Authors: Iris Anthony
I am often asked how long it takes to write a book. This one took a long time. I stumbled upon the beginnings of the story in 2002 when I was researching a different manuscript. It went through lots of versions and several casts of characters before it emerged, in this basic form, in 2009. It is due only to the kindness and forbearance of three people that this book was even published.
My husband Tony encouraged me, even when the story wouldn’t come together and it seemed as if it would never sell. My agent, Natasha Kern, graciously tutored me in a short course of How to Write a Novel and then tirelessly worked to sell the revised manuscript. My editor, Shana Drehs, saw some sort of design in the mess of structure and narrative I submitted, and with patience and grace, helped me to realize my vision.
Writing a book sometimes takes as long as it takes, and I am blessed beyond measure by those who have encouraged me, supported me, and aided me in the journey.
1. Did you have a favorite character? Which one? Why did that particular character appeal to you? What was it about that particular storyline that drew you?
2. Is there anything these seven disparate characters had in common?
3. In your opinion, what was the most tragic part of Katharina’s life?
4. Do you agree with Heilwich’s opinion that she was a murderess? She certainly intended to murder Herry Stuer. Do you think she ought to have gone through with it? How would the story have changed if she had? How would she have changed? What other outcomes did her choice affect?
5. How do you navigate the world? In blacks and whites, or with a palette of grays? Which approach is more terrifying to you? Why?
6. What did Denis most want? Do you think he will achieve it? Should he? Was he asking too much from life?
7. Denis was meant to be a representation of all of us. At some point, we all have to take off our rose-colored glasses and face the world as it truly is. At what point did you have to do this? What did Denis lose, and what did he gain in doing this? In your life, what did you lose, and what did you gain?
8. A Flemish woman berates Alexandre in Chapter 14: “Are you too good for God? Is that it? You’re only harming yourself. And besides, you can only be as clean as you are.” What did she mean?
9. If you could tell the dog anything, what would you say to him?
10. What would you say to the count?
11. Was the count a sympathetic villain? Who made him the way he was? At what points in the story could he have made different decisions? What would it have required of him?
12. Did Lisette live, or did she die?
13. In some ways, Lisette and the count are mirrors of each other. What similarities did they have? What differences? Both face ruin, but they respond to the prospect in different ways. Why?
14. Can you take worth away from someone, or do they surrender it?
15. Whose fault was it that the lace smuggling industry flourished in seventeenth-century Europe? The King’s? The courtiers’? The lace makers’?
16. Is the provenance of consumer goods important to you? Why or why not?
17. Katharina and the dog are both innocent victims in a world steeped in corruption. Did their lack of guile help or hinder their survival?
18. When has corruption knocked on your door? What was your response?
19. Is there an antidote to corruption?
20. What responsibility, if any, do you have for the corruption you see going on around you?
21. Is corruption a result of capitalism, or is it a result of totalitarianism?
22. Each character was offered a chance either to corrupt others or to aid in furthering corruption. What choice did each character make?
23. What might cause a good person to make a bad choice?
When I first started writing this book, I thought it was about lace. When I told my agent, she strenuously begged to differ.
How
can
a
novel
be
about
an
object?
she asked.
It
has
to
be
about
a
person
. I thought about what she said, and I rewrote the story, realizing that, in fact, it was actually about corruption and how people became ensnared in it. And it
was
about corruption…for two rewrites worth of edits. But in the end, that wasn’t really right either. It was during the third rewrite of this novel I finally listened to the conversation I was having with myself—for that’s all a novel really is. I was grappling with the concept of worth. Why would a person feel unworthy? And what is it that makes them keep feeling that way?
If the stories of Alexandre and Lisette, the count and the lace maker, the sister and the border guard had anything to do with one another, and if you found the dog illuminated any principle at all, I hope you discovered the pattern being created was one of worth—an interplay between positive and negative moral spaces. As I was writing this story, I came to the conclusion that worth is a paradox. We are all of us creatures of the same God. So if you can convince yourself that your fellow man has no worth, then the only thing you’ve really managed in the end is to prove to yourself that you have none either.
