Revenge of the Rose (55 page)
Read Revenge of the Rose Online
Authors: Nicole Galland
Konrad made a pacifying gesture. “And you may still have all these, in some form or other. You can’t
always
refashion life exactly as you want it, Jouglet.”
She maintained the broody silence, appearing to absorb this news.
“I will sweeten the pot for you,” Konrad said. “Paul will perform the marriage rites.”
“I will not!” his brother said hotly.
“Of course you will.” Konrad smiled. “The villain’s ultimate redemption: to reunite two souls he put asunder many years ago. It pleases the emperor very much.”
“Poetic justice is not going to sway me,” Jouglet said with a small anxious laugh.
Willem reached out tentatively for Jouglet’s hand. She took in a sharp breath at his touch, but she didn’t pull away. With absolute sincerity he said, “We will be precisely as married as our priest is holy— entirely in the public eye, and not a whit beyond that.”
Jouglet looked up at him with a surprised expression of approval. “That proposal is as honest as you are and as slippery as I am.”
He smiled. “So how can you possibly refuse it?”
There was a long silence.
A very long silence.
And then Jouglet said yes.
For the historical purist
The Emperor Konrad of this story did not exist. He was inspired by the fictional Emperor Konrad in Jean Renart’s thirteenth-century
Roman de la Rose,
who in turn is generally considered a stand-in for the actual Otto IV, of the Welf dynasty (for the information about Otto IV, I am indebted to John Baldwin,
Aristocratic Life in Medieval France
). Because I have not likewise made “my” Konrad a stand-in for Otto, the politics of my story do not correspond to the politics of Otto’s reign, although they do reflect the general timbre and mentality of the age. If you try to read this story with the expectation that it is “true-to-life historical fiction,” you may get quite exasperated, just as you might if you watched
West Wing
expecting it to feature the true-to-life president of the United States. Please don’t do that. Just read it and enjoy it. It’s a
story
.
For the geographical purist
The start of the name “Sudaustat” is homonymic to
pseudo,
and that is not a coincidence; those who know the region may recognize it as an unholy union of Sélestat (whose medieval shape it
vaguely
resembles) and St. Hippolyte (whose site it
vaguely
inhabits).
On a broader geographical scale, the history of Burgundy is tragic, vast, and complicated. At the time of this story, there were two (physically abutting but politically distinct) regions both referring to themselves as Burgundy: one an independent duchy to the west of the Saône, the other a more variously defined area to the east, which in the late twelfth century had become part of the Holy (Roman) Empire. The first of these, the former duchy Burgundy, is equivalent to modern-day Burgundy; the former county/kingdom Burgundy, wherein lies Dole and Oricourt, corresponds to the area around modern Franche-Comté. For ease of narrative, I have simplified the history and terminology by referring to the more eastern county/kingdom as Burgundy and the more western duchy (aligned with France) as Bourgogne.
For the linguistic purist
This text is strewn with terms that we associate with the Middle Ages but that were not actually in use in the time and place of the story— for example, “courtly love” (first used in the 1800s), “Holy Roman Empire” (first used in the 1200s), “the Crusades” (largely a post-Renaissance term), or “troubadour” (which should be confined to Provençal language and culture), where
trouvier
or “minnesinger” is correct. It would be confusing to speak to a modern reader of these familiar concepts with the unfamiliar phrases that actually described them in their own age and place. My aim was to create a narrative that flows easily to the modern eye and ear.
F
irst,
a salute to the thirteenth-century poet Jean Renart for the poem that inspired this project—
The Romance of the Rose
.
Also:
I am as ever deeply grateful to Marc H. Glick, Liz Darhansoff, Rich Green, and Jess Taylor, each of whom in their own inimitable way has been my champion.
I am happily indebted to my cousin Stephie Goethals and her family for their boundless hospitality, patience, translations, generosity, and German lessons.
Great thanks to my extraordinary team at HarperCollins. In particular, Jennifer Brehl, Pam Spengler-Jaffee, Lisa Gallagher, Kate Nintzel, and Juliette Shapland.
