Paris Red: A Novel (33 page)

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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Book design by Ellen Cipriano
Production manager: Louise Parasmo

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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