BEARDS: ANCIENT AND MODERN by Lydia Syson

Not far into writing Liberty’s Fire, I realised that my male characters would have to have facial hair.  There was just no getting round it.  Pretty much the only clean-shaven men in Paris in 1871 were priests, and the sensible ones were either in hiding or trying to escape the city dressed as women.  (I exaggerate just a little.)

I consulted my daughter.  She made a face.  Just don’t mention it, she said.  Specially not when there’s kissing involved. There’s something about the word moustache. 

I knew exactly what she meant, but I’d hoped it was a private prejudice.  Are YA readers ready to embrace romantic heroes with facial hair?

Looking around my neighbourhood, I feel she can’t be entirely right.  The beards have been moving in for a few years now. Around the same time as the London orbital came our way – something between the train and the tube, and an excellent thing for us transport-deprived South-East Londoners –  an explosion of facial hair (and fixies) took place in and around the local bars and cafés.  Young beards.  In fact, I notice, intrigued, not unlike Communard beards. 

Photograph: Brock Elbank

Photograph: Brock Elbank

The Beard exhibition at Somerset House has now closed but Mr Elbank’s brilliant contemporary beards can be seen in all their glory on Tumblr and will give you a good idea of what I'm talking about.  Beardseason, the Australian-born campaign to raise awareness of melanoma which was the start of this portrait series, continues to go from strength to hirsute strength.  To support it, I bring you a small selection of inspirational facial hair from nineteenth-century France, complete with links to more information about the revolutionaries (and one reactionary) sporting them.

Jules Vallès, journalist and author of the intensely vivid and highly autobiographical Commune novel, L'Insurgé (The Insurgent), as painted by fellow Communard Gustave Courbet:

 Courbet himself (photographed by Nadar):

Journalist and politician Henri Rochefort…

And as painted by Manet…

…more than once…here he is again, this time escaping from New Caledonia (4,500 Communards were deported to the Pacific penal colony after the fall of the Commune):

Napoléon La Cécilia, who found refuge in London where he taught French at the Royal Naval School then in New Cross:

Jarosław Dąbrowski, Polish activist, who died on the barricades during the final Bloody Week of the Commune.  His nom de guerre was Dombrowski, and was honoured in the name of an International Brigade battalion made up mostly of Polish miners during the Spanish Civil War.

Maxime du Camp, probably the Commune’s most vitriolic and effective critic and author of the 4-volume attack Les Convulsions de Paris, whose representations of women in the Commune endure to this day:

And finally, a man from a different kind of commune altogether, the transcendentalist Fruitlands, which was established by Louisa May Alcott's father in 1843. Joseph Palmer's interest in utopian politics, free speech and prison reform was sharpened by his own imprisonment after he fended off some men attempting to shave his beard in 1830, when beards were anything but fashionable. His gravestone in Massachussetts is apparently marked 'Persecuted for Wearing the Beard': 

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.

Your Guides to Paris circa 1910

by Imogen Robertson

One of the pleasures of writing about Paris during the Belle Époque has been spending hours flicking through the city guide books of 1907-1910 with their fuzzy photographs of treasures of the Louvre and their precise instructions on how to use the omnibuses. Many of the cafés and restaurants they describe are still there today from the opulent excess of pressed duck at the Tour D’Argent to the cheap and bustling Chartier in rue Montmartre. It’s the personal touch that you need to get a real feeling for a city though and for my picture of Paris I have to thank in particular two American writers who have been my guides; Helen Davenport Gibbons and Adelaide Mack. I admit there is much of Paris they ignore, the dark, the complex, the violent, the grim side of sexual and class politics but as guides to the human experience of the brighter side of the city, they are superb. 

The eye of the interested traveller is a great boon to a historical novelist. The curious stranger will always notice those details which make a location unique and which the locals will tend to ignore. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that I found a great deal more useful information in ‘Paris Vistas’ by Helen Davenport Gibbons and in ‘Magnetic Paris’ by Adelaide Mack than in Proust. 

