One of the joys of writing novels is all the travel. Not actual travel, mind you, but the journeys you get to take in your imagination. While I was writing my last book, Setting Free the Kites, I spent countless hours on the coast of Maine, even while I was stuck in landlocked Missouri. So it was with The Paris Hours. For the last few years I’ve had a lovely time strolling up and down the boulevards of Paris without ever leaving my desk. (Added bonus: no jet lag.)
It helps that I know the place well. I went to boarding school there when I was thirteen years old. Ten years later I returned, this time working as an attorney for an international law firm. When I sat down to write this book, it was a joy to revisit some of my old haunts.
But writing about Paris is not without its challenges. After all, there are already more books and movies set in the French capital than there are croissants in the city’s boulangeries. The symbol of Paris is the most recognizable architectural structure on the planet. So how to tell a story that offered a fresh perspective?
First, I set the novel on the streets and in the parks where real Parisians live and work, away from all those famous tourist attractions. (In all the time I lived there, I never once visited the Eiffel Tower.) Second, I chose to set my story in 1927. Back then the city was in a postwar explosion of creative brilliance, populated by an army of geniuses whose artistic legacies survive to this day. Finally, and perhaps counterintuitively, I resisted the allure of all that celebrity. Some of those characters appear in the book, but by design they exist on the periphery of the novel, not at its heart. As a writer I am subject to my own preoccupations, and I am drawn to quieter stories. And so I redrew the focus away from all that dazzling genius. My four protagonists had their own tales to tell.
On the subject of dazzling genius, a brief word about the tune that appears at various points throughout the novel. Passacaille is the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio, which is, for me, one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces of music ever written. Performed as intended, you will hear not only a piano, but also a cello and a violin. I reimagined the music as a solo piano piece, although I’ve never heard it played that way.
The character of Camille Clermont is based in large part upon Marcel Proust’s real maid, Céleste Albaret—but this novel is not, and is not intended to be, an accurate representation of Céleste’s life. While I have used some of her biographical details, I have also taken substantial liberties with ascertainable facts. For example, to the best of my knowledge Céleste’s devotion to Marcel Proust was absolute and unwavering, both during his life and afterward. But when I read that she burned all of his notebooks at his request, the novelist in me immediately began to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t followed his orders to the letter. And, with that one small question, this journey began.