Recently I was browsing Ebay and I put “1815” in the search field (I do this way too often!). This book popped up with only minutes to go on the auction and it was going for practically nothing, so I had to bid on it. It arrived a couple of days ago – not this version with the lovely cover, but Volume II of a three volume set- the memoir covering her life from 1815-1819.

Because it is Volume II, there is no introduction so all I know of la comtesse so far is from a website review “Born Adele d’Osmond in 1871 (I think he means 1771), daughter of a diplomat, lady-in-waiting to royalty, married to a General, she knew (or knew of) all the major players in this historical epoch.” I do not even know if the lovely portrait on this bookcover is la comtesse.

This volume begins with her traveling in France and staying for a few days in Lyon. She tells about a woman who visited her maid there, a woman named Marion, who had only one arm. Marion had been a servant to a vicar who had been imprisoned “during the Terror,” and every day Marion brought the vicar food that she carried in basket.

Here is the countess’s maid relating the story: “One morning, when she had been brutally repulsed, her perseverance in requesting admission to the prison exasperated one of the ‘sans culottes’ who was on guard; he proceeded to assert that her basket certainly contained evidence of a conspiracy against the Republic, and attempted to seize it. Marion, fearing that her poor dinner would be plundered, attempted to defend it. Then one of these monsters…struck off the arm which held the basket with a blow from his sword. Roars of laughter greeted this action. Poor Marion left her hand and half her forearm on the pavement of the prison, wrapped up the bleeding stump in her apron and came home to us….“

I think it is remarkable enough that Marion could have walked home with half her arm cut off, but here is the kicker. After her wound was dressed, Marion fixed another basket full of food and went back to the prison to deliver it to the vicar–that same day! She wrapped up her arm in lots of linen and put it in a sling and the vicar never knew she’d lost her arm until long afterward, when he was freed from the prison.

What incredible strength and endurance people must have had in those times. No ambulance. No emergency room. No morphine drip. No time to even mourn the loss of a limb. If I wrote that scene in fiction, no one would find it credible.

Can you also imagine how terrifying France must have been if one could be accused of ‘conspiracy against the Republic’ for merely carrying a basket of food? It must have been a perpetual nightmare.

Marion’s incident certainly hooked me on reading la comtesse’s memoir, but (alas!) I must put it down. I’m reading Memoirs of a Highland Lady, because the book I’m working on now, Mills and Boon/Harlequin Historical book #5, creatively known as “Tanner’s story,” is going to be partly set in Scotland. So far Elizabeth Grant, the Highland Lady, is remembering London….sigh!

Do you have any other memoirs or biographies to recommend to me? I love to learn of “our period” through the eyes of people who lived it.

Cheers!
Diane

I’ve been hard at work revising Warner book #3, Desire in His Eyes by Diane Perkins, which will be released in 2007. One of my revision tasks is to take a look at the words I use. For me, this means a couple of things:
1. Watch out for word repetition
2. Watch out for anachronisms

You have to love Microsoft Word (unless you are still a Word Perfect devotee, that is) because it make it so easy to search for repeated words. I discovered I was using the word “shrugged” all throughout the manuscript. My characters were shrugging all over the place. So I used Word’s “find” function and changed a bunch of them.

Another way words are repeated is on the same page or even in the same paragraph. I have a fist fight in the book and I used the word “thud” about three times in the same scene. My mind went blank about another word to substitute.

To the rescue came http://thesaurus.reference.com/

I used to have to pull out my thesaurus, look for my word in the back, then look in the various sections for the synonyms. In thesaurus.com I instantly have my synonyms!
For “thud,” I found “crash” “smack” “thump” and a really nice word, “thwack.”

That brings me to item number 2: anachronisms. Would my characters even use the word “thwack”? I try to use words that were in use in the Regency, even in my narrative.

Rescue #2 comes with http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

I love this website! No more risking a hernia lifting my Abridged Oxford Dictionary. No more eyestrain trying to read the small print. This is an online etymology dictionary, telling the earliest usage of a word and also how the word was used. Here is the entry for “thwack”: to hit hard with a stick,” 1530, of echoic origin. The noun is recorded from 1587.

So I could have used “thwack” but in the end I thought it sounded too “Batman” (the old TV show that used to use balloons saying “thwack” “bop” “wham”)

I also checked etymonline.com for was the phrase, “he was upstaged.” “Upstage” came into use in 1921, so I didn’t use it.

Another indispensible tool is http://dictionary.reference.com and the cool thing is you can flip back and forth from dictionary.com to thesaurus.com. I don’t trust my usage of words. In my very first manuscript, I used the word “discrete”, but what I really meant was “discreet.” That manuscript was read by lots of critique partners and contest judges and only one of them discovered my mistake. So for this blog, I double-checked the definitions of “anachronism” and “devotee.” It only took a minute.

What are your favorite online sites to assist with the writing process? Readers of our blog, this means you, too. I’ll bet nearly all of you use Word or Word Perfect for something. Or perhaps you have a favorite reference book. I’d love to know!