Gibbons was not a stranger to the darker aspects of life, soon after her marriage she witnessed the massacres of Armenians in Turkey and wrote about them in ‘The Red Rugs of Tarsus’, but ‘Paris Vistas’ is a joyful and amused account of her time in the city filled with affectionate portraits of both the French and the expat community. Gibbons also has a fantastic chapter on the floods of 1910  and as they form the backdrop to the denouement of my novel that was an enormous bonus. Her three thousand words on the drama of the rising waters have been more useful to me than the collection of hundreds of photographs of the floods available. That ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ thing doesn’t always hold true if the words are well chosen.  She captures the mixture of excitement, fear and confusion in the city rather brilliantly:

"Newsboys were crying extras : "The river still rises !" We were in darkness. 

No lights on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees. An engineer regiment was fighting 

the water in the Place de la Concorde by the light of acetylene lamps. The wheezing of an old pump taking water out of the cellar of Maxim's was the only sign of life on the gay Rue Royale."

"We saw strange sights that night, wooden paving-blocks floating in a messy jumble; a few restaurants endeavoring 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."

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

‘Magnetic Paris’ by Adelaide Mack is the literary equivalent of a breathless monologue delivered with a lot of hand gestures. You have to just sit back and enjoy the performance. All I know of the writer is that Adelaide Mack was the pseudonym of Flora Adelaide Mclane Woodson. If anyone can tell me more about her, please do. The book is perhaps not for admirers of Eric Hazan; Mack has no apparent interest in the history of the city and though she notes the condition of the poor and the dubious morals of the French in general, she does no more than shake her head over the former, widen her eyes slightly over the latter and then charges on with her fantastic, colourful images of the street life of the city. Her prose is full of the sort of precise details that frankly make me want to kiss her:

While you are at luncheon, you will hear a weird squeaky pipe, not unlike a bad imitation of the Scotch bag-pipes. This announces the approach of a knife- 

sharpener. An hour later, as you are closing your 

eyes for a half-hour's rest, you hear drifting up to 

your window first a man's throaty, "Le tonneau," 

which is followed immediately by a woman's voice pitched a key or two higher, "Le — tonn — eau," laying great stress on the last drawn-out syllable. They have come to take away your empty wine-case or tub. 

A minute later you are startled with rapid screams of, "Chiffons, chiffons, chiffons," running up and down a very bass scale ; this is the rubbish-man. 

or:

The camelot belongs to the boulevards and is al- 

ways an amusing and diverting feature. He is nimble of foot, as well as of tongue. He is an inventor, is shrewd, good-natured and honest, is usually a half-way comedian, is almost a Mephisto for ingeniousness and never fails to afford entertainment to the clientele of a cafe, the waiters of which always are his friends. He will suddenly deposit on your table a black poodle carrying a blue-bead basket in his mouth, and by the aid of a rubber tube and bulb attachment the poodle is made to sit up, shake hands with you and walk across your table. He has furry rabbits which hop about and wiggle their ears; fighting cocks running up and down his extended arm, performing monkeys on sticks, and painted rubber faces which, by squeezing, you can change into all sorts of grotesque, hideous and leering expressions. He has for sale the latest toy of the hour and will cut out your silhouette or make a charcoal sketch of you for five cents. 

You can just see it. The Book is also wonderfully illustrated with caricatures and portraits of the Paris scenes that Mack is describing. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet you can now find and read online (enjoying all of the illustrations) both of these books at the Internet Archive.

Paris Vistas can be found following this link, and ‘Magnetic Paris’ is here.

Ada Leigh: Heroine of the Belle Époque by Imogen Robertson

Henri Brisport - Les Belles au parc Monceau, 1908

I’m editing my latest book at the moment. It is set largely in Paris during the winter of 1909 / 1910 and my lead character is a young English woman studying art at one of the women only ateliers. The pleasure of any sort of writing is to loose yourself in a different world and the Paris of the Belle Époque has been a fascinating place to spend a year, if somewhat dazzling. I’ve been overwhelmed with material, photographs and films, travel guides and memoirs but as always it has been the accidental discovery that has made the biggest impression. 

