The amorous artist and the music hall star

This week I have such a fun story to share with you.

I’ve been in France for two weeks now, on the first leg of my digital nomad adventures, and so far it’s been great. I spent the first 5 days in Montmartre, my favourite part of Paris, then I moved to Malakoff, in the south of the city, which is where I’ll be until October, beavering away on the first draft of a novel.

My Malakoff writing desk - complete with barred window so I can’t escape till I’ve written the first draft!

Malakoff is an urban district but I somehow managed to find a tiny stone cottage to stay in, tucked away in the courtyard behind a nail bar and a sushi restaurant! It even has its own tiny garden, complete with one towering pine tree and every hour on the hour the bells from the church on the other side toll, so it magically feels as if I’m staying in the heart of the countryside!

My magic secret cottage

And speaking of magic, this week I have a truly magical tale to share with you. So make yourself a cuppa and settle in…

Last Sunday I took a walk to a flea market I’d read about before coming to France. It takes place every weekend on a bridge and I’d heard that it mainly sold smaller antique items - perfect for someone like me, who is now living out of one solitary suitcase.

So off I set and, after only taking one wrong turn, I arrived on the bridge, which had two rows of stalls running along it, and was a hive of activity. On the walk there I’d been thinking that I’d love to find a vintage camera from the 1930s, as I have a novel about a 1930s photographer coming out soon. I’d also heard that you can sometimes find old letters and postcards at this flea market and this intrigued me.

So imagine my glee when I spotted a stall with a collection of vintage cameras AND about five shoe boxes full of old letters. I’ll save what happened with the cameras for another time because today’s tale is all about the letters.

Obviously they were all written in French so I had no idea how to make my choice so I decided to let my intuition guide me. I stood in front of one of the boxes, closed my eyes, and pulled a letter out. The envelope was browning and silky with age, and fraying at the edges. I saw from the postmark that it was sent in 1934 and was addressed to someone named Suzanne at ‘Theatre Bobino, Paris.’

The fact that it was addressed to a theatre piqued my interest so I looked inside, and as well as the letter there was a piece of paper, clearly from more recent times, with a man’s name and the words, ‘artist and painter’ written on it in biro. I wasn't sure if it had got in there by accident but it added to the intrigue. I was about to pay for the letter when the woman on the stall informed me that I could get two for a special price, so I found another one addressed to the same Suzanne, sent four years later.

Sadly, when I got the letters home I wasn’t able to decipher the handwriting well enough to be able to put them through google translate. I did discover that the man’s name on the slip of paper was the name of the man who’d sent the first letter so I gave that a google and sure enough, it turned out that he was a well known artist and painter in Paris in the 1930s. It also turned out that the Theatre Bobino was a famous music hall back in the day and all the greats, including Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker sang there. Could Suzanne have been a singer there too?

I googled the name of the man who’d sent the second letter and it turned out that he was a musical director back then. The plot thickened.

On Wednesday, I met up with my good friend Marie, who was the translator for some of the French editions of my books. I couldn’t think of a better person to help me translate to the letters. We’d arranged to meet to go to an exhibition of Banksy’s artwork and afterwards, over tea and cake in the garden of the Museum of Romantic Life, I showed the letters to her. 

It turned out that Suzanne was indeed a singer and the first letter, from the artist, was a gushing letter he’d sent after seeing her perform at the Bobino.

‘I had limitless pleasure watching you perform yesterday afternoon,’ he begins. ‘Your cheerfulness and energy, your simplicity and natural ways are an art, and gave me a lot of pleasant moments. Such a precious gift in these times of scepticism we’re living through. You are so pretty, but that is another story, and how many others have told you that before me?

Then came my favourite line…

‘I have only one criticism, my joy was too short lived. The ghastly curtain was too quick to hide you from us poor audience.’

He then goes on to ask where she will next be performing, and also gives her his address, before ‘respectfully’ signing off.

As Marie translated the words written almost 100 years ago, the characters of Suzanne and Alex started to form in my mind, like a Polaroid developing. A beautiful music hall singer, and her amorous artist fan.

Then I showed Marie the other letter, which was written four years later, in 1938. 

‘Ooh, I think Suzanne married into money,’ Marie said, noting her new surname - de La Morliere de Lissac (and indeed, some later internet sleuthing informed me that the name belonged to a French noble family).  So the poor artist never got lucky in the end in spite of his epic ‘ghastly curtain’ line!

In the second letter, sent by the musical director, he is thanking Suzanne for their work together at a concert at Salle Pleyel, which is still a prestigious music venue in Paris to this day, and he talked about them working together again in the future. The letter ends with him inviting her to come to his place the following Thursday to discuss this further. 

And this is where things got really spooky. When we read his home address we realised that it was on the exact same street as the Banksy exhibition we’d just been to! I mean, of all the streets in Paris, what are the chances?!

‘We have to go back!’ Marie and I exclaimed in unison. So, as soon as we’d wolfed down our tea and cake, back we went.

We arrived at the address to find a beautiful apartment building typical of that part of Paris, complete with a huge wooden door at the main entrance. Of course, these days you need a key code to get in, but as luck would have it, one of the inhabitants turned up, and we caught the door before it locked again and slipped inside.

The door opened onto a courtyard garden. I took the letter from my bag and couldn’t help shivering as I thought of the music director writing it in that very building all those years ago. And of course, assuming that Suzanne accepted his invitation, she would have walked through that very same door and across that very same courtyard back in 1938.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything about Suzanne online but I was so thrilled to have been able to put a few pieces of her life story together just from the letters. And even better, to get to take one of the letters back to the place of its birth, so to speak.

With the letter in its ‘birth place’

I returned to my tiny cottage in Malakoff that night fizzing from the magic of it all. And it turned out there was still one more magical twist to come. 

Three years ago, when I was researching for my first World War 2 novel, An American in Paris, I came across the true story of a woman who owned an art gallery in Paris during the war and used it to hide famous paintings and Jewish friends from the Nazis.

Her bravery so impressed me that I vowed to one day write a novel inspired by her life story.

Last night, as I prepared to write this edition of Wonderstruck to you, I gave the artist who wrote the fan letter to Suzanne one more Google and as I reached the bottom of his Wikipedia page, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks - it turned out that he married the daughter of the art gallery owner I’d vowed to one day write a book about!

For years, I’ve been carrying that woman’s story around with me in my head, and now I have a letter written by her son-in-law in front of me on my desk!

I know life can often feel like a grind but sometimes, if we’re lucky enough, and open to it, it feels as if there’s a magical parallel universe pulsing away right at our fingertips. And as Roald Dahl once said: ‘Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’

So, until next week, here’s to believing in and seeking out the magic…

Siobhan