23. Marthe Bibesco — The Green Parrot with Lauren Cerand

KIM: Amy, The New York Times called the novel we’re discussing today “A strange and beautiful story, with the faintly arid charm of a miniature painted on the cover of a seventeenth-century snuff box.”

AMY: That’s actually a great and (in some ways) literal description of this book — The Green Parrot by Marthe Bibesco. 

KIM: Yes. It’s also got a little bit of everything to keep a reader enthralled: forbidden love, the intrigue of war, incest, twin-mix-ups, suicide and (I never thought I’d be saying this but) an interspecies love affair.

AMY: Yeah, you heard that right, people. All right, so now all that might initially sound like a bit much, but you’ll have to trust us—it’s so artfully rendered that it absolutely works. This book is equal parts haunting and lovely, and the writing is so graceful and memorable. Really, it is a little gem.

KIM: And to add to the intrigue, as if we needed to… this book was written by an actual princess! And we’ve got a special guest with us today to help tell you all about her. We’ll introduce her in a moment. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a great show in store for you today, so grab your tiaras everyone… let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

KIM: I’m especially excited to introduce our guest today, Lauren Cerand, because we go way back. We’ve been acquainted for many years, from our early days of blogging. Lauren has since founded a thriving global communications consultancy, prompting Time Out New York to dub her one of the “cultural gatekeepers in the literary world.” She also happens to be one of the most generous people I know, sharing her knowledge and connecting people in this utterly charming, witty way that feels serendipitous, but is actually thoughtful, strategic, and wise. She’s also a person who treats living itself as an art. 

AMY: True to this, in 2019, Lauren actually took a year’s sabbatical from her career as a publicist and moved to Florence, Italy to study jewelry making. (I just love a gal who pursues and lives her dreams! That’s amazing!) Now she’s returned to New York having crafted a life that includes jewelry making (she’s studying at the Pratt Institute), writing, and working as a highly-sought after communications consultant. She also serves on the advisory committee for Film Forum and the advisory board for Turtle Point Press in New York, and is a member of the City University Club in London. 

KIM: Because Lauren, who probably lives the life closest to a princess of anyone I know, actually introduced me to Princess Marthe Bibesco and The Green Parrot, I really can’t think of a better person to be our guest for this episode. Welcome, Lauren. 

LAUREN: Thank you.

AMY: Let’s start by telling you guys a little bit about Princess Bibesco because she is fascinating! She was born Marta Lucia Lahovary in 1886 in Bucharest. She was the third child of Romanian aristocrats, and she grew up on the family estates in Romania, but she summered at the stylish French beach resort Biarritz, where much of The Green Parrot is set. As was typical of Romanian aristocracy, she learned to speak French before she learned to speak Romanian, and was she extensively, though not formally, educated in history and classic literature as well as Romanian folklore. She made her debut into society in 1900, and was secretly engaged for one year to her cousin Prince George III Valentin Bibescu . Now, he came from one of Romania’s most prestigious aristocratic families, and they married when she was only 17-years-old. She wrote on her wedding day that she felt as though, through this marriage she had, “stepped onto the European stage through the grand door.” 

KIM: And that sounds glamorous (and okay, it is really glamorous), but in the early years of her marriage, she was actually pretty bored. It kind of reminds me a bit of what we now know about Charles and Diana. George was off racing cars and chasing women and Marthe was stuck at home with his mother. She almost died giving birth to a daughter in 1903, and then, in 1905, George was sent on a diplomatic mission to Iran and that changed everything for her. She basically was completely inspired by this trip to Iran and she began using the research from her journals and everything to write her first novel, which is called The Eight Paradises. She became the toast of Paris.

LAUREN: I think The Eight Paradises is one that I saw talked about on Twitter as being out of print that people quite hoped would be brought back into print.

KIM: That would be great. Maybe this podcast will help. We can only dream! So basically, at that point, she started to be known for her literary prowess in addition to her connections.

