Perfumes....by Adèle Geras

The cutting I've photographed above highlights the ancient art of soap making, associated for many centuries with Marseille. You can't see what it says but basically SAVON DE MARSEILLE is fighting to have themselves protected as a special product in the way champagne and certain cheeses are. They've been making soap from olive oil and ash for ages and ages and now upstart organisations like L'Occitane want to add perfumes to the original recipe, arguing that savon de Marseille might be authentic but it's brown and hard and does not smell very nice. Reading it made me think of France and smells and above all, perfume.


The serial VERSAILLES, which is on our televisions right now is one I haven't watched. I'm too overburdened with Scandi noir dramas and box sets of one kind and another to take on the story of Louis XIV with added bonking and English spoken throughout. But because I've read a little about Versailles (The Sun King, by Nancy Mitford and Pure by Andrew Miller to be precise) I do know one fact. The place stank in ways we can't even begin to imagine. No loos, no sanitation to speak of, people relieving themselves all over the place, behind hangings, in corners....I'm not going to describe it. Just stop for a moment and consider what it must have been like. Perfumes must have been more than a luxury. It's hard to think of going through those mirrored halls without some fragrant something clutched to your assaulted and flinching nose. Galimard Perfumes in Grasse was founded in 1797, so long after Louis could have made use of them, but they were doubtless still very much needed even after the Revolution and the Terror.


Grasse is a pleasant town on the slopes of the Alpes Maritimes. I have just come back from a week's holiday there, and can attest that roses, jasmine, oleander and many other flowers grow freely. Lavender is native to the region. Geraniums abound. The natural ingredients for making perfume are there, right on the spot and it has been home to the perfume industry for centuries.


Here I have to make a confession. I am a perfume fan. I have put a photo at the bottom of this post showing what's in my drawer at the moment. Chanel, Thierry Mugler, Vivienne Westwood, Frederick Malle, Jo Malone... I've had lots of other favourite smells in my (longish) perfume life: Calèche by Hermès, Ma Griffe by Carven, L'Air du Temps by Nina Ricci, Oscar by Oscar de la Renta, Infusion d'Iris by Prada. A few Gucci fragrances. Must by Cartier. Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant and so forth.


My mother wore Arpège by Lanvin. Always. My daughter wears all sorts of things but I associate her with Shalimar by Guerlain. Perfume brings back memories, and reminds us of certain people. All this to emphasise that it's an important part of my life.


So when we discovered that it was possible to go to the Galimard perfume studio just outside town and create our own perfume, we couldn't wait to get there and it turned out to be a revelation and one of the best ways to spend two hours I've ever experienced. We all went: me, my daughter, my son-in-law, my granddaughter, my grandson and a friend who was holidaying with us. We each made a perfume, or an after shave. They were all wonderful. And the process was so fascinating that I have decided to link it to Versailles to give it a bit of historical context and write about it in my slot this month. To make this post even more historical, I will say that Hilary Mantel writes about perfume and if you Google her name and add 'perfume review' , you can read what she has to say. She's a brilliant perfume critic, which will come as no surprise to her fans.













We each sat in front of a kind of desk with lots and lots of bottles surrounding it. Our tutor, Maxim, explained that with fragrance, there are base notes, heart notes and top notes. The latter are the ones you smell first, when you open the bottle and have a sniff. The heart is what you get when the perfume you've put on has settled down a little. The base is the most important: what's left when all the other smells have gone. It's the one that attaches itself to your clothes, your scarves and so forth. It's what's left when everything else has faded.










Some quite big bottles were put in front of us from which we had to choose our four favourites. If we didn't like any of them, others were provided. These were our bases. We were told to write them down. Maxim then came round and wrote down on our 'recipe sheet' how much of each fragrance we had to drip into the long 100 ml container in front of us.









I noticed, by the way, that when you try on a Jo Malone fragrance, you get a little 'recipe' to tell you what you're actually wearing. This is her printed card for a perfume, and.....












... below is my recipe. Beside each fragrance, ( 4 base, 5 heart and 5 top notes) is the quantity of each that had to be added to the flask. Maxim, I daresay, would have pounced if he thought we'd chosen something that he knew would smell horrible but he seemed to like our choices.







