Paris Red: A Novel, page 19
The story of how the gardener Guichet murdered the prostitute Mezeray is true; I learned about it and much more regarding the lives of working class women from Jill Harsin’s Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Poor & Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century by Rachel G. Fuchs also illuminated this topic. The story of a perfumer named Monpelas, killed by soldiers of Louis Napoleon in 1851, is also true and reported by Victor Hugo in Napoleon the Little (Napoléon le Petit). Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin was a real Parisian photographer; I learned about him primarily through Serge Nazarieff’s Early Erotic Photography.
In writing this novel, I spent hours looking at Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris and the 1860 Andriveau-Goujon map of Paris. Even though historian Richard Cobb and photographer Nicholas Breach recorded a much more modern Paris in The Streets of Paris (1980), that book mattered deeply to me. I also studied medical photographs of men and women with syphilis taken by Oscar G. Mason and E. K. Hough; the photographs were featured in George Henry Fox’s Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous Syphilis, published in 1881.
And of course I read many books and articles on Victorine Meurent and Édouard Manet. For Victorine Meurent, Margaret Mary Armbrust Seibert’s A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Edouard Manet and Eunice Lipton’s Alias Olympia were crucial. For Manet, I lived with (and often slept beside) the following books: Antonin Proust’s Édouard Manet: Souvenirs; Françoise Cachin’s Manet: The Influence of the Modern; Beth Archer Brombert’s Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat; Beatrice Farwell’s Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire; Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge’s The Last Flowers of Manet (with translations from the French by Richard Howard); T. A. Gronberg’s Manet: A Retrospective; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Manet: 1832–1883.
Please visit www.parisredblog.com for more background on the novel.
ALSO BY MAUREEN GIBBON
Thief
Magdalena
Swimming Sweet Arrow
Copyright © 2015 by Maureen Gibbon
All rights reserved
First Edition
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Gibbon, Maureen.
Paris red : a novel / Maureen Gibbon.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-24446-5 (hardcover)
1. Meurent, Victorine—Fiction. 2. Manet, Edouard, 1832–1883—Fiction. 3. Painters—France—Paris—Fiction. 4. Artists’ models—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—History—1848–1870—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.I139167P37 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014034455
ISBN 978-0-393-24447-2 (e-book)
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Maureen Gibbon, Paris Red: A Novel
