Historical figures

In addition to people who are mentioned in passing, including the names of generals, politicians, photographers, and notorious figures like P.T. Barnum, there are a few historical figures (including two non-human ones) and other real people who appear in the pages of Hearts at Dawn or who have an important influence on the characters.

I did my best to portray them, and I hope they’d be happy with the results.

They include:

~ Cleverman (1797 or 1798-1878)

François Eugène Lahire (stage name: Cleverman) was a magician who owned and was performing at the Theatre Robert-Houdin in 1870. The theater’s founder, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, is one of history’s most famous magicians (Houdini took one of his names in homage), and Cleverman kept many of his illusions and automatons in his show, while adding his own touches as well. You can read more about Cleverman and see some engravings portraying his act here.

~ Juliette Lamber (1836-1936)

A writer and feminist, Juliette Lamber went by a few different names, including Juliette Adam and Juliette Lambert. During the Siege of Paris, she was the wife of Edmond Adam, the head of Paris’s police force. She used her wealth and power for a number of good causes, including running an ambulance. Although she’s mostly known for her fiction works, Le siège de Paris : journal d'une Parisienne, a collection of her letters and journal entries written during the Siege, was an immensely helpful resource to me when researching Hearts at Dawn.

She was an excellent witness of history, giving incredibly detailed eyewitness accounts of events like the storming of the Assemblée Nationale and the night that the Parisians learned of Napoleon III’s capitulation. I wanted to feature Juliette in a scene in Hearts at Dawn out of gratitude for this, and also because she inspired Joseph’s climb to the top of the Sainte-Chapelle to see the aurora borealis. Her account of that night makes some strange sort of reference to wishing she’d done just that. In real life, as in my novel, she was busy tending to the sick in her ambulance while those wondrous lights were in the sky.

~ Elihu Washburne (1816-1887 )

Elihu Washburne played many important roles in US politics. Among them, he was the US Ambassador to France from 1869-1877, which means that despite enduring the hardships of the Siege and the Paris Commune that followed, he still loved Paris and his job enough to stay! I wanted to mention Washburne because judging from his letters and journal entries (of which you can read many in the book Elihu Washburne: The Diary and Letters of America’s Minister to France During the Siege and Commune of Paris by Michael Hill (pub. Simon & Schuster, 2012)), as well as the opinions of his contemporaries, he seems like a very nice person. Dealing with chronic ill health, he was also an inspiration to Orin – although their problems were of course very different.

~ Léon Gambetta (1838-1882)

A bombastic and bold statesman, Léon Gambetta proclaimed the Third Republic to a massive crowd in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. About a month later, he left the city by hot air balloon, to rally other French troops to come to the aid of the City of Light. And those are only two of the many interesting – even bizarre – events in his short life.

~ Jules Cousin (1830-1899)

Jules Cousin was the head of the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville and closely involved in the founding and growth of one of my favorite museums in the world, Le Musée Carnavalet, a museum dedicated to Paris’s history. The collections being acquired in Hearts at Dawn are things you can see there today, from old shop and tavern signs, to detailed scale models of Parisian neighborhoods at different points in history. There are lots of other neat things to discover, too! Unlike many of the other real-life figures in Hearts at Dawn, I wasn’t able to learn much about Cousin as a person. But he seems like a good egg, so that’s how I chose to portray him.

~ Mengin

This pencil-seller, whose last name was sometimes spelled "Mangin", became famous for the dramatic displays he put on when peddling his wares on the streets of Paris. Dressed as a knight, he stood outside his caravan and gave humorous speeches alongside displays showing the strength of his pencils. It was apparently quite a show. The Guide de Paris Mystérieux by François Carradec and Jean-Robert Masson (pub. by Tchou, 2019) recounts that he became a bit of a celebrity – and quite rich selling his reasonably priced pencils! As Rossignol says in Hearts at Dawn, you could get a little coin with his face on it if you bought several pencils.

Unfortunately, not much has been written about Mengin. I first learned about him from a small entry in La vie parisienne sous le second empire by Henri d’Alméras. But there is someone else who wrote a bit about Mengin: none other than P.T. Barnum! I was making the final edits to Hearts at Dawn when I learned that Barnum admired him and made him the subject of the third chapter of his book The Humbugs of the World. You can read this chapter - and the entire book - for free online.

~ The elephants Castor and Pollux

Castor and Pollux really did exist. They were beloved animals at the zoo of the Jardin d’Acclimatation and they met the tragic end I describe in the book. They’re just two of the numerous animal victims of the Siege.

Émile Rouline is based on James Mark Emmerling, a dear blogger friend and amazingly talented writer. Like Émile, he was smart, philosophy-obsessed, kind, funny, a lover of a good political cartoon, and a unique soul. Also like Émile, he suffered from bipolar disorder. This condition ultimately claimed his life.

The loss is staggering, from the grief of those he left behind, to the loss of what he could have written. James’s work was brilliant and challenging, sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always memorable.

He once told me that he hoped to visit me in Paris someday. I believe his spirit travels the world, laughing and discovering and marveling, but this book is another way to make that happen.

James was a prolific blogger, but unfortunately most of what he wrote has been lost due to blogging site shutdowns and his own choice to delete some of his work. You can read what remains, as well as learn a little more about him and his life, on the website dedicated to him.

Book cover designed by Natasja Hellenthal of Beyond Book Covers