We also had to choose a name for our perfume. Names are desperately important and we had huge fun the night before discussing our choices. We ended up with a good selection. Mine was LIERRE which is French for IVY and sounds good when you say it. The address of the house we were staying in was Chemin des Lierres, so that's the reason for my choice. My daughter called hers Dénouement, which is appropriate for a thriller writer. My granddaughter chose Floraison and my grandson Code. Our friend Chris chose Volte-face and my son-in-law, who's Welsh, chose Hiraeth which means 'longing for home.'












When you've mixed your own perfume, you choose the bottle. See above. Then they take away the recipe and put it on file. There's a number printed on the label which will enable you, if you feel like it, to reorder your personal fragrance when your bottle is finished. I reckon these below will be made redundant soon....I'm devoted to Lierre and am very happy to wear it for years and years. It was a memorable afternoon, and I loved every moment.

Succumbing to Psychogeography by Lydia Syson

Sometimes research can seem to go frustratingly, time-wastingly wrong.  Last month I went to Paris to do some final (ha!) research for my new book Liberty’s Fire, which is set in the ‘terrible year’ of 1871 when Paris, under the Commune, found itself besieged for the second time in a few months – not by the Prussians, but by France’s own army.  Among other things, I planned to fill a hole by getting myself to the National Museum of Photography, recently reopened at Bièvres.

  

The museum boasts 30,000 different cameras and accessories dating back to the earliest years of photography.  I’d checked the website numerous times.  I knew I had a fairly short window of opportunity, as the museum only opened a few afternoons a week.   On my previous research trip to Paris last March, I’d been fantastically efficient about communicating with certain museums and archives in advance to make sure I’d definitely be able to see the material I needed.  This time I was in a more relaxed, end-of-project, flâneury sort of mood.  It simply didn’t occur to me to phone the museum in advance.  

Bièvres, which claims to be the ‘capital of photography’, styles itself ‘un village aux portes de Paris’ – a village at the gates of Paris.  I was coming from St Germain-en-Laye and the journey took hours: three complicated train changes, each one involving a long wait between trains, culminating in a decent walk from a deserted station.  Plenty of time in which to fantasise about all the wonderful material I was going to find when I finally arrived, all those telling details that would bring key moments in my book to life.  I convinced myself that I would stumble on exactly the camera my photographer character would have used, and get a real sense of the scale and design of the developing equipment.  I could already practically see the reconstruction of a mobile darkroom which the curators of this museum would naturally have lovingly installed, for how could any visitor truly understand the curious processes of wet collodion photography without such a thing? I was prepared to be granted insights that could be acquired nowhere else.

Remembering the photograph on the website, I walked on, expecting at any moment to come upon a grandish stucco’d house in landscaped gardens, and a warm welcome.  Instead, I found scaffolding, an abandoned marquee and some silent prefabs.  Also an unapologetic sign saying that the museum would be closed until late November for ‘works’.  Works which showed absolutely no sign of being in progress.  I almost wept.  In fact, I think I probably did, because stomping furiously back to the station, I skidded on one of those white plastic bumpy things on the pavement which marks a crossing, and tore up my hand and elbow so badly I had to call at the Mairie to wash off the blood.  (The receptionist there had no idea the museum was shut for months, and told me helpfully that ‘It does have certain opening hours, you know…”)

All that precious time wasted.  It was unbearable.  Back at the deserted station, waiting another aeon in the first leg of another complicated multi-suburban-trained journey into the centre of Paris to visit the National Army Museum, whose website had assured me that the collections covering the years from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the Commune were now on display, I gnawed at a pear and despaired.  

And then the train arrived. I got on, and nearly burst out laughing.  It had grubby orange vinyl seats and smelled like a pissoir, but every wall and ceiling was lavishly decorated with photographs from the Château de Versailles. 

Luxury and poverty seemed in violent collision on this train, just as they had been at the end of Second Empire France, when Napoleon III fled to Chislehurst after his defeat at Sedan, and the people of Paris rose up to claim their municipal rights.  At that moment I turned psychogeographer and let myself drift.   I am absolutely no expert on Debord, my acquaintance with the Situationists is passing, and I can only really cope with Iain Sinclair in bite-sized chunks (his London Review of Books articles suit me perfectly).  But Walter Benjamin has been by my side for months, and I suddenly saw a serendipity in this journey becoming the main event.  My expedition ceased to be a failure and became something else.  This kitschest of trains (my photographs don’t do justice to its photographs) then trundled me through places I’d been reading about for the past eighteen months.

