, so ordered and confident, being eaten away by forces it could not control or understand became the central image of my novel. The idea that just when you feel most secure the waters might be eating away at the foundations haunted me through the writing. I finished it feeling we should all be suspicious of what seems like solid ground. 

For a non-fiction account of the floods, I recommend Paris Under Water by Jeffrey H. Jackson   

My novel, The Paris Winter, is published on 11th April.

Diamond thieves in Paris by Imogen Robertson

Paris Café by Ilya Repin

One of the many things I love about this blog is the opportunity to offer up bits of research that haven’t made it in to my novels or have done so in such a heavily fictionalised form their origins are lost. The robbery yesterday of £30 million in diamonds reminded me of two stories of 19th century jewel heists I read during my research for The Paris Winter (available for pre-order now, since you ask). 

The first I like because of its elaborate set-up and was reported in the Bradford Observer April 29 1875. A couple, claiming to be English and accompanied by a servant, took a very nice apartment in Avenue d’Eylan for two months and paid in advance. They made themselves conspicuous by their lavish spending, particularly at the jewellers where they managed to spend six thousand francs in a week. The apartment was six hundred and fifty a month by comparison. They paid in cash and were, unsurprisingly, well liked. At some point the husband began negotiations to buy a set of diamonds for his wife costing 112 thousand francs. He and the jeweller agreed on the bargain price of 106 thousand and the jeweller was then invited to bring the diamonds up to the apartment and receive payment. Up he went into the fashionable sitting room and was invited to wait while the husband took the diamonds into the bedroom to show his wife. She was unwell, you see. 

The jeweller saw signs of the wife’s presence in the apartment; her sewing box, her shawl, and there was also the comforting sight of bundles of bank notes on the side-table ready to pay him. He made himself comfortable and began to read the paper. It took him some three-quarters of an hour before he became suspicious. He found that he had been locked into the room and the bundles of bank notes were in fact ‘prospectuses’. He tried to ring the bell (this is my favourite bit) but the bell pull came away in his hand. It was another three-quarters of an hour before he could get any help as the concierge had been sent away on a complicated errand by the ‘servant’ of his customers. By the time anyone could work out what had happened the thieves had a two hour head start which was, apparently, all that they needed. They had left no clues, even removing any maker’s mark from a hat left in a cupboard, though they did leave a set of false whiskers behind them.

The second case involved some of the French Crown Jewels, most of which were sold off by the state in 1887. M. Lepée in Rue de Madeleine bought some of them which he displayed in the window of his shop. One morning the following year the managers niece came to open the shop and found the ten thousand pounds worth of diamonds were missing and the shop was full of the robbers tools, including a crowbar and a dark lantern. The shop would have lost a lot more, the thieves were obviously planning to open the safe, but it seems they were alarmed by some noise and fled. Not before they had paused for a snack though. It seems from the report they paused mid-robbery to have some ham. This proved to be a bad idea not just because they didn’t have time to open the safe, but because the police saw the name of the butcher on the meat wrapping and went to ask him if he’d sold ham to anyone suspicious recently. He had and was able to give a description of two men with foreign accents, a description that matched the one the concierge gave of two men who had been enquiring about the empty flat above the shop.

I didn’t find any room in the novel for ham loving criminals or doctored bell-pulls, though there are diamonds, betrayal and cruelty enough. I did find myself thinking though as I read these stories, why are we often so fond of jewel thieves from Raffles to Ocean’s 11? Is there something about people wearing jewels that cost more than most houses that means when they are stolen our moral sense is less offended than by other crimes, other robberies? Not that there is anything noble, roguish or charming about the diamond thieves in my book, but it is a trope, isn’t it? I’d be interested to know what you think.