Story of the story

My sister died when I was 7. She was one year older than me. I have never really been able to cope with this loss. Very early, I chose to imagine that she was still alive, but the Christian version of Heaven did not suit me. It seemed to me that she too had a right to see her mother (who is mine too, and she's great, I strongly recommend her). So I created an alternate world where she could keep living, even if I did not see her. I never tried to know what happened there, what she was doing. I was satisfied with believing she had not disappeared forever. The rest did not matter.

In time all this faded away. I grew up. I went to university. And the more I studied about the history of the Church, the less convinced I became. I even turned into a fundamentalist atheist and an anticleric. Which does not prevent me from dreaming and imagining. When I started writing, one of the first stories that popped in my mind was that of In Memoriam. Probably because it was the first universe I invented as a child.

The shape of the book, an epistolary novel, seemed quite obvious. First because it is the only way to allow both characters to speak. Then, because when I wrote the manuscript, I was going through an agitated period in my life. I moved five times in one year... So to speak, I was living among boxes. It was easier to cut the narrative into short episodes, which I could write independently one at a time. A long, linear narrative would have requested more room and more time. In addition, since the greatest part of Charlotte and Pierre's story is not told (they only write once a year and their lives are full of silences and blanks), the conditions in which I was writing matched the conditions in which the tale was told.

As for the historical background... Nothing is more annoying to me than anachronisms and blatant mistakes in historical narratives.In Gladiator for instance, the succession of discrepencies makes the film unbearable to me (zoom in on the stirrups, to name but one example -for if the Romans had had stirrups, the Huns would never have come to mow the lawn...). My novel is not properly speaking a historical novel, but the characters live through two centuries. And that is the period in history which I master least. To avoid the most obvious mistakes, I used my knowledge to its best. I studied the American Civil War, the Boxers War (in China at the end of the 19th century)... So I managed to have my characters be where it suited me the most at the right time.

Finally, there are a number of ideas in the text. The "untimely theories", the "theory of the clitoris", the "theory of the evolution of potatoes"... It was fun bringing them together. And to keep the suspense going, the exchanges between Charlotte and Pierre go through three stages, marked by the birth and death of Victor. I played with their condition. The wager was to make them interact while they do no exist in the same world. I am quite satisfied with the "assassination" I conceived in these circumstances.