Coming from La Defense earlier, I’d already passed through St Cloud.  In 1871, photographers like Adolphe Braun had come there to photograph the devastation caused by the Franco-Prussian war.  The most dramatic of St Cloud's ruins was the vast château where Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie used to hold court in spring and autumn.

No sign of that now, but from the train window, I’d looked at the cranes and a few stray fin de siècle turrets and out across the trees to Paris.  On the far side of the city, I could see the Sacre Coeur hovering whitely over Montmartre.  The basilica was built as a symbol of conservative moral order, a penance for the sins of the Franco-Prussian war, but more significantly, for the ‘crimes’ of the Commune.  It covers the very spot where the revolution of 1871 erupted, when the Government of National Defense (which had ruled the new Republic since the fall of the Empire) tried to remove the cannons bought by public subscription to protect the French capital from Prussian attack.  It was only twenty-three years since the capital’s last bloody uprising.  The Government immediately fled to Versailles, recently vacated by the victorious Prussians, the Commune was duly elected and declared in the capital, and then the fighting began between Paris and ‘Versailles’, between the National Guard militiamen and the Army of France.  It was a civil war in miniature. 

My journey that day took me right over its battlegrounds.  Nearly every station we stopped at, all those names flickering on departure boards, triggered images and memories connected with my research.  Issy, near the Porte de Versailles, had been a key strategic point in the war: as long as the Communards held the Fort, they could block the route of the Army into Paris.  They lost control of it disastrously, on the night of 7^th April, after which the fighting and bombardment became ever more bitter until Paris itself was invaded on the night of May 21st.  No sign of it from the train – I discover now that the wasteland where the fort once stood has recently been turned into an ‘ecoquartier’, a fifth of which is social housing - but I felt an odd (psychogeographical?) frisson when I noticed the office building of Safran, a multinational defense group. 

All these edgelands of Paris - Puteau, Montretout, Mont-Valerian, Boulogne…all had been the sites of significant battles or artillery batteries at a time when French shells were falling on the Arc de Triomphe. 

My gaudy train pulled into Versailles Chantiers and a young woman in front of me revealed a gold-embroidered crown on the pocket of her jeans as she lifted her glittery cardigan to retrieve her ticket.  I looked at the station name again, and felt quite chilled. That morning, it hadn’t struck me. Changing trains here for the second time, I suddenly realised its significance.  During and immediately after the slaughter of Bloody Week, about 43,000 suspected Communards were marched from Paris to prisons in and around Versailles.  Conditions were unbelievable. The women prisoners at Versailles Chantiers were the subject of one of Eugene Appert’s now notorious photomontages: distorted, composite images created to justify the government’s extraordinarily brutal suppression of the Commune. 

At last I reached the Army Museum in its impressive setting at Les Invalides.  How on earth would a museum like this deal with the subject of the slaughter that was carried out by the Army itself that terrible week in May 1871?  I hunted high and low for an answer.  There was indeed a large display that ended in 1870, where I encountered this National Guardsman.  In another part of the building, another section of the museum took visitors from 1871 through to the two world wars.  Of the massacre of approximately 20,000 people on the streets of Paris, there was no mention whatsoever. 

The Affair of the Poisons Part II (with a preliminary digression on the Olympics)

Linda Buckley-Archer

The Men's Time Trials in Teddington

For three days Olympic cycling has taken over Bushy Park and the surrounding roads.  Miles of barriers and bunting and Olympic flagpoles.  It’s been a festival atmosphere where we live, in Teddington, and the roar of the crowds drifted over the park this afternoon as ‘Wiggo’, Bradley Wiggins, fresh from his Tour de France triumph, won gold.  He flashed by me on Chestnut Avenue (conceived by Sir Christopher Wren) en route to Hampton Court Palace and victory.  The herds of deer that normally roam the park have been keeping a very low profile.  It was so good to see Henry VIII’s old residence as a backdrop for the crowning of a British sporting hero.