I am grateful for the thousands of months of research that real historians have labored so painstakingly to attain, so that I may blithely wreak havoc with their wisdom (especially Georges Duby and James Brundage). Also much gratitude to the archivists of the city of Mainz, the librarians of the Bibliothèque Humaniste in Sélestat, the docents of the castles of Haut-Koenigsbourg and Oricourt, and various other sundry professionals I startled with my requests for information. If any of them ever reads this I hope they are not too appalled with the liberties I’ve taken.
For aiding and abetting, in ways direct and indirect, big and little, I thank: Amy Utstein, Eowyn Mader, Lee Fierro, Jennifer Goethals-Miller, Janice Haynes, Lothlórien Homet, Brian Caspe, Alan and Maureen Crumpler, Shira Kammen, Laurence Bouvard, Leo Galland, Steve Muhlberger, Christopher Morrison, Jeffrey Korn, Lillian Groag, Elizabeth Lucas, Nicole Steen, Peter Sagal, Beryl Vaughan, Philip Resnik, David and Krista Parr, Bronwyn Eisenberg, Steve Lewis, Tony Taccone and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Nick Walker of Aikido Shusekai.
N
icole
Galland hails from Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard University, she spent most of her time there doing theater, though she was actually getting an honors degree in comparative religion (and with that as an excuse, sojourned in India and Japan, her time abroad including a stint as a Buddhist nun near Kyoto).
Galland repatriated to California and cofounded a theater company for teens that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was granted a full fellowship to pursue a PhD in drama at the University of California, Berkeley, where she showed great promise at pretentious performance art. Before academia could entirely seduce her, however, she withdrew from the program and split the next several years between the Bay Area and New York City, eking out a living in theater, writing, editing, and, of course, temp work.
After winning an award for her screenplay
The Winter Population
, Galland moved to Los Angeles and spent a few years as a screenwriter. In April 2002 she rediscovered the unfinished outline to
The Fool’s Tale
, which she’d begun in college, and was about to delete it from her hard drive when she decided, just for fun, to see what would happen if she finished it instead. Thanks to much serendipity, the book was completed in early 2003. She immediately fled from Los Angeles back to the Bay Area, where she worked for a while as literary manager/dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. When
The Fool’s Tale
was published to positive reviews in early 2005, she left the Rep to write full-time.
For about a year, she lived out of a backpack, researching and retracing the steps of the ill-fated Fourth Crusade for her upcoming novel,
Crossed
. Finally, after twenty-three years away from her home-town, Galland returned to Martha’s Vineyard to live year-round. Here she reconnected with an old high school classmate, Darren Lobdell, whom she hadn’t seen in more than twenty years. They became engaged with dazzling speed and will have eloped by the time this book goes to press, though they’re not sure it’s really eloping when you insist on telling everyone about it.
What first inspired you to write this book?
What is the poem about?
become
the rich and famous. (Too bad there’s nothing like that in modern American culture….)
And what about it made you want to turn it into a novel?
That’s all very interesting but a little academic, don’t you think? Anything else?
really
grabbed me was that the narrator is not playing it straight with his audience, and I began to wonder why. He lies by omission, he hides things from us. At least four times, I found myself wondering, “Hey, what’s
really
going on here?” To satisfy my own curiosity, I made up answers, and that became
Revenge of the Rose.
Can you say a little more about the “class-biased propaganda”? There’s a lot of political intrigue in the story, but it doesn’t seem to be a “political novel” per se.
has a job
; he
works
his way up the socioeconomic ladder. To the aristocracy, that makes him and his class gauche. The two classes were in competition for a certain level of power, and so naturally a story written for one group would make a villain of the other, just like during the Cold War the obvious villain in American action flicks was a Russian spy. Once I realized that the steward was the villain largely
because he worked for a living
, my Yankee sensibility got riled, and I immediately decided to make him more sympathetic.
Your chapter titles are all literary references; did you learn anything unexpected about the literature of the time?
You’ve got to be kidding.
But what about all the romances and fairy-tales featuring girls and young women? Isn’t the message there that anybody can be blessed with love and fortune?
How did you balance the need for historical authenticity with the desire to take creative license?
that
. So, to answer the question, there was no
need
for balance. I was free to go after the creative license every time. This was especially true when it came to women’s behavior; just as the heroine’s behavior in the original poem turns out to be exceptional, probably
all
of my female characters are exceptional.