Librairie Stock, Paris, rue Saint-Honoré, 1909

I spent the first part of my research period at the London Library, and knowing the Paris floods of 1910 were going to play a big part in the final novel, I was browsing through their copies of the Times from January of that year. Before I’d even opened the page to the foreign news section though, my eye was snagged by one of the Special Announcements on the front page. The Ada Leigh Homes in Paris for English and American girls were acknowledging donations and asking for more, saying this: ‘The Homes have sheltered 22,723 Young Women who might otherwise have lived at questionable lodgings.’ At first I imagined an institution, deeply religious and probably unnecessary. Who were these women who had so much to fear from questionable lodgings? What did that even mean exactly? Still, the announcement was intriguing. Everything I had been reading about Paris up to that point had been soaked in champagne and the new electric lights, recommendations for the best hotels, tea-rooms reserved for ladies and the most useful omnibus routes for tourists. The poor were only mentioned to provide a contrast with the diamonds and satin of the customers crossing the pavement to the Café de Paris, or to add a little colour such as the cries of the street sellers pushing their carts. True, in reading the biographies of artists of the time one saw a certain sort of poverty, but it was a bohemian poverty still glamourised even when it was sordid and full of men and their mistresses arguing over the café tables of Monmartre. The heroine of my book was middle-class but with little money. She would not be at home in either setting and the story of those Young Women, English and American that the advert suggested were in Paris, and in need in great numbers didn’t seem to have made it to the literature I was reading. 

James Wilson Morrice - Street Scene Paris Pink Sky, 1908

I looked for more information on the homes and found, well very little, but in the end I found in the British Library a thin volume by Mrs Travers Lewis, Ada Leigh herself in fact called ‘Homeless in Paris.’ It had been printed as part of her fund raising activities. I started to read and it was one of those moments when a voice from a century ago speaks so clearly and fearlessly across the years, the emotion is a little like falling in love. 

The book tells the story of how Ada, an upper-middle class young woman, very religious from the first, came to spend most of her life in Paris caring for the destitute. Her story begins when, staying in Paris, she found the girl selling her gloves in the department store was English, and was not aware that there was an English chapel in the city. Ada offered to spend her Sundays reading the bible with the girl and any of her friends who wished to come. It was in this way she discovered any number of English women were living in Paris working six days a week for only their bed and board, and were locked out of their boarding houses on Sunday from sunrise to sunset. Some of these women started to come to study with her, she fed them too, and she began approaching others on the street, pressing invitations into their hands signed ‘from one who cares for you’. They told her ‘such sad stories I could not sleep.’

Gwen John - Chloe Boughton-Leigh, 1904-08

By 1873 she had moved to France and set  up a hostel for women in need. She did not ask questions or lecture, she simply cared for those who needed it and prayed for them, which probably won her a great deal more converts than haranguing them would have done. She dealt with drunks and pimps, went and collected girls out of brothels and opened a free registry for her charges to find respectable work. All this in face of deep opposition from her family to whom the idea of her, an unmarried woman, employed in such work was shocking. She was told that a gentlewoman’s name should only appear in public papers when she was ‘born, married and departed,’ and here was she openly campaigning for money. She asked where the more suitable candidates might be found, and as there was no one else willing to step forward she gained her point. Even her father was eventually won round. 

What makes her little book so remarkable to me though is the way she gives the women she helps their own voices. For instance she quotes one woman saying: ‘I hate Christian people… they build fine institutions for us when we are lost. Who will build one to prevent our being so?’  Another, an American girl brought over as a governess then dismissed with a pay off of 20 francs threw herself in the Seine. She told Ada, ‘It was not that I wished to die, but I did not know how to live.’ That girl did not recover from the illness that followed her suicide attempt. At other times Ada reports her cards offering help and prayer were handed back to her with the dry comment ‘give it to one of the new girls.’

Rue de Rivoli 1907

That book told me more about the loneliness and isolation that could overcome a stranger in Paris than anything else I came across in my research. I also developed a deep respect for this woman, her courage and generosity. Ada saved many lives and gave comfort to those in great need. She married in 1889 and was widowed in 1901 but was actively involved in the management of the homes until her death in 1931. She is all but forgotten now despite the many thousands of women she saved. She should be celebrated.