Lauren Willig - The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

As for the Bonapartes and their hangers-on, while caricatured a bit (something of which Amy’s beloved news sheets would no doubt approve), they have been drawn largely from life; Napoleon’s court boasts a rich collection of contemporary memoirs and a mind-boggling assortment of modern biographies. Josephine’s extravagances, Napoleon’s abrupt entrances to his wife’s salons, Pauline’s incessant affairs—all were commonplaces of Napoleonic Paris. Georges Marston’s drinking buddy, Joachim Murat, suffered a tumultuous marriage to Napoleon’s sister Caroline; Josephine’s daughter Hortense took English lessons at the Tuilleries until her tutor was dismissed on suspicion of being an English spy; and Beau Brummel really was that interested in fashion.

In the interest of the story, some rather large liberties were taken with the historical record. Napoleon inconsiderately sacked Joseph Fouché and abolished the Ministry of Police in 1802. Both were reinstated in 1804—a year too late for the purposes of this novel. But no novel about espionage in Napoleonic Paris could possibly be complete without Fouché, the man who created Napoleon’s spy network and cast terror into the hearts of a whole generation of Frenchmen and English spies. In addition to rehiring Fouché a year too early, I also made him the gift of an impressive new Ministry of Police on the Ile de la Cité. No existing building possessed an extra-special interrogation chamber ghastly enough for Gaston Delaroche.

I also rearranged England’s secret service a bit. During the Napoleonic Wars, espionage was coordinated through a subdepartment of the Home Office called the Alien Office—not the War Office. Given the strong fictional tradition of ascribing dashing spies to the War Office, I just couldn’t bring myself to have Richard and Miles reporting to the Alien Office. I could picture the wrinkled brows, the raised eyebrows, and the confused “Shouldn’t he be going to the War Office? Where do aliens come into it? I didn’t know this was that kind of book!” As a compromise solution, while I call it the War Office, any actual personnel, buildings, or practices described in conjunction with Richard’s and Miles’s work really belong to the Alien Office. For the little-known story of the Alien Office and much more, I am deeply in debt to Elizabeth Sparrow’s wonderful book, Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792–1815, which is, essentially, Eloise’s dissertation. Eloise, however, is not jealous, since she a) has that fabulous scoop about the Pink Carnation, and b) is fictional.

Q. Where did you get the idea for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation?

A. Baroness Orczy used to say that the Scarlet Pimpernel strolled up to her one day at a Tube stop. My introduction to the Purple Gentian was far less dramatic. After years of exposure to the Scarlet Pimpernel and his swashbuckling brethren, it occurred to me that the Pimpernel and Zorro and all those other masked men really had it way too easy. Their plans were seldom foiled; they always landed on their feet when swinging through windows; and, for the most part, their heroines stayed out of the way, cheering from the sidelines. Clearly, this state of affairs couldn’t be allowed to continue. I set about plotting mayhem, and quickly decided that an enemy would be an insufficient obstacle to fling into my suave spy’s path. Enemies were too simple, too easy. I would bedevil my hero, not with an enemy, but with an unwanted ally. A strong-minded heroine set on unmasking him—so she can help him. It was every spy’s worst nightmare. Once that crucial question was resolved, the plot rapidly fell into place. Napoleon’s interest in antiquities and the archaeological aspect of the Egyptian expedition provided a cover for my hero, and the guillotine a motive for my heroine. After that, however, the characters pushed me aside and took over. Richard flatly refused to swing into rooms on a rope, and the smuggling subplot, which was originally accorded a much larger role, all but disappeared. As for Jane . . . let’s just say that Jane was originally supposed to be meek and mild.

Q. Why did you pick this particular time period?

A. When I was ten, one of the inevitable Napoleon and Josephine miniseries aired on television. Enthralled, I badgered my father, a former historian, for books on the topic. He replied with a pile of heavy tomes. They might be dusty on the outside, but on the inside, they teemed with color and intrigue. I laughed over Josephine’s pug dog biting Napoleon on their wedding night and cried over the unhappy marriage of Josephine’s daughter to Napoleon’s brother. I even named all of the guppies from my fifth grade science project after Napoleon’s numerous relations. Although the guppies long ago departed for that great fishbowl in the sky, my interest in the Napoleonic Wars has remained, from the English side as well as the French. With Waterloo so firmly fixed in our imaginations, sometimes it’s hard to remember that the threat of French domination seemed a very real thing to contemporaries, as gallant little England held out alone against the growing forces of France (England’s Continental allies showed a distressing habit of surrendering every time Napoleon defeated them in battle). It was a time of flux and turmoil, as England reacted to the shocking news and ideas pouring across the Channel, fearing rebellion within as well as invasion without. Uncertainty and upheaval may not make for comfortable living, but they provide great fodder for both historians and novelists.

