The details of the war and the flight from Baden-Baden came from Waddington again and also from Turgenev’s letters, published as Turgenev’s Letters, the edition edited and translated by Edgar H. Lehrman. The portrait of Bizet and the scandal around Carmen derives in large part from Winton Dean’s Georges Bizet: His Life and Work, and the introduction to Céleste Mogador’s autobiography—Mogador was believed to be Bizet’s muse for Carmen.
I am also indebted to the following: Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Emile Zola’s The Kill and the Penguin Classic edition of Zola’s Nana, translated by George Holden; Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Lucy Johnston; Strapless by Deborah Davis; My Blue Notebooks by Liane de Pougy; Evenings with the Orchestra by Hector Berlioz; The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson; Courtesans by Katie Hickman; Grandes Horizontales by Virginia Rounding; Napoleon III and Eugénie by Jasper Ridley; The Price of Genius by April Fitzlyon; Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs, My Double Life; Mitsou by Colette, and her collected stories, also Chéri and The Last of Chéri, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances; The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top by Janet Davis; The Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Céleste Mogador; Bertrand Bonello’s excellent film House of Pleasures, and the two-volume graphic novel Miss Don’t Touch Me by Hubert and Kerascoet; and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys.
The opera lyrics quoted here are from my own translations.
As characters, Euphrosyne, the tenor, and the Prince are all imaginary. Aristafeo and his dogs, the Lords of the Lower Garden, appeared to me in a dream.
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Thank you to my partner, Dustin Schell, who read drafts, made dinners, did laundry, paid the bills, talked me down off of whatever ledge I had managed to get on, and still met me with champagne when I was done. His love changed my life, and his readings dramatically improved the novel. I will thank him for the rest of my life, but here especially.
Thank you to my beautiful family, who were so patient despite the many vacations ruined by drafts and deadlines; thank you to my late father, Choung Tai Chee, who brought me up to love Italian opera and Russian novels, and thank you to my mother, whose stories of her childhood and her family informed the creation of Lilliet.
Thank you to my agent, Jin Auh, who I cannot thank enough, and everyone at the Wylie Agency. Jin loved this novel from the first few pages I sent a very long time ago and is the only person who’s read this novel anywhere near as often as I have. I am so grateful for her enduring enthusiasm and her wisdom and hard work.
Thank you to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt but especially to my editors: Webster Younce, who acquired it; Andrea Schulz, for her enthusiasm and patience despite receiving me as an orphan, and her determination to bring this novel out; and to Naomi Gibbs, who has seen it in so many forms and whose thoughtful work on its intricacies made this final version possible. I’m very grateful to them all. Thank you to Marian Ryan and David Hough, my copyeditors, on the first and second rounds, respectively—the novel is buttoned up and ready for the ball because of you.