Journal

Is Château Valaire based on a real château?

Many aspects of the fictional Château Valaire are based on the actual Château de Servigny, although not location, the former being situated “midway between Orléans and Tours on the Beuvron,” the latter outside the village of Yvetôt-Bocages on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy.

Château de Servigny dates from the Sixteenth Century but had its moment of fame in the Twentieth, when following the landings at Utah Beach it was used as the headquarters for General “Lightning Joe” Lawton’s 7th Army Corps during the siege of Cherbourg. The German surrender was signed in a drawing room on the second floor, and the room remains preserved as it was that day.

It still serves as the private residence of the family whose ancestors built it and so is not open to the public but, like Château Valaire, arrangements can sometimes be made for special events, including D-Day celebrations, in which it often features.

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Do the Jeff Koons paintings exist?

The two fictional paintings that Andromeda encounters in the Vaughn villa are based on “Bracelet” and “Ribbon” (pictured: “Ribbon,” Jeff Koons, 1995–1997, © Jeff Koons; from www.jeffkoons.com). They may depict small things but are monumental works, each about 9 by 12 feet, something that Koons practices in other media, notably sculpture–monstrous candies and balloon dogs made of highly polished stainless steel–and even topiary. In New York City, there have been two major exhibitions in recent years: the Whitney put on a retrospective before moving downtown; prior to that there was a rooftop exhibition of the sculptures at the Met. Koons artworks can often be found at the auction houses or in Chelsea galleries.

Andromeda badly underestimates their market value, as indeed does her accoster on South Beach: “Bracelet” was sold in 2007 for $2.25 million.

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Was the Venice ball based on a real event?

The ball that Andromeda attends is based on two masquerade balls held annually in Venice during Carnival: the Gran Ballo Mascheranda and Il Ballo del Doge. Both of these take place in the Palazzo Pisani Moretta on the Grand Canal, and much of the fictional Ca’ d’Inverno is adapted from this palace.

The accompanying photograph shows the palazzo’s facade on the evening of Il Ballo del Doge, lit by flame as Andromeda saw Ca’ d’Inverno, and with the dark shadows of boats carrying ballgoers in the foreground, waiting for their turn to land guests.

These balls are far from restrained but not to the level of indulgence in Andromeda’s affair. Her episode has more in common with certain private events organized for those fortunate few with sufficient prosperity and pulchritude to qualify—the bel mondo of the type depicted at Ca’ d’Inverno.

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Do the murals described in ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA actually exist?

The frescoes in Pompeii’s Villa dei Misteri are, in both appearance and scholarly understanding, as Dr. Leatherwaite describes them in Chapter Thirteen. The villa’s name, meaning mysteries, refers not to puzzles but the paintings themselves, which depict a Dionysian “mystery”—that is, a secret rite in which a young woman is initiated into the cult of the half-Greek, half-Oriental god, Dionysus.

This is a photograph of the triclinium—the dining room where the aristocratic Romans feasted under the gaze of gods, unaware that Vesuvius was about to consume them. The far wall, the northeastern, depicts three incidents: scene four, the catoptromancy episode where the future is observed in a silver bowl (filled with mercury?); scene five, with the god Silenus lying back in ecstatic exhaustion (note the damage where the lava came flowing through); and scene six, with the initiate undergoing ritual flagellation by a winged goddess.

The frescoes are best viewed by arriving at Pompeii at opening time, turning left after entering and walking past the funerary monuments directly to the villa, situated a little out of town—you will likely have the place to yourself. Later, around noon, with Pompeii now crowded and sweltering, drive over the spine of the nearby Amalfi peninsula to Ravello and enjoy a leisurely lunch washed down with local wine in the cool of the hills while gazing out over the Gulf of Salerno glittering a thousand precipitous feet below.

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Does the book have a motion-picture analog?

No. The final film made by the late French New-Wave auteur Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gradiva (2007), captures some of the same style and sensibility—a nebulous search; present but imprecise menace; somewhat surrealistic & hallucinogenic. Also, the Gradiva legend, strange enough to have fascinated both Freud and Dalí, is dreamlike, much as the experiences that Sabrina undergoes. (See the accompanying tableau-vivant-like still from the movie: you can see how it would have appealed to those two dream-obsessed figures from the last century). But as an analog it soon breaks down—different stories, settings, underlying themes; Floreat Lux has other sources.

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Has Boyle’s Wish List been fully realized?

What Boyle actually meant by some of the items on his Wish List is not always clear, such as “Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing,” but here is an item-by-item accounting, assessing each in turn as having been achieved or not, with explanatory comments where appropriate.

The result: twenty items accomplished and four not yet. But all four not-yets are just variations on the same theme: making human beings physically more capable than nature created them. Now that we are on the brink of the era of genetic programming, it is reasonable to assume that these four will be achieved sometime in the near future, perhaps within a generation, thus completing a list that must have seemed to Boyle to be a wild dream, but most of whose items are so commonplace to us now that we don’t even think of them.

