I stumbled on these photos of patrons at the Paris Opera, by Bill Henson. There’s a kind of fiction to them, of being in the theater, and looking up to see someone near you.

Some of the fun of the opera is looking over to see other people while they listen, which is something almost as intimate as watching someone sleep.

The Paris Opera was built Napoleon the III, a man who cared nothing for music or musicians, and paradoxically remains one of the most important musical institutions of our age.

When I first started writing this novel, I’ll admit, I didn’t know what to think of myself for doing it. I felt confused, a little like the boy from the Ice Queen fairy tale, who wakes up far from home, realizing he’s been under a spell. France? 19th Century? Opera made sense to me some—my father was always listening to it, always singing it, even. He loved in particular La Traviata.

My confusion came because I thought of myself as a modern person, making contemporary fiction in contemporary times. For that reason, when I described this novel, for example, to a friend who’s also a fan, she said, Will I even like this? But as I tell people, there’s your idea of yourself and who you are, and both are always present.

I should point out, some of my favorite contemporary fiction is about characters in other time periods. The challenge is always to scrape away the level of kitsch that’s descended on so much of how we think of those  times, in order to follow your intuitions, and  yet still have a good time with the story. So on the one hand, you are lost in what a friend of mine calls the enchantment, but on the other, always aware that somewhere, a historian may cut you like a fish for forgetting this or that seemingly small detail.

Having said that, I’m not longer surprised to be writing about a young woman singer, alive during the Second Empire in France, during the birth of luxury and couture as we know it, all of it paid for by the real estate junk bonds that were being used to remake Paris. I’m not surprised to find her under the political rule of a man descended from an earlier ruler of the same name, the scion of a political dynasty, who was a terrible public speaker but popular with the common man, who had “voting helpers” at the polls, and who, because of an ailment he kept secret and that became more and more serious, eventually had his wife increasingly act in his stead. This emperor took away the freedom of the press, resulting in a news media dominated by stories critical of the out-of-control sex lives of female celebrities–the only thing the press could really report on–and these celebrities were famous in part because of the sums they spent on their jewelry and clothes. Professors had to sign loyalty oaths, as did the Senate. The end of that Empire, when the novel is set, finds the country at war with Prussia, a war begun with a false sense of confidence on the part of the French, and undertaken in part to restore the country’s sense of national pride and patriotism.

Now the only thing for me is to avoid making the parallels too plain, or rather, to avoid appearing as if I’m pressing them too hard. It’s strange to work on history and also feel as if one is having a clairvoyant experience. In the end, though, all I can do is stay clear about the story.

This is one of the significant locations of the novel.

11 December 1866

Chesneau came to see us today. We talked about the veiled but obvious hostility between the Empress and the Princess and the trouble this causes Nieuwerkerke.

He told us that on the Empress’s last visit to the Bank, noticing the bare panels between the windows, she had asked Rouland if there had not been once some painting there, and Rouland had replied that they had been taken by the Louvre. No soonerhad she got back to the Tuileries than the Empress had ordered Vaillant to return them to the Bank. Now if those paintings, removed to the Louvre before the Revolution and partly dispersed among provincial art galleries, had been allowed to go back to the Bank, the way would have been opened to all manner of claims resulting in the breaking up of the Louvre collections. On receiving this particular order from the Empress, Nieuwerkerke had offered his resignation to Vaillant, declaring that after working to enrich the Louvre he could not agree to its despoliation. Whereupon Vaillant, realizing that it was against himself that the public’s indignation would be directed, had gone to see the Emperor and spoken of joining his resignation to that of the Keeper. Faced with this double resignation, the Emperor had made Eugenie see reason, though not without difficulty, and ever since she had borne a grudge against Nieuwerkerke, whom she accused of thwarting all her wishes so that it made no difference whether she was Empress or not.
She bears him a grudge too on account of another incident. Having been put up at Windsor by the Queen of England in a suite of rooms with old pictures, she decided, when the Queen visited France, to decorate her suite in like manner. Nieuwerkerke raised no objection to a demand for some masterpieces from the Louvre, with which it seems that the sovereigns of France have always had the right to decorate their palaces. At three o’clock—the Queen was due to arrive at five—he sent over the Louvre’s finest pictures. But the Empress had two embarrassing moments as a result. First of all, on her arrival, the Queen recognized the pictures from the Louvre, and came out with: ‘Ah, that picture comes from the Salon Carré, and that one over there. . . .’ And then, the next day, she wanted to go to the Louvre, and the Empress, going with her, found notices hanging where the paintings had been, announcing in capital letters: Removed by order and taken temporarily to the Tuileries. Which struck her as a protest to the nation against her caprices.

21 October, 1867

At the English buffets in the Exhibition, there is a fantastic quality about the women, with their splendid beauty, their crude pallor, their flaming hair; they are like whores of the Apocalypse, something terrifying, frightening, inhuman. Their eyes gaze unseeingly into the distance. A cross between clowns and cattle, they are magnificent, alarming animals.

3 January, 1868

In a snowstorm which made one shudder in sympathy for the poor of Paris, we rang the bell of this house on the Champs-Elysées, insolent in its dazzling light and ablaze with chandeliers and red curtains that could be seen through the windows. In the huge drawing room, ther was no fire in the enormous grate: nothing but a stove that had just been lit. La Païva dislikes open fires. She came in soon afterwards, dripping with emeralds all over the flesh of her shoulders and arms. ‘I’m still a little blue with cold’, she said. ‘It’s because my maid has just done my hair with all the windows wide open.’ This woman, with her Russian blood, is not built like other women. In this kind of weather, she lives in icy air and water like a sort of monster from Scandinavian myth.

24 February, 1868

Exactly twenty years ago today, about one o’clock, from the balcony of the flat where we lived in the Rue des Capucines, I saw the ironmonger across the street run up a ladder and, with hurried hammer strokes, knock down the words to the King which followed the word Ironmonger on the sign over his shop. After that we went to the Tuileries Gardens and saw a roebuck’s head which had been cut off, lying on the ground, and an equestrienne from the Hippodrome caracoling on her horse. The statue of Spartacus had a red bonnet on its head and a bunch of flowers in its hand. The palace clock had been stopped, and on the great balcony one of the victorious revolutionaries, wearing Louis-Phillippe’s dressing-gown and looking like a Daumier caricature, was mimicking the King’s pet phrase: ‘It is always with renewed pleasure. . . .’
Nowadays when I go along the Rue des Capucines, I see the words to the Emperor on the ironmonger’s sign, where it once read to the King.

The empress Eugenie is pictured cutting the talons of the emperor. She was the only woman to refuse to have sex with him on meeting him and it fascinated him. After their marriage, he would continue to have affairs, but she, out of the many women who tried, was empress.

This is a favorite caricature of the queen.  She was the idol of the Empress Eugenie, and  she and Napoleon the III tried to use the trappings of Louis the XVI to legitimize their reign.

The design here is by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.  My friend Shauna Seliy sent me this, as a postcard, back in 1999, and I used to stare at it on my desk.  It was like I was listening to it, when I looked at it.  This was before there ever was a novel.  It feels a little to me as if the whole thing came out of this card.