I turned to 1910 and found a picture of the Paris flood. My copyeditor gave me Olga Samaroff's An American Musician's Story , which is where most of the Conservatory bits come from, and finally I mixed in some ideas about painting and forgery, because I was interested in how various cultures define art and how women artists fit into that time. We had one back in Boston last October. Between one hour and the next rivers flooded, basements flooded, and the power went out. There are times like that in people's lives too.
Emotion takes over, things change very fast, and afterwards, everything's different.
For these people, love was the greatest disaster. The flood was a perfect image. The flood was Paris's Titanic. Paris was the most modern city in the world. It had electric lighting everywhere and all-electric hotels.