AMY: Her career as a writer kicked off from there. She was awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française (which is one of the oldest and most prestigious French literary prizes) and around that time she met Marcel Proust, who wrote her a letter praising The Eight Paradises. He said, “You are not only a splendid writer, Princess, but a sculptor of words, a musician, a purveyor of scents, a poet.” Can you imagine getting that kind of feedback?

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: So they became really good friends.

KIM: Proust was also lifelong friends with another of Bibesco’s cousins, Prince Antoine Bibesco. Prince Antoine was married but had a rep as a ladies man. And what makes him important, I think, in our discussion is this: Marthe dedicates The Green Parrot to him. And this fact that will be especially intriguing a bit later, when we tell you more about the novel. 

AMY: Right. So the princess, Marthe, was strikingly beautiful as well as intelligent, and she held sway over a glittering, elite social sphere, which included royalty, the politically powerful, and literary luminaries throughout Europe. Her circle of friends included Jean Cocteau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vita Sackville West, and Winston Churchill, among many others. So she wrote about herself and her position, “I am the needle through which pass the filaments and the strands of our disjointed Europe to be threaded together in a necklace.” Lauren, I’m guessing you can dig the jewelry metaphor here.

LAUREN: I do really dig the jewelry metaphor, and actually, I find that reading memoirs by women who lived in Romania are always especially amazing to me because prior, obviously, to the forces that changed the 20th century, it was really one of the kind of unimaginably glamorous, decadent, luxurious cultures on the world stage in Europe. So it makes perfect sense to me that she would have experienced the kind of cosmopolitan and glittering scene that she lived in as being at the absolute center of everything that was happening, and of course, an enormous necklace would have made so much sense to her. In the end, when she had no access to any of her money because it was all in Romania which had become Communist, she was able to live the rest of her life, basically, I believe, just selling jewels that she had taken with her.

KIM: And she actually wasn’t joking at all about her importance in that quote Amy read for us! She was even supposedly asked to secretly mediate a political disagreement between France and Germany. (And that’s not the only story like that.) Although she was a bright light of society and the arts, unfortunately her marriage wasn’t a happy one. She did, however, have well-known men from all over Europe literally throwing themselves at her and she had a string of notable lovers over the years. One of them, Prince Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craön was super serious about her. He wrote her many love letters and—get this——he even gifted her rose petals which he’d had inscribed with a secret message. Marthe pressed the flowers, and they remained in her possession throughout her life. 

AMY: Okay, I’m swooning over that one. Well done to him. We’ll link to an article about how the petals were discovered among her papers, actually, and the process, in 2016, by which conservators at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center were able to unfurl them to read the inscriptions. I love that stuff, and I love that they still exist.

KIM: It is really fascinating, but it’s also just sooo romantic too! Lauren, do you have any favorite anecdotes about the Princess you want to share?

LAUREN: I tried to track down a biography of her before the show, but it’s long out of print. My favorite thing about it was the only thing I was able to get access to, which were the reviews of it, which were “Why would anyone want to read about this much glamor?” When I visualize her, I think a lot about this amazing exhibition of dresses that I missed in Paris, but I saw in New York at the FIT museum maybe five or 10 years ago. It was the dresses that belonged to the Countess Greffulhe, who was a huge inspiration for Proust. And one of the dresses was the dress she was wearing at a garden party the day that she met him, and it’s so incredibly fragile that it was laid on the floor on a mirror, and you were only allowed to look at the reflection of it. So I feel like Marthe has this kind of fascination for me as well. Like, I want to know everything about her life, I want to understand everything about her life, which is actually quite sad. Even in reading up for this episode, I learned that many of the things that happen in the book that are unspeakably tragic, hence the appearance of the green parrot, actually were directly from her life. It’s quite autobiographical. And obviously, the political time that she lived through is unimaginable to us. I can imagine how glittering it was and also something of what it must have felt like to have the glass shatter.

KIM: So to get into a little more about the specifics of the tragedy that she experienced in life that also plays into The Green Parrot, in 1892 (when she was around 6 years old) her brother, the only son and heir to the family fortune, died of typhoid fever. An elder sister died of cholera in 1911, and her younger sister Marguerite killed herself a few years later. Marthe's mother and favorite cousin also took their own lives.  

