aristocratic intoxicants

I’m adapting the Colette chapter for a short story competition, and I was stuck on the twist — I don’t mean the twist in a Roald Dahl kind of way, I suppose I mean the point of it. A story has to have a point: what is it trying to say? What WAS I trying to say? I had the same problem with my story “The Slave of Bracelets”: June gives Anais the bracelet. And then what? Something definitely had to happen with the bracelet, but what? I didn’t have the title yet, so it was all a bit more up in the air. It took me a while of thinking, fermenting, agitating and vacuuming (it’s a great sedative) before it came to me: June takes it back. The ending was blindingly obvious once I had it, but until then I had no idea what on earth could happen with that sodding bracelet.

Incidentally, the real bracelet in question had a cat’s-eye stone in it, but in my story I’ve changed it to a tiger’s eye. When I started writing these stories, I wanted to be very strict about being faithful to the biographical and historical facts. But I needed a stone that would catch the light and be mesmerising, and also suggest June’s exotic magnificence, and cat’s-eye stones just don’t inspire me. There was no way I could write about this cat’s-eye and how fascinating it was. When I write I see objects and characters in my mind, and whenever I looked at the bracelet I felt bored. I decided to take some writerly liberties, as after all, I am not writing biographies (neither of them need any more of those to be written about them) and I felt it was more important to get the story, as fiction, right. There are a couple of other things, for example Anais’s dog in the story is a lapdog rather than the policedog she actually had, but that may change, depending on what kind of personality I need the dog to have later!

So…. here I was again with the same problem. I have Colette, Willy and Missy: a scandalous, melodramatic threesome (foursome, if you count Meg, but she’s not in my story, although that may change) that went on for years. In my story, Colette meets Missy and they get together for the first time. But what was the point? It didn’t seem enough. And then I remembered that one of the Claudine novels (Claudine and Annie) has a subplot about Annie’s addiction to ether, and I remembered other novels where Colette writes about going to an opium den (just for the experience) and about morphine addicts. Willy wrote articles accusing Missy of being a morphine addict — Willy and Colette had very public domestic arguments that were published as letters in the press.

I realised that I could ‘grow’ this theme. I haven’t been able to find much about fashionable drugs in the 1900-1910 period, but I did find much more about laudanum (morphine dissolved — I’m sure that’s not the technical term! — in alcohol, mixed with sugar) than I did about ether. This makes me wonder if ether was used all that much, but it’s definitely what Colette refers to (inhaling rather than drinking) so after alot of angst and wondering if I should change the drug to laudanum, I’ve decided to leave it as ether. I think — I may be wrong — that laudanum was more of a working-class drug as it was so common (must have been cheap), in which case ether is right. And I have some morphine in there too, just for variety. It’s wonderful and fascinating how freely people were able to intoxicate themselves!