Waiting for Wiggins:  Chestnut Avenue in Bushy Park with the roof of Hampton Court Palace in the distance

And what did you all think of the 2012 Opening Ceremony and its historical agenda?  I loved the whole daring concept of the evening: the crowd-pleasing James Bond and Mr Bean sketches,  of course, but also the idiosyncratic attempt to introduce the history of Britain into the spectacle.  It was probably mad to try, but they pulled it off, and, oh, those chimneys and the smelting of the Olympic rings!  It was the dramatic equivalent of rendering the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a haiku.  Thanks, I suspect, to screenwriter and Carnegie medal-winning children’s writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who did the storyboard, not only British history but also children’s literature (and children) were celebrated in the spectacle.  It certainly raised a cheer from me. 

Versailles and the Affair of the Poisons: Part II

The Palace of Versailles

 In June I  wrote  a post about a 17^th-century French scandal involving poisoning and focused on one individual, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was burned for her crime.  As it turned out, the Brinvilliers case was only the tip of the iceberg.  Once La Reynie, Chief of the Paris Police, started to dig about, and discovered the sheer scale of the problem, he determined to stamp it out. It was not uncommon, it seemed, for people across the social classes, including the nobles at Versailles, to procure poison from individuals masquerading as harmless ‘fortune-tellers’.   The Chambre Ardente, a special tribunal, was set up in 1679.  It was to meet in secret to investigate the affair.  One notorious purveyor of love potions and poisons to high-ranking individuals at court was Madame Voisin.  The woman was arrested, interrogated and tortured.  She talked...and talked.  Every day the names of more and more noble courtiers were dragged into the affair:  the Duchesse d’Angouleme, the Princesse de Tingry and even the maid and sister-in-law of Madame de Montespan, the King’s mistress.   The whole of France talked of nothing else. “Men’s lives,” said the horrified La Reynie, “ are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is everywhere – in Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces.”   That persons close to the King were implicated was especially worrying – partly on account of the scandal, but more importantly on account of Louis’s safety. 

La Reynie

Despite La Reynie’s zeal, it was when witnesses started testifying that the King’s mistress herself, Madame de Montespan, had had regular dealings with Madame Voisin (an accusation which Voisin never confirmed) that things started to fall apart.  As far as the King was concerned it was unthinkable that she should be tried and imprisoned.  The tribunal consequently collapsed.  In order to avoid Madame de Montespan’s involvement, all evidence implicating her was to be suppressed by means of the lettre de cachet (detention without trial).  Nancy Mitford (in The Sun King) notes the final tally of punishments meted out by the Chambre Ardente:

[...]36 burnt to death after torture; 4 sent to the galleys; 36  banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and 30 acquitted.  The fortunate 81 who remained and who benefited by lettres de cachet [insofar as they weren’t executed], were chained up in dungeons all over France for the rest of their lies, in solitary confinement.  If they spoke to their gaolers they were whipped – Mme de Montespan’s name must not be bandied about the French prisons.  Thirty-seven years later some these people were still alive.

I first read about l’Affaire des Poisons while doing some preliminary research at Versailles.  I remember looking out on the exquisite grounds and thinking how horribly deceptive appearances can be.  But then, that’s why we invented novelists and historians...

Happy Holidays!

CHARACTER or THE LURE OF POINTY TREE GARDENS

CHARACTER or THE LURE OF POINTY TREE GARDENS

by Linda Buckley-Archer

[...] nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. David Lodge (The Art of Fiction)

We’ve had some wonderfully historical and robustly technical posts over the last few days which have been fascinating and daunting in equal measure. So I’m devoting today’s post to something I feel more comfortable with: the art of make-believe. In particular, the process of creating, and responding to, characters in fiction. I put the blame for this choice firmly at Louis XIV’s door.

The more research I do on 17^th-century Versailles (for a YA/crossover novel I’m in the midst of writing), the more I find myself getting sucked into the character of the Sun King. I have ‘made up’ the principal players and was going to avoid the distraction of bringing Louis himself to life with all that this would entail. I vowed that I would refuse him dialogue or any ‘close-ups’, and was going to restrict myself to third-hand information and an occasional ‘long-shot’ of Louis XIV wandering about what the National Theatre of Brent was pleased to call his ‘pointy tree garden’. But I’m conflicted, to say the least – and feel myself cracking.