It is difficult to think of a topic related to the Regency period or about writing Regency on this day, Sept 11, the fifth anniversary of the horrific event known by its date, the three numbers we punch into our phones in the event of an emergency. 9/11

I was at work that day, a social worker for the county that includes the Pentagon. A co-worker brought in a radio for the first time that day and was just testing it when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. That was how we heard. We canceled our clients and otherwise remained helpless, watching out the windows at the smoke rising from the Pentagon or listening to the radio. Thanks to cell phones, I was never out of touch with my loved ones. It took my husband, who worked in Washington DC, hours to get home. Had it not been for the heroes of Flight 93, he might never have come home again. My co-workers and I were asked to stay at work while all day people and cars streamed past our building getting out of the city. Our county’s police, fire, and medical workers were busy responding to the emergency. When I finally left, it was 4 pm and by then the streets were eerily deserted.

I won’t be watching the TV coverage or the controversial ABC docudrama. Have no plans to see the 9/11 movies. I’m just not ready. Last year when the emergency dispatcher tapes were released, I burst into tears hearing them. Last week I heard an actress who happened to be in NYC that day, tell about stepping out into the street and seeing the ash-covered survivors walking toward her. She saw a business man weeping being held by a homeless man who comforted him. I burst into tears and have tears streaming down my face now in the retelling. I don’t know why that image gets to me. I suppose because it symbolizes both the grief and the glory.

I visited the World Trade Center site this summer, as I did the summer of 2001. This time instead of a raw gash in the earth-a horrible scar- there was rebuilding. Rebirth. Hope. I didn’t cry.

What event in the Regency could be most similar to this?

Waterloo? Encarta says: “French casualties totaled about 40,000, British and Dutch about 15,000, and Prussian about 7000; at one point about 45,000 men lay dead or wounded.” That’s pretty horrific. On the other hand, the people knew the battle ended the killing.

Maybe the French Revolution, even though it was before the Regency and was a protracted event, not a single, terrible day. According to Wikipedia, 1200 people met their death on the guillotine or otherwise in the Reign of Terror, less than half our losses on 9/11. Many of the aristocrats in England knew these French contemporaries, some were even related to them. The English must have been terrified their own masses would rise up and kill them all. They certainly took repressive steps to nip any revolutionary sentiment right in the bud. No wonder the English feared a French invasion and made Nelson a hero for averting it, and later Wellington for ending it. In Regency times, Napoleon was the “Boneyman,” aka “bogeyman”, still scaring children today.

I wonder how history will paint 9/11 in 200 years?
I’d like to think somebody like me will still be brought to tears.

Like the example of that homeless man, my cyberhugs to all of you.
Diane

For fun, I’m reading Ian Kelly’s Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style (Free Press, 2006) and have discovered a couple of interesting facts. Or at least things I did not know.

According to Kelly, tailors during Brummell’s heyday tended to specialize. Gronow had said Brummell favored Weston as his tailor, but Mr. Kelly’s research found that Brummell frequented several tailors. The primary ones were Schweitzer and Davidson on Cork Street, Johnathan Meyer on Conduit Street, and Weston, the only one British born. He favored different tailors for different items of clothing: Weston primarily for waistcoats; Schweitzer and Davidson for his coats and greatcoats; Johnathan Meyer for the forerunner of our modern trousers that Brummell pioneered.

Kelly states that Brummell “wore slim-cut trousers or ‘pantaloons’ that flattered his famously long-legged frame. For daywear these were made of leather, mercerized cotton, or nankeen and plain cotton in summer. Evening wear necessitated black, according to the new asthetic, and Brumell wore sheer black silk jersey, made up as breeches for Carlton House or the theatre, and as pantaloons for the clubs.”

I guess that answers my question of a couple of weeks ago about what color my hero’s breeches should be.

Brummell, like so many other gentlemen, purchased his hats from Lock & Co. The shop still exists today and in it you can actually see Wellington’s and Nelson’s famous hats.

Here is an image attributed to Brummell, but I am not at all certain it is the Beau. What do you think?

I much prefer this image.

James Purefoy as Brummell!
The BBC says: “The Taunton-born actor is heading a star cast in BBC FOUR’s Beau Brummell, a new drama at the centre of the channel’s The Century That Made Us season focussing on the 18th century, to be screened on Monday 19 June, 2006.”

Oh, don’t you wish they would air all the shows in the US???
What do you think about James Purefoy as Brummell? He certainly wears the clothes well!

One more important fact about Brummell.
Kelly could find no evidence that Brummell wore underwear.

Cheers!
Diane

I have lost my mind. I totally forgot to blog yesterday, my Risky Regency day.
Here are my excuses:
1. I’m slogging my way throught the revisions to Desire in His Eyes, Blake’s story, to be released by Warner in 2007.
2. I have to write a new Mills & Boon / Harlequin Historical by the end of October.
3. My daughter moved back in after living in NYC.
4. She brought her cat with her.
5. That makes four cats in our house.
I’ve hardly even looked at a picture of Gerard Butler, either. Honest. I promise to find my mind by next Monday and have something better than this for you to read.