I have enough to do learning about Belle Epoque Paris. My brain is crawling with far too many names (far too many of which knew and interacted with each other), from indefatigable Louis-Michel to the aging Victor Hugo, the short-legged Toulouse-Lautrec or the bear-like Rodin, the feuding Garnier and Eiffel, the on-again-off-again Monet and Manet, Ritz and Bernhardt and...
But I am doing a Dan Brown pastiche here, and to do it properly I need to show the process of following the clues across Paris. Huxley didn't get to paint the clues into his own artworks, though (plus his is more of a scavenger hunt), and that makes this a rather more interesting exercise in the process of history; in how places change and how context matters.
So I actually have to write the clues. Huxley was a realist; he was landed gentry with a classical education (he served as an officer in the first world war -- and may have volunteered for the Second Boer War), and he was hanging around the literary elites, politicians, and bon vivants of the best of the fin de sicle. So he has no illusions of being a poet.
But like I said; he went to school at a time when Greek and Latin were on the menu, when a good understanding of the Classics was there. Plus he knows the popular culture -- some of which is today almost considered high-brow, like Hugo, but some of which has been completely forgotten. And he is hanging out in the salons swapping gossip about these fabulous (and, unfortunately for a writer who would like to finish this year well documented).
Do you know I have six different full-length films available to me on Prime (for free) about the lives of Rodin, Gaugin, Cezanne, and...I can't even remember all the rest.
Hell, I never even learned the rules of constructing proper couplets. As artless as Huxley may claim to be, and as tossed-off he considers his own efforts, these are coming out of an education that I can't match.
And that is before I add the layers of time and change. Is that building still standing? Conversely, does everyone now know what was the hot new gossip secret in 1902? Do you even have to visit the painting when you can find a really, really good reproduction on line?
And of course the nature of this kind of hunt. It took me a couple weeks to zero in that this is basically "go to a place and look for clues to the next place." Which means you have to be in the right place before it becomes clear what it was you are supposed to be looking at.
Right now the only one I have is that from St. Pierre you "follow the saint" to where he was martyred. Which is about two hundred feet, that being the current location of Sacre-Coeur. From there, I'm thinking it is an Ozymandius reference that Penny catches but can't follow; the Exposition had been spread out in that direction but only the Petit and Grand Palais remain. That, and the Luxor Obelisk, which had been there for a while but originated with...Rameses II.
So Penny goes to check out the Egyptian collection at the Louvre. Because there are two more levels to this. One is that Huxley, after his brief clue, goes on to ramble about his exploits as a strapping young man in wild turn-of-the-century Paris. And Penny isn't the only person who is reading all of his remarks on the people and places and reading too much into a few chance mentions, like "The Mummy's Secret" or "Napoleon's Gold."
The other is that Penny understood Huxley's context very well. She knows he isn't leaving clues to a hidden treasure. He's leading his reader on a scavenger hunt to experience some of the Paris he loved. And she's doing the same thing; using his clues as an excuse to enjoy Paris herself (and take a little bit of video for her subscribers back home).
So she'll take a mis-read clue as an excuse to go have some fun. And all of those options, too, have to be folded into those little bits of wretched doggerel I've been struggling to compose.
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