There were strange things done in the centuries of old. It was not unheard of for mothers to wield their children’s sexuality as a weapon. King Louis XIII’s advisors several times purposefully encouraged him toward male favorites in attempts to stabilize his infamous moods. And the King’s younger son, Philippe, was actively pushed toward homosexuality by his mother, Queen Anne.
King Louis XIII himself is an enigma, who just recently has begun to emerge from behind the robes of his much-celebrated minister, Cardinal Richelieu. It was their partnership that wrenched away the last remaining powers of the nobility and ushered into Europe an era of absolute monarchism.
At one point during the seventeenth century, Flemish bobbin lace was the most lucrative contraband in Europe. A network of lace smuggling, established in an earlier time for purposes of import tax evasion, was quickly enlarged. It used traditional methods, such as hollow loaves of bread, as well as coffins and dogs, to move lace from Flanders into France. Entire estates were sold for the privilege of purchasing lace, and reputations rose and fell on the amount and quality of lace a courtier wore. The smuggling practices begun in the sixteenth century would continue until the nineteenth century.
Lace makers were needed by the thousands to keep up with the demand. They worked long hours in workshops that were heated by animals housed beneath or beside them to spare their precious lace the possibility of being contaminated by soot or cinders. The work was painstaking and done in such poorly lit conditions that many went blind by the age of thirty. And when their usefulness had been exhausted, they were thrown out into the streets. In the interest of accuracy, I must say not all lace workshops and schools were run by nuns, and those that were did not necessarily treat their charges with such cruelty.
The story of lace is fascinating. That a frivolous piece of frippery could produce such heartrending consequences is both paradoxical and tragic. And the lives of these characters are mirrored by those working in the sweatshops of today’s fashion and accessory industries.
Be careful what you wish for; your wishes have a way of reaching out to impact others in unforeseen ways. And remember that no matter how convinced you are to the contrary, you always have a choice.
Q:
Lace
smuggling? It doesn’t seem quite right to put those two words together.
A:
And that’s exactly where this book started. I ran across a reference to lace smuggling as I was doing research on costuming for a different novel back in 2002. At that point, the idea of lace and the concept of smuggling were so disparate that it was hard to place them side by side. But they kept niggling at me. And finally, the thought of putting two such unexpected things together proved too great a temptation. I had to write about it.
Q:
The novel is set during an era in France when lace was forbidden. Can you talk about that?
A:
Sure. Louis XIII issued five edicts that placed prohibitions and restrictions on clothing, and on April 3, 1636, he forbade the wearing of lace altogether. That’s the edict that provided for confiscation, fines, and banishment from the kingdom. Sumptuary edicts were enacted across Europe during this time period. The reasons were several. In France’s case, money was being lost across the border through lace purchases in Flanders and Italy at a time when the King desperately needed money to fill his treasury due to expenses from wars and other pet projects. It was hoped that forbidding the wearing of lace would keep all that money in France and, therefore, available to the King.
Another reason is more difficult for our modern minds to understand. Europeans had a great need to keep everyone in their place. Most of these sumptuary edicts were very explicit about who could wear what: Princes of the Blood could wear cloth of gold; other princes were only allowed to wear cloth of silver. Dukes could wear gold lace; earls could only wear gold trim, etc., etc. Ever since Europeans first started visiting America as “tourists,” they’ve been appalled that they couldn’t tell who was who. Since our founding, part of being an American was the “right” to purchase and wear the things we wanted.
In Europe, even an extremely wealthy merchant couldn’t wear cloth of silver, for instance, or lace in our case. In America, if you had the money, no one would stop you from buying (and wearing) what you wanted. These edicts seem very much like quibbling to us, but they were important tools for social control.
Finally, the King himself was quite ascetic. He did what he had to in order to be kingly, but he was austere. He wasn’t into the whole musketeer look (floppy boots, huge hats, big ruffled lace collars). He was called “The Just” because he really did try to enforce the rules he made (when violations were brought to his attention). He killed the noble who plotted against Richelieu, for instance, in the Chalais Conspiracy. He also executed a court favorite who insisted upon dueling after he had forbidden it. The King was derailed from his natural penchant for justice when his mother and his brother started conspiring against him, but in general, he wanted order. And he didn’t approve of conspicuous consumption. Obviously, many of those at court did since he kept having to issue sumptuary edicts, but that seemed to be how it went back then just about everywhere.
