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Picturing a World

Hotel breakfast

Literary criticism uses the term "misprision" to refer to an author's creative misreading of another writer's work. Morisot's young woman is presumably in a private house and the meal is specified as luncheon; but for me the flowers in the background call to mind the little garden behind the Hôtel des Marronniers on the rue Jacob, where breakfast was served when my husband and I visited Paris to research my novel. (That garden also inspired the one I put behind my invented café Le Petit Honoré later in the book.) A freshness in this young girl's face and her bangs, make me think of Jeanette during the time she and Cousin Effie are first in Paris, staying in a hotel and searching for an apartment on the Left Bank. When you are writing, anything that makes the story come alive for you is to be treasured, rightly interpreted or not!

NB: She is holding a fan. They keep turning up!
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