..and other French words

Another research book arrived today. I'm not really intending to read all this stuff, not that deeply. But I am getting excited about the basic concept of my next book.

Here's how I'm thinking about it now; at the outer layer, this is a DaVinci Code story. Run around scenic Paris visiting famous artworks and monuments and ferreting out clues to a treasure one step in front of the bad guys.

Under that, it is more a story of the hero conundrum; that the tough part isn't becoming a skilled martial artist or gaining super powers or whatever; the tough part is that the problems of the real world aren't so obvious and aren't best addressed with a fist to the chin. For this story this is happening on both sides of the treasure hunt; the people who put it into motion really want to be breaking into museums at night and scaling buildings and all that Uncharted stuff in search of a lost treasure. For Penny, she's accepted that she is on the path of being a hero but she's discovering she is actually really, really bad at waiting for adventure to come to her. Assuming it ever does and what happened to her last year isn't just a fluke!

Ah, but where this particular rubber meets the road (sabot meets cobblestones?) is Paris. Paris for what it represents in the arts and in the dreams and the inspiration, a million reflections of the City of Lights from a million different admirers all trying to grasp the intangible. The points of contact here are largely two; an American tourist, an art student wanting to find that inspiration in the place where so many others created.

And a figure from the past, glimpsed through his memoirs, who was in Paris in that heady, crazy period where the belle epoque, the birth of Impressionism and the Can-Can and the ramp up to the Paris Exposition slides into the fin de' siecle and the growing rumors of war.

And Montmartre, a ramshackle village on steep hills covered with windmills and vines, where the latest "commune" could live the Bohemian life and let the tawdry and licentious entertainments free writers and artists from the established art and literature. Which grew and became too popular and with the Exposition the energy shifted to the Latin Quarter instead, leaving only the bars and brothels. Always poor, the class lines are very visible across this entire period and beyond; Sacre Coeur was dedicated to the dead of the communes during the Revolution. 

And the funny thing is? I don't really have to have a deep understanding of the geography or the economics. I just need to name-check a little Toulouse Lautrec and show the seedy floor shows he loved so much, and the picture is there, or at least as much as I need.