Enchantée(133)

Marie Antoinette: Born in 1755, she became Queen of France when she was fourteen. Coming from the more relaxed Austrian court, she found the rules at Versailles stifling. She sought refuge in fashion, gardening, and interior design, but her extravagant habits made her an object of ridicule and hatred for the French people. If you want to read more about her, I’d recommend Antonia Fraser’s biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey.

Louis-Phillipe II, Duc d’Orléans: Born in 1747, Philippe was the king’s cousin and in line to the throne of France. To help pay off his debts, he turned his magnificent Parisian palace, the Palais-Royal, into an entertainment free-for-all with restaurants, cafés, gambling halls, and gathering places for political radicals. Just after the events depicted in Enchantée, Orléans became a revolutionary, adopting the name “Philippe-Egalité”—Equality Philippe—and siding with the Third Estate (the commoners) in their grievances against his cousin the king. In an interesting twist, his personal secretary was Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the author of the scandalous book Les Liasons Dangereuses, which Camille keeps trying to finish reading.

Fashion: Though the French court had long been seen as refined and elegant, it was Marie Antoinette who became France’s Queen of Fash ion. During her reign, fashions changed so quickly that dresses needed to be restyled for every event and new hats were created overnight to celebrate current events, such as a French naval victory. The queen’s hairdresser, Léonard Autié (so famous he went by his first name), designed Marie Antoinette’s much-imitated extravagant pouf hairstyles. He sometimes collaborated with celebrity stylist Rose Bertin, who dressed Marie Antoinette and those who wished to look like her. I was inspired by Bertin when thinking about Sophie Durbonne’s career; like Bertin, many young women found new careers in the growing fashion industry, which gave them increased social status and mobility.

Money: In 1789, French currency was still primarily in coins, though that would change later in the year with the production of paper money called assignats. The basic unit of account was the livre. A gold louis was worth 24 livres; the double louis d’or, 48: the demi-louis d’or, 12. The little copper sol (or sou) was valued at 1/20 of a livre.

Balloons: In the early 1780s, hot-air balloons were all the rage. Commemorative handkerchiefs, earrings, toys, and hairstyles all celebrated these new objects of wonder and scientific achievement. In August 1783, the Montgolfier brothers, Charles and étienne, sent a balloon up from Versailles as the royal family watched. It was the first to carry passengers: a rooster, a duck, and a sheep. The first manned flight in a montgolfière (as the new balloons were called) took place a few months later; the pilot was Jean-Fran?ois Pilatre de Rozier, known to be both charming and fearless, and his copilot was the noblemen Fran?ois Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes. Soon the craze spread to England, where the dashing Italian aeronaut, Vincent Lunardi—about to crash his balloon in a field—doffed his hat to a pretty milkmaid, who took hold of the balloon’s basket and saved him. That moment was one of the inspirations for this book.

The Storming of the Bastille: Along with the Tennis Court Oath, the fall of the Bastille is considered one of the first events of the French Revolution. On July 14, 1789, crowds of people, worried that mercenary armies stationed in Paris were about to attack, descended on the old Bastille fortress in search of guns and ammunition. The fortress was also a jail, housing seven prisoners. After the armed crowd stormed the fortress, they decapitated its military governor with a knife and released the prisoners. A few days later, enterprising Parisians were selling pieces of the rubble from the fortress as souvenirs and giving tours of the interior, where a broken printing press was passed off as an instrument of torture.

People of Color in Eighteenth-Century France: Though they don’t often appear in movies or novels set in this time period, there were people of color in France in 1789. Diaspora from the French colonial empire had arrived in France from places like North America and India; slaves were often brought to France by their masters from plantations in the Caribbean. Most of their stories have gone untold, though we know a little about some of them. One such person was Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose father married one of his slaves and brought her and their infant son to Paris; the Chevalier grew up to be a famous swordsman and composer. Another was Julien Raimond, born to a French father and biracial mother in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Raimond moved to Paris and successfully petitioned the National Assembly to grant free-born men of color the right to vote. Last, there was the Senegalese orphan girl, raised as an aristocrat during the French Revolution, who inspired Claire de Duras’s best-selling 1820s novel, Ourika. Did a person like Lazare live in Paris in 1789? I don’t know, but he certainly could have. In Enchantée, I’ve tried, based on historical research and my own experience, to imagine such a life as Lazare’s into being.





Acknowledgments


First, to Molly Ker Hawn, the best agent an author could wish for: thank you for championing this story, always being in my corner, answering all my questions, and guiding me on this journey—for everything, really. You are magic.

To my editor, Sarah Dotts Barley, who loved (and understood) this story from the beginning, saw what needed to be done, and helped me get there. Your enthusiasm and generosity made hard work feel light. Merci pour tout, Madame B. A big thank-you, too, to my publisher, Amy Einhorn, and all the fantastic people at Flatiron/Macmillan who have made this book a real thing, especially Patricia Cave, Adriana Coada, Anna Gorovoy, Keith Hayes, Lauren Hougen, Nancy Trypuc, and Emily Walters. Thanks, too, to Jenna Stempel-Lobell for the title lettering.