Louis XIV, his son, had a different focus. He loved glitz and glamour. The more of it, the better! He actively encouraged his nobles to partake in lavishness. He wasn’t personally against lace and consumption the way his father had been. He did, however, have a huge need for funding his wars. Colbert (his minister) decided not only to forbid luxury goods in France (as Louis XIII had done), but also decided to encourage the creation of domestic rip-offs. For a while, the rip-offs were just that, but eventually, they became even more desired than the foreign goods they had been copied from. The association of France with luxury goods began during Louis XIV’s reign under Colbert’s guiding hand. All of the famous French laces date from that period. The French perfume industry developed then. The glass industry came of age, as did luxury textiles.
Q:
Let’s switch gears for a moment. I have to tell you that I hated the dog’s story. Not because I hated the dog, but because the abuse he suffered was so terrible. It was difficult to read. Tell me you made those parts up.
A:
I would give almost anything to tell you that I did. If the idea of lace smuggling fascinated me, it was the smugglers’ treatment of dogs that forced me to write this story. If there were a stronger word, I would use it. The dogs compelled me to write this book! Envisioning what they went through outraged me. At first, the only mention of dogs I could find was in a French text that noted over 40,000 of them were killed during a fifteen-year period as they tried to cross the border between Flanders and France. So it wasn’t an instance of one demented person abusing dogs. It was a whole industry.
I knew I had to write about it, but I didn’t know how. How could you train a dog to sneak across a border, deliver a length of lace, and then return to you without being detected? I talked to a friend who raised dogs, and we had an interesting but inconclusive discussion about how they might be trained to do that. Obviously, there would have to be some sort of reward for the dog. We didn’t arrive at an answer, but we knew that to cover that sort of distance, a dog, in effect, would have to be self-motivated. He would have to want to do it. I never dreamed what that motivation would be! It wasn’t until several years later that I discovered the answer. I wish I could say there were no dogs harmed in the creation of this book. I actually cried when I wrote those scenes.
Q:
So you’re a dog-lover then?
A:
Absolutely! In fact, my family adopted a dog from Mutts Matter Rescue in the summer of 2011. It breaks my heart to think that he was on a kill list. I look at his cute little pug face and wonder how anyone could ever have given him up. I wish I could have known him as a puppy. If only dogs could talk!
Q:
How did you come to an interest in lace?
A:
It started at the age of eleven. I remember it very distinctly because it was that year that my grandmother decided to teach me how to tat. (Tatting is a form of shuttle lace.) Unfortunately, that was not the year I actually learned how to do it. It took several more years and an infinite amount of patience on her part for me to acquire the knack.
When I lived in Paris from 1996–2000, I made several visits to Bruges, Belgium, and became enamored of bobbin lace. Another juxtaposition in this book akin to lace and smuggling is the exquisite, valuable bobbin lace made in the seventeenth century and the plight of the girls and women who made it. They worked in the fashion industry’s original sweatshops.
Q:
The structure of this story, having seven alternating first-person points of view, is very unique. Why did you write it the way that you did?
A:
I wanted to tell the story of lace, and it seemed to me that in order to do it, I would have to follow the process from start to finish. Some of the characters would logically never meet each other, and there was no one person who would be present in every scene of the story. I knew I would have to have multiple points of view.
In its first drafts, the story was originally composed of nine parts (I included the perspectives of Lisette’s father and the priest in Signy-sur-vaux). Beginning with the commissioning of the lace in France, I let each character appear once to tell his or her part of the story. That worked for the beginning, and it worked for the parts set in Flanders, but I quickly realized I would have to allow some characters to make a second appearance once the lace was smuggled into France. Several more drafts had Lisette, the Comte, and Alexandre resume their stories at the end of the book. That didn’t quite work well either because Alexandre’s story took place in both France and Flanders.
It took a brilliant editor to suggest that (1) lace was the whole point of the story and it would be more engaging to start the book with its creation, from Katharina’s point of view, and (2) that the narratives should be broken up and alternated to create a more continuous sense of narrative. She was right, and I like the result!