Q. You’re in graduate school and law school, and yet still find time to write novels. How do you juggle?

A. It helps that I have very poor television reception. Aside from the lack of distractions, it all comes down to what I think of as the Theory of Productive Procrastination. It’s a sad fact of human nature—or, at least, my nature—that one never wants to do what one is actually supposed to do. The minute I undertake a task, I would instantly rather be doing something else. Laundry, for example, or cleaning out the bottom of the closet. Writing The Secret History of the Pink Carnation gave me something to do while avoiding working on my dissertation. Of course, the dissertation still needed to get done, so I had to add on law school. In comparison with doing my torts homework, the dashing Royalists who form the subject of my dissertation suddenly took on a renewed allure. And to get myself to do my law school homework . . . well, there’s always the new book to procrastinate from now, even if it does mean that my closet is still messy and likely to remain so. I find the same rule applies within the Pink Carnation books; whenever the historical characters begin to weary me, there’s always Eloise to play with, and vice versa.

Apart from the procrastinatory imperative, juggling multiple careers has proved unexpectedly productive in other ways. I wrote the Pink Carnation over summers, on either side of my third year of graduate school. That nine-month hiatus in between, while frustrating at the time, gave the plot and characters time to simmer on the back burner and mature in ways I had never anticipated. Recently, I took a break from the third book in the Pink Carnation series to work at a law firm for several months. The interactions and intrigues of the office provided all sorts of insights into human nature and ideas for future plot twists. One of the glorious aspects about writing is that nothing is a wasted experience; one never knows when a scrap of dialogue, a historical fact, a bit of legal jargon might suddenly come in handy, popping to the surface from the subterranean reaches of one’s brain. While the writer as introvert in a garret is a well-established trope, venturing out into the workaday world keeps dialogue and characters grounded in some semblance of reality.

Q. Like Eloise, you have spent the past six years working on a graduate degree in English history. Did your historical training aid in researching The Secret History of the Pink Carnation?

A. Yes and no. I had done a field on Modern Britain (which is defined as anything post 1714), which left me with a bookcase full of monographs on Georgian England, and I was a past master at wandering through the stacks of Widener Library with my head at a forty-five-degree angle, just in case there might be something on the shelves the library catalog had missed. I knew how to work the microfilm reader, and where to look for the more obscure historical journals. At first, it all seemed to be going well. I even had all sorts of choice historical tidbits gleaned from contemporary memoirs (Napoleon’s relatives always make for colorful reading)—and then I hit a snag. Amy was about to fling herself into a chair, and I had no idea what the chair looked like. I turned to my bookshelves, but none of the scholarly works that weighed down my shelves contained anything remotely useful. Fifty-odd books on Georgian England, and not one description of a chair. All of this is a rather long way of saying that training as a historian goes only so far in writing a historical novel. Bit by bit, I learned to look farther afield for those pesky period details one couldn’t find in the traditional histories, developing a collection of books on antiques, architecture, costume, and even cookbooks. Historical maps suddenly became items of desire. I haunted the period rooms in the Metropolitan Museum, squinted at little plaques in folk museums in England, and discovered a wealth of resources on the Internet, especially writers groups devoted to the time period.

Q. Why a book within a book?

A. Too much caffeine? Aside from the effects of overcaffeination, the Eloise chapters arose out of a combination of factors. During my year in England, I’d gotten hooked on chick lit, and was eager to try my hand at it. As a writer, I enjoyed the challenge of working with different voices and styles within the same book. The Delaroche chapters, deliberately penned in a style that I think of as “High Melodrama 101,” arose out of that same impulse. Writing in the first person provided a whole new set of challenges to work through. How do you adequately describe a character from within her own head? Since everything is filtered through that character’s viewpoint, how do you allow her to cherish her misconceptions while putting the reader in the know?

As a historian, I had another hobbyhorse to ride. One of the greatest challenges for both the historian and the historical novelist is rendering the past accessible to a modern audience. In juxtaposing the historical and modern chapters, I hoped to play up the commonalities that persist across the centuries, despite changes in costume and custom. Over my years dipping in and out of archives, I’ve repeatedly been struck by how little human nature changes. By far my favorite example of this comes from a set of fourteenth-century letters, in which a teenage boy writes home from boarding school because his favorite tunic needs washing and he’s short of funds (which sounded eerily like my brother’s calls home from boarding school), and a grown daughter fumes to her brother that if she has to spend one more day in the same kitchen with her mother, one of them isn’t going to make it out alive (we’ve all been there). I’ve also seen the son of a sixteenth-century queen write to his mother that his grandfather is a big meanie because he won’t let him go riding, he’s grown two inches, and when is she going to come home so that he can show her his brilliant new toy sword? Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Q. You and Eloise are both Harvard grad students who spent a year abroad in England. How much of the book is autobiographical?

A. The answer to that is probably best summed up by a college roommate, who, upon reading the book, exclaimed indignantly, “But Eloise isn’t anything like you!” We do share a predilection for three-inch heels and toffee nut lattes, but, other than that, Eloise’s adventures are entirely her own. My own researches take place two hundred years earlier than Eloise’s, in the seventeenth century rather than in the nineteenth, and I did not, much to my chagrin, stumble on a cache of undiscovered family papers. Instead, I developed an intense attachment to my favorite desk in the manuscript room on the third floor of the British Library, and spent several weeks learning how to work the watercooler in the lunchroom of the Public Records Office. In my own defense, it was a very confusing watercooler.