Louis’s manners were impeccable, he would even lift his hat to a chamber maid, and he could be charming company. Contemporary accounts also reveal a man capable of acts of touching sensitivity and kindness. Love and hunting took up a lot of time. He adored witty, intelligent women and was devoted to his hunting dogs (see picture of Nonne, Ponne and Bonne) which he fed himself, in his private quarters, with biscuits specially prepared by his chef.

However, his courtiers were often reported to have literally quaked in the monarch’s presence - and for good reason. Louis had it in him to be hard and cruel. For example, when the mother of a workman who had been killed in a building accident at Versailles shouted at him from afar, the King had her taken away and flogged, despite pleas for leniency (her son had, after all, given his life for Louis XIV’s latest house extension). And then there was the notorious man in the iron mask affair: an anonymous ‘man of quality’ left to rot in solitary confinement for more than thirty years for an unnamed crime. So this Bourbon king, around whom revolved one of the most dazzling courts Europe has ever produced, is at once a character who is intriguing and psychologically complex and, for the novelist, a tempting figure to fictionalise. He also, apparently, had terribly good legs.

I have sketched out a few potential scenes and have written some halting lines of dialogue while attempting to mentally ‘inhabit’ this iconic figure. But my instincts are telling me to back off: the Sun King is too ‘big’; he may end up unbalancing my plot. Or it could be that, quite reasonably, I am intimidated at the thought of finding his ‘voice’, and of filling in factual holes with fictional putty (or, I suppose, vice versa) in order to make my narrative work. In any case, my difficulty with Louis XIV has forced me to focus, in recent days, on the function and creation of the purely fictional character.

In praising My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, in a post last week, Catherine Johnson reminded us what a bizarre and wonderful process is the peopling of a novel, and the subsequent interaction of those characters with the world outside the author’s head. Catherine commented that she had to stop reading the novel as soon as she suspected something awful was going to happen to Nadine and Riley. “How old am I?” Catherine asked. “Too old to care that much about fictional characters surely.” Those of us who have not grown out of fiction know exactly what she means.

The fictional character is a powerful creation, and a great one can enter the reader’s psyche as efficiently as a virus can breach a cell wall. I suspect that I do ‘care’ about Jane Austen’s Emma, William Boyd’s Logan Mountstuart (Any Human Heart), Jane Gardam’s Betty (The Man in the Wooden Hat) or Tolkien’s Frodo (T.L.O.T.R.) more than I do about many flesh-and-bloods. Though I’m not sure how healthy this is. If I were absolutely forced to choose between saving an anonymous mortal life and pressing a button that would destroy all traces of Philip Pullman’s Lyra and her daemon for eternity, I’d do the right thing – of course – but with a heavy heart.

These ‘made-up’ characters have been woven into the warp and weft of our lives, and it’s easy to forget that someone else’s imagination gave birth to them. Even stranger, for an author, is when readers insist that your characters wouldn’t behave in a certain way (how dare they?). Yet, given that fiction only properly ‘happens’ in the mind of the reader, who, in the end should have the last word on a character’s inner life?

Characters, even when they portray ‘real’ people are not real, and the language they use, when compared to a transcript of ‘real’ dialogue, is not real. We understand this, and yet, among the most compelling aspects of reading (and writing) are those encounters with fictional characters who truly speak to us. So, as readers we become practiced in the art of suspending our disbelief, and as writers we become practiced in the art of concocting fictional details so that the reader can be persuaded to fulfil their side of the fictional bargain.

Characters need to have the semblance, at least, of ‘completeness’. Readers don’t need to know everything about them (as ever, good writing is all about the telling detail, synecdoche, the part standing for the whole) but they do, arguably, need to feel they understand them. And it is particularly important that - like real people – they can surprise us. It is the curious ‘autonomy’ of the fictional character, this capacity for ‘freedom’, which makes the writer want to go on writing and the reader want to go on reading. If we sense, as readers, that a character is the writer’s puppet, the novel ceases to be a shared journey and starts, instead, to feel like a mechanical exercise. So, to go back to Catherine’s point, the idea that ‘fictional constructs’ have free will and a unique identity, and that when readers encounter them – as so many words on a page - they may actually begin to care about them, is simultaneously absurd and, for many, the raison d’être of the novel: that is, to know, or to imagine that you know, what it is like to be another human being.

