The Secret Language of Stones

Author’s Note

As with most of my work, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale.

Paris during the Great War is described as close to the truth as possible. The bombings, strife, rations, numbers of dead and wounded are all based on fact. You can visit all the streets, bridges, buildings and churches, museums, and cafes I wrote about except for the shop where Opaline works, La Fantaisie Russe in the Palais Royal. However, I did base it on the jeweler Georges Fouquet’s very beautiful boutique, which you can visit in the Musée Carnavalet. The tunnels under the Palais do exist and were used for all kinds of clandestine operations during the war.

There were indeed laws in France forbidding fortune telling and necromancy so as to prevent charlatans from taking advantage of the grieving, and while there were many types of spiritualism practiced, I am not aware of anyone who worked with talismans the way Opaline did.

Anna Coleman Ladd’s “Studio of Miracles” did exist and restored dignity to countless men, but there wasn’t a sculptor there named Denise Alouette. Jean Luc’s mother, like him, is a character of my invention.

Le Figaro was and still is one of the great French newspapers, but there never was a Ma chère column.

Thousands of Russian émigrés flooded the city in those early years of the twentieth century, but there wasn’t a jeweler named Pavel Orloff that I am aware of. For generations there were rumors-still unproven-that the tsar sent emissaries from Russia to other countries, well before the revolution, with treasures to safeguard, but the Rainbow Diamond collection I described in this novel does not exist.

As far as I know, the Dowager Empress never undertook a secret journey to England during that last year of the war. It is true, however, that in her lifetime, she claimed to never believe her grandchildren had all perished along with her son. She always held out hope.