AMY: During World War I, she served as a nurse in Bucharest, which is pretty interesting, and in 1948, the Communist government confiscated all of the Bibesco property in Romania. So she was exiled. She spent the remainder of her life in Paris and England, and sadly, her daughter and son-in-law didn’t make it out of Romania and were placed in detention for almost nine years. 

LAUREN: Talking about this sort of idea of finding your identity in exile reminds me of another book that I really love: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with anything about his life. He essentially was sort of living out of a suitcase, and everything in Russia is lost to him, and he’s part of this large colony of Russians in Paris. There’s this really beautiful section about being separated from everything that you know, including all of your material possessions, that I think about all the time. And it’s: She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of travelling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, the windy heath, the misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.

KIM: That’s a really interesting quote, and it’s perfectly suited to this conversation about Bibesco.

AMY: So The Green Parrot was published in France in 1924, and translated into English about five years later by Malcolm Cowley.

KIM: Right. And this seems like a great place to begin our discussion of this terrific little novel. Lauren, do you remember how you were introduced to it and what your initial response was?

LAUREN: I actually came about this book in a very funny way. I was looking on this really great web site one night of a vintage and used bookstore in New York called High Valley Books that I follow on Instagram. There was something interesting, and I texted it to my friend, Tynan [Kogane], who’s an editor at New Directions, and we started having this exchange where we were looking through the inventory of the bookstore while we were also talking about the things that we like. It was actually the first time since the entire global pandemic that I had had the experience of really feeling like I was in a bookstore with a person, talking to them. And then I happened to see this copy of The Green Parrot, so I ordered it immediately. A few days later it showed up. It was incredibly beautiful. It’s leather-bound with a marble cover, and it’s got these incredible gold, gilded lilies on the spine. It’s from 1924, from an edition of, I believe it’s 500. It was published in Paris. But it’s in French, which I can read for, you know, menus and the newspaper, and, like, a text message, but I can’t really appreciate the beauty of a novel. So I was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I got so caught up in kind of the romance of that moment.” And then, I agreed to be on the board of advisers of a press in New York called Turtle Point Press. They were asking me about how to market their French back list. I said, “Oh, well, why don’t you send me the books and I’ll tell you how to hook up with all of these kind of French governmental organizations that are involved with promoting French culture that I worked with in New York.” Three or four days later, this big box showed up at my door — actually someone delivered it. And The Green Parrot was in there because they published it. I thought, “Oh, I’m really meant to have this book in my life.” So yeah, I read it and I was just completely, completely blown away. There are other books that I like that deal with a similar period. There’s The Balkan Trilogy [by Olivia Manning]. Eleanor Piryani wrote an incredible, incredible memoir called More Was Lost… this period, actually, when you could still meet a man on a boat who happens to live in a castle. She moves there with him, but, like, right before the Iron Curtain falls. I think the original version that I read was on Turtle Point Press, actually, but it was reissued by the New York Review of Books Classics. I feel that there’s kind of a shelf of books that The Green Parrot belongs on, but at the same time, it’s like absolutely nothing else I’ve ever read in my life. Like, I immediately knew that I was in the hands of someone who was just in full command of their powers, and that was the first page, you know? That was the first line. What was surprising to me was the idea that someone had been in such intimate conversation with people that we consider absolute immortals at this point, and had just kind of been swept away from history. And I found that really interesting. I really find it remarkable about women writers, because you know, history has a funny way of doing that. But I was really amazed to discover that something so rich and so vivid could have that beautiful quality of a book that is just waiting to be discovered by you, the reader, on an ordinary day.

