WWRW: Spooky Stories and Belle Epoque

Two years ago, this time, I wrote a very short post about some middle-school age appropriate paranormal novels for October.  If you're interested, click here.

This week, I read Belle Epoque by Elizabeth Ross.  Contrary to what you see on the cover, Belle Epoque is the story of a plain girl, who gets a job in Paris, 1887, as a "repoussoir" or beauty foil.  Every peach in the bushel looks the same until you take a normal peach and place it next to a bruised one.  Then the normal peach looks more beautiful.  Repoussoirs are bruised peaches, hired as accessories to Paris' elite, giving socialites an advantage at the Season's well-attended events.

Maude is hired by the Countess Dubern to be her daughter, Isabel's companion.  Unfortunately, Isabel has no idea that "poor relation" Maude is actually paid to be her friend.  Torn between her job requirements to get Isabel married off, and Isabel's desire to study for the Sorbonne, Maude has to decide who she will be, the repoussoir, or the friend.

The subject matter, hiring and selling the services of "ugly" girls is weighty, but Ross does a commendable job dealing with body image and the "law of comparisons."  Isabel tells Maude, "The rule of comparisons is an endless circle, for there will always be greater and lesser people than yourself...If only my mother could see that there is far more to me as a person than where my physical features depart from hers.  I have a mind, I have opinions, I have compassion for others.  I have a heart..."

When Maude tells her friend, cafe musician Paul, what she really does for a living, he responds, "But they have it all backward...You are lovelier than any person I have met in this City of Light.  You are truth and honesty and imagination and, yes, beauty.  And a rich woman dripping in jewels and silks with painted lips and curled locks, is but a foil for your purity and strength of character."

Belle Epoque is appropriate for teens.  There is some discussion of a servant girl being molested by her master.  When Maude witnesses such an event, the Countess mentions that at a certain aristocrat's home, it is the footmen who have to beware of the master.

There are also some unrealistic situations.  For example, Maude finds Paul on her doorstep late one night.  He is drunk, and she helps him to his apartment and to bed, leaving a note for him.  I sincerely doubt that any young single respectable woman would enter a bachelor's apartment without a chaperone in 1887.  Anachronistic errors aside, I was pleasantly surprised with Belle Epoque.

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