Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

The character of the Comtesse de Castiglione was drawn in large part from “La Divine Comtesse”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione , the catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show of the photographs Pierre-Louis Pierson took of the Comtesse. One of those photographs, from the series called “The Opera Ball,” is used in the cover design with permission from the Metropolitan, and I’m especially grateful to them for this, and to the designer of the cover, which I love. Thank you also to all of the contributing scholars: Philippe de Montebello, Pierre Apraxine, Xavier Demange, Françoise Heilbrun, and Michele Falzone del Barbarò. As I read their catalogue essays and footnotes, a picture appeared of a woman who was often underestimated as decorative all while she wielded tremendous political influence — and who was also not without wit and an eye for revenge. Very little of the political role of the Comtesse was invented — she really was sent at nineteen by the Italian embassy to seduce the Emperor Napoleon III to Italian reunification; she was blamed partly for the assassination attempt on his life as it was thought she controlled the Italian assassins hidden in Paris; she had a Prussian prince friend who took her to the showing of her portrait by Pierson in a boat along the Seine; she was in weekly mail contact with Adolphe Thiers over the three years leading up to the destruction of the Second Empire; she befriended the Orleanists; she appears to have met with Bismarck to spare Paris from shelling; after she returned to Paris, she lived for quite some time protected by the Paris police, on orders from her correspondent Adolphe Thiers. Her apartments in this novel are imagined as much as they could be from the available descriptions in the catalogue. It is my hope that this story respects her for being the political spymaster she appears to have been, at home and abroad, even if the plot is imagined. This plot is the sort of assertion a historian can’t make, but that a novelist can.

For the Tuileries Palace details and the details of the lives of the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, I relied on Life in the Tuileries Under the Second Empire, By Anna Bicknell, An Inmate of the Palace , the autobiography of a British governess to the Duke and Duchess de Tascher. The story of the parrot who learned to swear from her maid’s lovers comes from there, as well as my portrait of Pepa, the Empress’s confidante, and the noble sisters who hated her, and also my description of all of the Empress’s habits at the Tuileries. For the Empress at Compiègne, I used In the Courts of Memory , the letters of Lillie Moulton, the American soprano and wife of Charles Moulton; she was a close friend to the Emperor and Empress, and a regular guest at the imperial series at Compiègne. From her letters came the stories of the Empress sitting in war councils in the afternoons, her ladies-in-waiting angry at the snub; the schedule of the day; the hunts in a given week; the costume balls and skits and affairs. The poupée dérangée scene is drawn from the letters most closely, in particular the joke made by the Prince Metternich and the lyrics to the songs. That scene in her letters occurred at approximately the time Lilliet would have been in the palace, so I knew I had to put Lilliet into it. Moulton’s letters are also the inspiration for the guest character the tenor tries to seduce, though there is no sign she was ever unfaithful to her husband in life. I don’t use her name in the story, but I hope Moulton is enjoying one last pantomime in disguise from the beyond. I mean that character as a tribute to her.

Moulton also kept careful record of her lessons with Delsarte and Pauline Viardot-García’s brother in those letters, which contributed to the novel as well.

The gossip in the Tuileries Palace comes primarily from the Bicknell but also from Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in particular from their records of the regular complaints of the Princess Mathilde. I also drew from those diaries for the details of Lilliet’s life during the Siege and the Commune. Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris was especially valuable for the way it described Paris’s preparations for the Franco — Prussian War and the Amazons of the Seine program. The list of furs left behind when the Empress fled was republished in Rupert Christiansen’s Paris Babylon from a British newspaper at the time, and I altered it with the addition of the otter Lilliet steals and places in her room. I also relied on his Tales of the New Babylon for information, timeline, and local color during the Siege and the Commune.

The details of the intimate life of the Turgenev and Viardot-García set in Baden-Baden — and the collaboration between Turgenev and Viardot-García — come from the works of Patrick Waddington, in particular his monograph A Probable Detente . Most of this is available through JSTOR, along with Viardot-García’s letters, translated by Waddington. These were the model for the letters by Pauline, and so thank you also to JSTOR. The portrait of Pauline’s teaching methods and the teaching book of exercises come from her own published course book.

The Waddington monograph was also my source for details about George Sand’s home life at Nohant, as were her autobiography, and her published diary. The German traveling version of Hamlet performed at Nohant is that much shorter version, Fratricide Punished , the Johannes Velten text. The Queen of the Night speech Lilliet reads aloud is my own translation, but the Furies lines are taken from the 1905 translation by Horace Howard Furness, available online, which were poetically superior.

The details of the war and the flight from Baden-Baden came from Waddington again and also from Turgenev’s letters, published as Turgenev’s Letters , the edition edited and translated by Edgar H. Lehrman. The portrait of Bizet and the scandal around Carmen derives in large part from Winton Dean’s Georges Bizet: His Life and Work , and the introduction to Céleste Mogador’s autobiography — Mogador was believed to be Bizet’s muse for Carmen .

I am also indebted to the following: Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Emile Zola’s The Kill and the Penguin Classic edition of Zola’s Nana, translated by George Holden; Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Lucy Johnston; Strapless by Deborah Davis; My Blue Notebooks by Liane de Pougy; Evenings with the Orchestra by Hector Berlioz; The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson; Courtesans by Katie Hickman; Grandes Horizontales by Virginia Rounding; Napoleon III and Eugénie by Jasper Ridley; The Price of Genius by April Fitzlyon; Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs, My Double Life; Mitsou by Colette, and her collected stories, also Chéri and The Last of Chéri, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances; The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top by Janet Davis; The Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Céleste Mogador; Bertrand Bonello’s excellent film House of Pleasures , and the two-volume graphic novel Miss Don’t Touch Me by Hubert and Kerascoet; and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys.

The opera lyrics quoted here are from my own translations.

As characters, Euphrosyne, the tenor, and the Prince are all imaginary. Aristafeo and his dogs, the Lords of the Lower Garden, appeared to me in a dream.

§

Thank you to my partner, Dustin Schell, who read drafts, made dinners, did laundry, paid the bills, talked me down off of whatever ledge I had managed to get on, and still met me with champagne when I was done. His love changed my life, and his readings dramatically improved the novel. I will thank him for the rest of my life, but here especially.