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Is there a Riviera villa like the one to which Baker invites Sabrina?

Now known as “Villa X,” the Villa Bloc at Cap d’Antibes on the Côte d’Azur was designed by Claude Parent for the sculptor André Bloc and finished in 1962. This photograph, taken when the author stayed there in 2018, captures the sense of optimistic modernism underlying the design, including the fabulous top floor, Baker’s “big glass box looking out over the Mediterranean”—reminiscent of Bronaryre’s Manhattan sky-cell, and echoing the light/enlightenment-seeking theme of FLOREAT LUX.

Also shown is the external staircase—helical rather than spiral, as in the Templar staircase of the Unburying the Dead scene. Watson & Crick revealed the helical nature of DNA in 1953, just a few years before Villa Bloc was conceived, and so perhaps the helical design in this case was not a coincidental foretelling but a conscious acknowledgment of that epoch-changing event.

Although privately owned and not open to the public (even the road to it is restricted, apparently due to French naval control of the neighboring lighthouse) the history & details of the villa’s design are available in the abundantly illustrated book La Villa Bloc de Claude Parent (Editions Imbernon, Marseilles, June 2011). In the original design the middle floor was open, spatio-dynamisme having strict rules for the proportion of open to enclosed space, but a later owner had it filled in. In La Villa Bloc de Claude Parent, the architect’s views on this can be seen in his angry scrawl across the blueprints: “Idiot et voyou [thug].”

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Can Bronaryre’s Manhattan “sky-cell” be visited?

For the first time in half a century, the penthouse at 70 Pine Street is open to the public. Floors 63-66 have been converted into a restaurant—Saga, opened just 4 weeks prior to the publication of FLOREAT LUX, and fittingly the site of a celebration for the book’s launch. The 66th floor—Bronaryre’s “sky cell”—has been preserved, including the pint-sized pinion-driven elevator emerging through the floor.

This photograph was taken from the terrace on the 63rd floor. The Empire State Building’s spire is brightly lit, center-left, emerging in Midtown taller than all the others. The Chrysler’s spire is also visible, although it appears squared off by the tall building behind it (the Citigroup Center). The catenary curves of the “noble Triborough” are visible to the right and, further right, a span of the distant Whitestone, where the East River becomes Long Island Sound. The golden triangular top in the center of the shot belongs to the Foley Square US Courthouse, site of many famous trials, from the Rosenbergs to Osama bin Laden (in absentia), and a place a little too well known to the many Manhattanites who, like the author, have become acquainted with it via jury duty.

In New York, no restaurant will long survive on location alone, but Saga has food & service to match the panorama and is destined to be listed among the finest in the city—thus, for the cost of a (superb) meal, anyone can see the same view that fascinated Sabrina in the sky-cell.

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Oxford Crown at the Ashmolean Museum

Do the various publications named in the story really exist?

With three exceptions, all of the many books, papers, and articles cited in FLOREAT LUX are actual publications. Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster was published in 1613, shortly after the trials to which he was a witness, though that account unwittingly does more to condemn the magistrates than the accused. Jonathan Jones is a well-respected figure in art criticism, and his 2002 Guardian article on Rothko is worth tracking down. The century-old numismatic paper that Sabrina locates in the Maughan, Nelson’s Gold Coins Issued at the Mint at Oxford, etc., gives a stirring account of the Civil War context (FLOREAT LUX’s author conducted research in that same library, with access granted by the kind permission of King’s College). Even some of the very obscure and dry-sounding references can be entertaining, such as Volume 17 of the Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society, published in 1855, that Bronaryre gives Sabrina, listing the location and provenance of all known extant Oxford Crowns, including the Ashmolean’s (pictured, courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)—it numbers these as either ten or eleven, the dubious eleventh rumored “to have been in possession of a lady, a friend of Dr. Disney, Hollis’s Executor,” a line which with Victorian delicacy brings to mind an illicit relationship paid for with purloined treasure.

The other publications referenced in FLOREAT LUX are likewise real—among them: Philosophiae Magnae Paracelsi; De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae; Démonologie, ou traitté des démons et sorciers; Hexagrammum Mysticum Theorem; Catalogus plantarum horti medici Oxoniensis; and the incredibly named The Spirit of Solitude: an Autohagiography: Subsequently re-Antichristianed The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Æthylwine at Easton Grey is fictional, based loosely on two 19th-century Oxford University works of scholarship on medieval cartularies: The Cartulary of the Abbey of Eynsham and The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, both of which feature detailed analyses of their seals, although none of them Templar. Lastly, The Wonders of the Windrush and Cavendish House Dishabille are both obviously fictional, although the cover art of FLOREAT LUX offers hints as to how they might have looked.

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FLOREAT LUX Paradise Lost fleuron

What is the separator symbol in FLOREAT LUX?

The fleuron used for section demarcation throughout FLOREAT LUX (shown here, much enlarged) is a segment from the arabesque border on the first page of the First Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, printed in 1667 by Samuel Simmons.

According to David Masson’s foreword to an 1877 facsimile reproduction of the First Edition, Simmons produced “a very carefully printed book. It may rank, I think, as the best-looking book of Milton’s printed in his life-time.”

Given the role of Paradise Lost in the novel, it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the poem in this manner. A typographical note with more detail has been appended to the First Edition of FLOREAT LUX.

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Is Caiaphas College modeled on an actual Oxford college?

The location of the fictional Caiaphas, most of its architecture, and much of its history are based on Jesus College, Oxford. This photograph was taken by the author while briefly occupying rooms (as a non-academic guest) on Staircase VIII. It shows the northern section of the first quad with the Chapel forming most of that side, and part of the Dean’s Residence is visible to the left. The Dean’s Garden—the site of Sabrina’s green door encounter—is on the other side, and the top of one of its trees appears above the chapel roof.

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70 Pine Street

Is there a real apartment like Bronaryre’s Manhattan “sky-cell”?

Bronaryre’s apartment in a spire was inspired by the penthouse of 70 Pine Street, New York. This 1930’s Art Deco building was once the world’s third-tallest and twice the tallest in Downtown: firstly when it was built, and then again after 9/11. The solarium in the spire—the “sky-cell” of FLOREAT LUX—was for a time an observatory open to the public. Later, when AIG acquired the building, the space was used for private entertaining, and it was during this period that the author became familiar with it.

In FLOREAT LUX, Bronaryre’s building is situated not at 70 Pine Street but amid that mysterious warren of narrow lanes immediately below 48 Wall Street—once headquarters of the Bank of New York, and whose magnificent main banking hall is now an event venue, including conversion into “Club Ralph”: a Jazz Age nightclub created for the after-party following the 2019 Ralph Lauren fashion show, some features of which were incorporated into the Cavendish House episode in FLOREAT LUX.

This shot of 70 Pine Street’s spire was taken from the roof of the Beekman Hotel, about half a mile away.

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Statue of Dante, Verona

What is the source of the theory about Dante’s ‘Inferno’?

The theory of a mathematically encoded message hidden in Dante’s Inferno is entirely original to FLOREAT LUX. It came first from an analysis of the poem’s structure, prompted by the observation that many of the divisions seem too forced to be the result of poetic license alone, and then considering the findings in the context of mathematics at the time in medieval Florence.

The photograph is of the Dante statue in the Piazza dei Signori, Verona, taken by the author while recently in Italy—this year, Italy is celebrating Dante Alighieri on the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death.

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Harrier, hunting at dusk

What is the website’s background photograph?

The background in the website’s title block is a photograph of a female harrier, hunting near dusk with storm clouds gathering behind her, much as on page 200 of FLOREAT LUX. Here, as in that scene, she is soaring above a carefully cultivated and topiarized parterre, and the shot was taken on the same terrace from which Sabrina and Bronaryre observe the bird while drinking cocktails and discussing botanicals.

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