Académie Lafond and all those who teach or study there are fictional but the school is based on Académie Julian which did have premises in Passage des Panoramas and Rue Vivienne and offered expert training to male and female artists, many of whom are household names today. On the work in the Women’s Ateliers I recommend Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jane R. Becker.
Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) was a model and painter, friend and muse to both Toulouse Lautrec and Erik Satie and mother to Maurice Utrillo as well as being a great artist in her own right. For an account of her life I recommend Mistress of Montmartre: A life of Suzanne Valadon by June Rose. She was living in Impasse de Guelma at the time The Paris Winter is set, but her accommodation was cramped so she probably didn’t sub-let. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was in the habit of reciting Dante to her.
For the description of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Rue de Fleurus I’ve relied on her book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The paintings that Maud and Tanya notice in particular on the walls are, of course, Picasso’s.
Miss Harris is also a fictional character, but inspired by Ada Leigh (1840–1931), a remarkable woman who ran a house for penniless English and American women in Paris during this period in Avenue de Wagram. I have made great use of her short book Homeless in Paris: The Founding of the ‘Ada Leigh’ Homes published privately under her married name, Mrs Travers Lewis. It gives a rare account of destitute women in Paris during the Belle Époque and many of ‘Miss Harris’s’ anecdotes and victories are in fact Ada Leigh’s. Her maid did at times lock her out on the balcony so she could get some fresh air.
For all things opium related I am deeply indebted to Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction by Steven Martin, a gripping historical and personal account of opium smoking and addiction.
The best account in English I have come across about the Siege of Paris and the Commune is The Fall of Paris by Alistair Horne.
For a non-fiction English account of the flooding of Paris in 1910 I recommend Paris Under Water by Jeffrey H. Jackson. I’ve also drawn heavily on the reporting of the floods in The Times and Le Matin, and in La Vie à Paris 1910 by Jules Arsene Arnaud Claretie, though I’ve occasionally distorted what was flooded when to suit my own purposes.
I think any twenty-first-century woman might fear for her blood pressure reading The Modern Parisienne by Octave Uzanne, but it shed a great deal of light on both the economics of women’s lives in the period and the unthinking misogyny dressed up as an ‘appreciation of the feminine’ current during the period. For other views on women during the Belle Époque I recommend Feminisms of the Belle Époque edited by Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause and Career Stories: Belle Époque Novels of Professional Development by Juliette M. Rogers.
Many other books of travel and discovery have been consulted during the writing of this novel, but I’d like to mention two in particular: the charming Paris Vistas by Helen Davenport Gibbons which includes a great description of the floods and Magnetic Paris by Adelaide Mack which includes an account of the New Year celebrations at Bal Tabarin and some wonderful scenes of life on the Paris streets. I also thoroughly enjoyed Paris à la carte by Julian Street and made use of his accounts of the different grades of Parisian bars and cafés. All these are out of print at the moment, but you can read them online at the Internet Archive at www.archive.org. You can read The Modern Parisienne there too if you are feeling up to it.
As always all mistakes, misunderstandings and anachronisms are my fault and mine alone.