Photo: Portrait of The Honourable Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), Irish natural philosopher. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

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What was the inspiration for the “star journey”?

It is hard to say what lies behind an act of imagination, but Sabrina’s hallucinogenic voyage into deep inner/outer space has several identifiable sources. The fact of the scene being labeled “The Fire Sermon” points to two: Buddhism, by way of T.S. Eliot. Recent advances in the mathematics and physics of laser light—a field of study loosely labeled “nonlinear wave topology”—were also influential; these are manifested in Bronaryre’s description of the mechanism. And the imminent launch of the James Webb telescope, which promises to look back 13.5 billion years into the 13.8 billion years of the Universe’s existence, no doubt influenced the imagery at the end of Sabrina’s journey.

A vivid inspiration was the artist Marco Brambilla, whose work the author first became acquainted with in 2016 at The Standard High Line, down in New York City’s Meatpacking District. One of Mr. Brambilla’s video artworks—Creation (Megaplex)—is installed in the hotel’s elevators, otherwise darkened, and this has the effect of seeming to plummet passengers through cosmic spacetime as they journey up and down between the lobby and the rooftop bar—a clever way to display such art.

The accompanying photograph is a snapshot from the video inside those elevators, showing strands of DNA with life (including mermaids) emerging from the primordial swirl, but the full effect is inseparable from movement and needs to be appreciated in video form. So, if in New York, take a trip to The Standard High Line’s rooftop bar and enjoy the show along the way—or it can be seen here.

By the author, ago

What is the background photo at the bottom of the website?

The background of the Contact section is a shot from the interior of an E-Type Jaguar—the basis for Bronaryre’s—and is the same vehicle as on the rear jacket of FLOREAT LUX. The exact model is a 1969 Series 2 Roadster, right-hand-drive and British specification, which is to say that the 4.2-liter straight-six is equipped with triple SU carburetors—Sabrina’s “row of shiny little tea kettles”—not the dual Zenith-Stromberg units on American XKEs, fitted to meet US emission standards but reducing power. In this shot is visible “a lever to the left of the steering column” that Sabrina thinks of as “selecting flap for take-off” (in fact it chokes those triple SUs, enriching the mixture for a cold start).

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Is Temple Slaughter Preceptory based on a real place?

In its basic layout—Palladian structure, topiarized parterre, broad parade, clock tower, Neptune fountain, sounding room with a wonderfully ornate grille—Bronaryre’s estate is loosely based on Cliveden House. Sabrina’s room, too, was inspired by Cliveden’s Lady Astor suite, including the fanciful Jacobean fireplace that fueled Sabrina’s phantasmagorical dreams (pictured).

However, there are many differences: Cliveden is located on the Berkshire-Buckinghamshire border, just ten miles northwest of Heathrow, and sits on the mighty Thames rather than the modest Windrush. Also, although it has been home to a Prince, two Dukes, an Earl, and four Viscounts, as far as is known no one claiming to be the Lord of the Underworld has ever occupied the place. Nevertheless, there is a certain scandalous reputation to Cliveden that might appeal to that gentleman: the original house was built by George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, son of a rogue and himself a rogue: he used the place to stash his mistress, and killed her husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, in a duel over her; between the World Wars it was the scene of lavish parties on a Gatsbyesque scale, hosted by the Astors and whose guest lists included luminaries as varied as Charlie Chaplin, Mahatma Gandhi & Lawrence of Arabia; more lately, it was the setting for the key events in the Profumo affair.

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Is it true that “no two genuine democracies have ever gone to war”?

As far as the author is aware, Bronaryre’s assertion is correct. In the first Indo-Pakistani War (1947) both sides were technically democracies, but the partition had just occurred, there were still independent princelings deciding which if either nation they would join, and there had been no instance of the peaceful transition of political power that distinguishes genuine democracies. In the 1965 & 1971 wars, Pakistan was under military dictatorship (there had been an election in 1970, but the winner was imprisoned by the ruling general). In the fourth war, in 1999, both sides were again technically democracies, but the fact that there was another military coup in Pakistan that same year makes it hard to assert that democracy there was as yet genuine.

The intermittent “Cod Wars” between Iceland and the United Kingdom (1958-1976) resulted in some ships being damaged in collisions, but there were no deaths and these conflicts cannot count as real wars.

More recently, in the Russia/Georgia and Russia/Ukraine conflicts both sides were nominally democracies, but the assertion that Russia under Putin is a genuine democracy is not credible.

Any counterexamples would be interesting to hear. In their absence, Bronaryre’s observation makes a compelling argument for a political system so effective in bringing peace to such a belligerent species, and should encourage the democracies to more resolutely close ranks against today’s global rise of authoritarian regimes.

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