An aerial view by Linda Buckley-Archer

As I am travelling without my family (a research trip to Versailles) I have bagged myself a window seat. For once I don’t have to peer over two people’s laps when the plane takes off. As the earth drops away the dismal landscape around Heathrow merges into a bigger picture. The outsize car parks, acres of concrete and scrubby fields dotted with ponies quickly shrink into something that resembles a circuit board. Now I see West London, now the whole of the sprawling city, and now, as it snakes through the capital towards the sea, a living map of itself, I see the Thames. I live close to the river not far from Hampton Court Palace where the Thames cradles Bushy Park in a tight curve. As the plane banks, I strain, before it is too late, to locate my suburban neighbourhood.

In life, as in fiction, perspective and point of view are key, and an abrupt shift can be unsettling. I am finding this rare, aerial view unsettling. Up here I catch a glimpse of myself down there, in my terraced house, hunched over a keyboard, struggling with a new fictional character, defining his world view, refining his dramatic predicament. And a bit of writerly doubt creeps up on me, like the cold white cloud that presently envelops the plane: what am I doing writing this book? In searching for solutions to my seventeenth-century protagonist’s problems have I not actually been looking for solutions to my own all along? And if this is the case, shouldn’t I just keep a diary instead – which would involve a lot less heartache. And then (and this is a real can of worms), questions that have come up over the years start rising to the surface, as they do at moments when you could happily do without them. So why are you writing for children? And why choose foreign, historical contexts for your fiction when you’re here not there, when you’re now not then? For that matter, why all this fictional obliqueness - why write metaphorically when you could write about the thing itself? Indeed, why write children’s historical fantasy at all when you could write adult, contemporary, realist fiction? And so on and so forth. Anyway, at 40,000 feet, or however high I am at the time, I feel compelled to justify: Why I Want to Write this Novel.

The clouds break and, from this elevated perspective, I watch the crisp green outline of the coast as the Channel looms into view. All at once it hits me that this sudden bout of soul searching is probably less a crisis of confidence than a psychologically devious way of putting off writing the novel. This is more familiar territory. I hope I’m not alone in suffering this kind of commitment crisis when embarking on a new project. If I am, perhaps I should seek help urgently. There should be a term for this kind of symptom, and may be there is – writer’s ‘flu or P.N.T. (pre-novel tension).

The plane starts its descent towards Paris. As the past versus the present is currently uppermost in my mind, this aerial view reminds me that you can ‘look down’ on the past in a way that it is not possible to do with the present, in a way that you certainly can’t do with your own life. When you’re in the thick of things it is rarely possible to get enough distance for an unobstructed viewpoint – and sometimes you need a visual aid. Sarah Bakewell recently described Montaigne’s essays in terms of “writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognise their own humanity.” The motives for writing and reading historical fiction are varied and numerous but I wonder how central (and conscious) is its function of mirroring our present. Even if we accept that the coherent ‘mapping out’ of the past is a mirage (history’s cartographers all have their own agenda: the closer you get the less the lines appear to join up), isn’t it nevertheless true that the aerial view history affords is our best bet for picking our way through the muddle of the present before it, too, becomes the past?

In any case, flying over northern France I begin to feel more cheerful about my project. I start to think about the Sun King’s genius for public relations, of the art of social survival at the court of Versailles, and look forward to the magnificence of the Hall of Mirrors on a sunny afternoon.

The trip goes well; the spirit of the place works its magic and my enthusiasm is reignited. Le Nôtre’s fabulous gardens are, once again, a particular inspiration. I fly back at night and am allotted an aisle seat. I immerse myself in Geoff Dyer’s book on D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, which makes me laugh - a lot. It is, it transpires, as much about his failure to get on with writing his book as it is about D. H. Lawrence (although no less insightful for that). Does anyone have an easy ride with their writing? Or perhaps that’s the point - if it were easy, it might not be worth starting in the first place.

Linda Buckley-Archer’s Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster.