W. Norton; and Dominique Bourgois at Christian Bourgois Éditeur—thank you for believing in Victorine and me. Thank you also to Cécile Deniard, my French translator. The story of how the gardener Guichet murdered the prostitute Mezeray is true; I learned about it and much more regarding the lives of working class women from Jill Harsin’s Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Poor & Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century by Rachel G. Fuchs also illuminated this topic. The story of a perfumer named Monpelas, killed by soldiers of Louis Napoleon in 1851, is also true and reported by Victor Hugo in Napoleon the Little (Napoléon le Petit). Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin was a real Parisian photographer; I learned about him primarily through Serge Nazarieff’s Early Erotic Photography. In writing this novel, I spent hours looking at Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris and the 1860 Andriveau-Goujon map of Paris. Even though historian Richard Cobb and photographer Nicholas Breach recorded a much more modern Paris in The Streets of Paris (1980), that book mattered deeply to me.
