The Missing Italian Girl (39 page)

Authors: Barbara Pope

Tags: #Suspense

Maura grabbed Clarie’s hand. “But why do all the good people die?”

Clarie sank back in her chair. This was not a question she addressed between lessons. She could not help but picture all the deaths in her life: her mother, her baby, Bernard’s father. All beloved. She squeezed Maura’s hand and leaned forward again. The girl had suffered so many losses. Pyotr, Angela, now Nico. And who knows what had happened to her father, or the Russian girls?

“I don’t think they die really, altogether. They stay inside us, are part of us. Just as when you grow up, the young Maura will be part of the older Maura. They’ll all be there inside of you, helping you to be a wiser, fuller person. And besides,” Clarie tugged on Maura’s hand to try to get her to look up, “not
all
the good people die. Some are still with us.”

Maura pulled her hand away and stared into her cup. “I know that,” she whispered. “I know that now.”

“This doesn’t mean,” Clarie said, still trying to meet Maura’s eyes, “that we should not mourn, that we should not be sad. We must be, because we’ll miss them. And sometimes it’s very unfair that they leave us so early.”

They both sat there in silence for a few moments, until they heard a commotion in the parlor. Bernard knocked on the doorframe and entered the kitchen with a very grumpy Jean-Luc in his arms.

“Look who’s here,” he said to his son.

The pouting toddler rubbed his eyes until he could see clearly. And then he smiled.

After all, it was Maura.

Historical Note

R
EADERS MAY WONDER WHICH OF
the characters really lived and which events actually happened. Séverine (Caroline Rémy de Guebhard) was a famous journalist of the time, and Mmes. Roubinovitch and Sauvaget did serve the Lycée Lamartine.
La Fronde
(The Sling), mentioned in the Epilogue, was an all-women’s newspaper edited and published by the enterprising former actress and salonnière, Marguerite Durand. The first edition appeared in December 1897. The Charity Bazaar Fire (May 1897) and the bombing in the Café Terminus (February 1894) were important and traumatic events in the history of Paris.

If you explore Clarie’s Paris, you will find the gilded entrance to the Gas Company Administration building, the Moulin Rouge, the Lariboisière Hospital, and, of course, the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est railroad stations. The building once dedicated to a model workers’ community still remains, marked by a plaque, on the rue Rochechouart. Lycée Lamartine also lives on in a very different guise. It is no longer a breeding ground for proper bourgeois girls in uniform, but a public co-ed institution, with teenagers “hanging out” as they would near any American high school. Farther away, the Bourse du Travail (Labor Exchange), near the Place de la République, is an impressive center for labor activities. The laundry and the tenement on the rue Goutte-d’Or are long gone.

The two Italian songs in the story are loose translations of traditional lyrics reprinted in
The Folk-Songs of Italy
(Arno Press reprint, 1977). “The Fiancés of the North” was one of the many popular songs written to protest the killing of nine demonstrators in the northern industrial town of Fourmies on May Day, 1891. The rapturous reading of Proudhon that Clarie heard in the working-class café is taken from one of the anarchist’s articles quoted in James Joll’s
The Anarchists
(New York, 1964).

To say that the rest is fiction does not relieve the author of striving for authenticity. This means piecing together innumerable sources: general and specific histories, biographies, travelers’ accounts and guidebooks, photographs and paintings, dissertations, nineteenth-century novels, and the ever-handy Internet. Rather than present a tedious “select” bibliography, I’ll give some examples of sources that fueled the narrative, sometimes in surprising ways.

John Savage’s dissertation on the legal culture of the Paris Bar (New York University, 1999) provided me with a number of wonderful details about the arduous path to admission (including the house inspection) and the Labor Exchange’s attitude toward lawyers. On a much smaller scale, Matilda Betham-Edwards’
Home Life in France
(London, 1905) confirmed that, indeed, a Parisian housewife could buy a ready-to-eat chicken.

Emile Zola is essential. It was only after I chose to have Maura live in the Goutte-d’Or that I remembered it as the locus of his 1877 working-class novel,
L’Assommoir
. Guy de Maupassant offers a sardonic look at Paris journalism in
Bel-Ami
(1885), loosely based upon the life of Séverine’s most notorious lover, Georges de Labruyère. John Merriman’s
The Dynamite Club
(Boston, 2009) details the words and deeds of Emile Henry, the Café Terminus bomber. For what Clarie called the “noise of Paris,” there are innumerable books on Montmartre and Vanessa Schwartz’s wonderful
Spectacular Realities
:
Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris
(Berkeley, 1998), with photographs and analyses of popular ghoulish entertainments like the Paris morgue. Finally, the best source in English on the notorious lives and impressive achievements of Séverine and her friend and colleague, Marguerite Durand, is Mary Louise Roberts’
Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France
(Chicago, 2002)
.

Acknowledgments

F
IRST THANKS MUST GO TO
the members of my wonderful writers’ group who have saved me from countless embarrassments and infelicities as the book developed: Mabel Armstrong, Faris Cassell, Kari Davidson, Elizabeth Lyon, and Geraldine Moreno-Black. The next line of defense were willing readers of the first completed draft: Linda Frederick, Freddie Tryk, Pam Whyte, and especially George Wickes, who keeps me attuned, on pitch, to the cultural mores of late nineteenth-century French culture. My editor, Jessica Case, offered an incisive critique, as always, with a deft and gracious hand. Mollie Glick, my agent, continues to be the support system that any author would be grateful for.

One of the pleasures of writing this book was exchanging emails with far-flung colleagues in French history. I thank Claire Germain, Benjamin Martin, John Merriman, and Jo Burr Margadant for the work that has been important to the Martin series and for their prompt, friendly responses. Tom Kselman gets a special thanks for sending me to Zola’s short story, “The Way People Die,” on the different social strata of nineteenth-century Paris. As for non-historical help, thanks to Dr. Lee Davidson, who graciously and promptly shared his experience with knife wounds.

Finally, I thank my husband, Daniel Pope, for his technical help, enthusiastic support, and for just being there.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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