Welcome to my corner of the Historical Novelists’ Four-Day Book Fair. About forty authors are participating, so be sure to visit many of the fair’s books.

This is the stall for Syncopation: A Memoir of Adèle Hugo

Writer. Composer. Seductress. Liar.

For humans there is only memory, and memory is unreliable.

In nineteenth-century France, a woman’s role was explicitly defined: she was a daughter, then a wife, then a mother. This view was held by novelist and poet Victor Hugo, but not by his daughter, pianist and poet Adèle Hugo. Under such constraints, what’s a woman of passion to do? Syncopation breathes life into the unconventional thoughts of this controversial female figure. An elderly Adèle recounts her desperate attempts to gain personal freedom. Her memoir blurs the fine line between truth and madness, in a narrative that is off-kilter, skewed, syncopated.

Order your copy of Syncopation, from Cornerstone Press.  Want to know more about the story?  Read on:

Prologue

To life there is a rhythm one knows from the womb. It begins as the beat of a mother’s heart–slow and steady and safe. An infant finds the pulse in its own heart and continues the rhythm in its needy sucking. The toddler pitter-pats to the rhythm, and the sound of the servants starting the day carry it through.  The pulse is in the wind and the laps of the waves from the Seine; birds sing it and squirrels chitter it; the very soil under out feet moans and groans to its pounding.

In perfect time, from an especially forceful contraction, the baby fell into waiting hands. She screamed in blows staccato and clear, slowing rhythmically to a docile cooing more in tune to her station in life. Adèle was born an angel to a family of gods. Her father, Victor, was a poet, playwright, and politician, brilliant and beloved by his countrymen. She was named for her mother, the first Adèle,the most beautiful woman in France. Her brothers, Charles and François-Victor, were handsome, strong, and clever. And her sister, Léopoldine, was a model eldest sibling—doting and tender, never scolding or haughty. Her skin was a translucent mountain stream: cool and fresh and clean; her generous black hair captured the light and returned it in a blue sheen which mocked the night sky; the moon would hide when Léopoldine went out at night, the orb’s beauty waning in her glow. She was sweet like marzipan, gentle like a summer breeze, flexible like a reed, warm like an old Bordeaux. Léopoldine was perfect like a pearl.

Firecrackers exploded and people shouted when Adèle was born. It was July 28, 1830, the middle day of Les Trois Glorieuses, the three-day revolution protesting the tyrannies of King Charles X. With such a birthday, one knew at once that Adèle was born for glory and fame.

The Hugo house was the first on the newly constructed rue Jean-Goujon, with the wide fields of the Champs-Elysée as their backyard. The family had everything one could desire: parkland to explore, books to read, a small black piano, and each other.

And then one day, as a unit, this perfect family gasped. Those who survived missed a half-beat from the breath of life. If it had been a whole note, they could have perhaps fallen back into the rhythm, but it was a half-beat. They syncopated. They moved out of step, off-kilter. Forever more, they would run and jump and dream and scream, but they would be unable to slip into that easy rhythm, that regular beat that keeps time for the world.

—What are you doing, Dédé?

—I’m writing my memoires, Didine.

—You’ve not written them in first person, Dédé. Why do you write Adèle as if you are not Adèle?

—It is necessary. I will have more freedom in third person. I can explore the minds of others; I can write about places I have not been.

—Do you think that is a good idea?

—If I thought it were a bad idea, I would not do it.

–Au contraire, responded Didine.  You would do it exactly because it is a bad idea. I see a sparkle in your eye at the idea of committing mayhem. These “memoires” will surely make people angry.

—Who will become angry? All of the people who might become angry are dead.

—They have left behind children. The children will surely try to stop you.

—Stop the truth? I feel an obligation to let the truth be known.

—Whose truth? asked Didine.

—Is there not but one truth? responded Dédé.

—Perhaps for God. For humans there is only memory and memory is unreliable.

Thanks for visiting my virtual book fair stall.  From here, I recommend visiting Cornerstone Press and checking out other authors’ virtual stalls.

Jessica Knauss has initiated a blog hop to allow book fans a chance to read excerpts from a number of historical novelists. Welcome if you have come here from her page. Go there next, if you started here. My excerpt from Syncopation: A Memoir of Adèle Hugo is below:

Pulling off her gloves, she placed her palms and right cheek against the stone wall. “I like how the cold moves into my blood. I can feel the music, even when there is no service; the building stores the sound of the music. I can hear hymns sung a hundred years ago.”

Adèle opened her eyes and saw him standing several paces from the building. “Come,” she said, tugging at him. “You’re not feeling the cathedral.” She removed his hat, and, threading her fingers through his hair, gently pressed his head against the cold stone. “Close your eyes and feel Notre Dame.”

Auguste closed his eyes, but he felt only the nearness of Adèle, and her palm against his temple.

Now hop on back to Jessica Knauss’s website and visit some other authors.