AMY: The novel is written in first person, and begins with our young narrator describing how life in her family revolves around grieving over her dead brother, Sasha. The family lives this beautiful and seemingly lush existence in the south of France and yet there is this oppressive pall that hangs over the household, and it robs our young narrator of joy. Lauren, I had the same reaction to the first page of the book. Seldom do I have to stop and re-read twice or three times an opening paragraph, and I did it with this one, like rubbing my hands together salivating basically. So I’m going to read it for everybody:

“There are Russians of Nice, just as there are wines of Bordeaux and violets of Parma. For our part, we belonged to a closely related species, the Russians of Biarritz; we were a Muscovite family that had settled in the Gulf of Gascony. But above all, we were a family in mourning; this was our originality, the first of our titles of distinction. More than our wealth, more than the great number of children and servants, more even than the mansion built by my father between a vast garden and a private beach, our sorrow gave us a sort of superiority over the other foreign families and, as it were, a personal luster. For mourning is always brilliant; it embellishes those who wear it, and sets them forth by covering them with darkness, as night does with stars.” 

KIM: That is gorgeous. I got the chills again hearing you read it aloud. It really gives you a feel for the tone and style of the book, and it’s so gripping, just from those first few lines. Beautiful.

LAUREN: And also a sense of just how incredibly cosmopolitan this family is, you know, that there are these kind of references of this particular expat community. They are intimately familiar with the best wines available. They are totally familiar with violets of Parma, which are renowned for lasting less than a day, and there’s this incredible, incredible sense that she’s sort of speaking to you from a vanishing world that somehow exists just out of reach. It’s smoldering away, but she has the absolute full vision of everything.

KIM: It’s really a gorgeous meditation on this longing and loneliness and literal and figurative exile, like you mentioned. On the one hand, there’s these attempted and successful suicides that happen in the book, and at the same time there’s this idea of living in an emotionally closed-off way that’s also like death. Did it remind either of you at all of The Virgin Suicides [Jeffrey Eugenides] in that way? 

LAUREN: I’ve never seen it or read it.

AMY: I don’t remember enough about The Virgin Suicides to make a comparison there, but how rife is this book for a Sofia Coppola adaptation? If she were to get her hands on this, I think that would be wonderful.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I think it has a very cinematic quality to it. And I think, also, there’s something about a kind of texture and the tapestry of sadness in the family that is really really deep, and it has different kinds of cultural connotations and, you know, she talks in the book about how they shift from being Greek Orthodox to Roman Catholic, and there’s just all of these kind of rituals around sadness. The first pages are really devoted to really a catalogue listing of her miseries, right down to the kittens that are dying on the ledge in the cesspool and she’s forbidden to rescue them. And so I think that there was this real kind of sense that it's a kind of weight and a weather that has settled over this family. There are definitely some books that I can think of that have that quality. I think that a really good story is able to kind of take you out of yourself and to remind you that we all have those periods that are like Picasso’s Blue Period where you just remember a time in your life and you just think, “I just couldn’t imagine anything else but the kind of sadness that was sort of living in my house with me.”

AMY: So, Kim, you obviously drew that comparison though. Were you thinking of the movie or the book? 

KIM: Uh, both, but I think just the sadness that sort of reverberates throughout the family. In The Virgin Suicides, in the book, the narrator is a neighbor, and he’s trying to understand where that’s coming from. The context and everything is completely different, but just that similar idea of the deep loneliness of a family and then the resulting suicides I thought was interesting.  

AMY: So, Lauren, we asked you if you would like to read one of your favorite passages from the novel ahead of this podcast, and I’m curious to know what you’re going to select!

LAUREN: Well, I think what I would like, if it’s not too much of a kind of giveaway to introduce people to the appearance of the parrot. So this is from a chapter, Chapter 3 called “The Prodigious Birth of Love.” Also, I currently have a muff that I really love that I got as a Christmas gift, and so this story begins with a girl walking wearing her muff:

Children no less than adults prefer to believe, need to believe, that they are the objects of an exclusive preference. This illusion, which is indispensable to their happiness, is assured to them at first by their nurse and later by their mother. But never for a moment was I allowed to think that I occupied the first place in my mother’s heart: it was forever taken by another. Never did I enjoy a privileged position with any one whatsoever,and no mark of preference had ever been given me until the day when, falling from the skies, the green parrot lighted on my muff. Yes, this miracle happened! And nothing ever happened in our family; we were the four little girls in mourning, to whom every distraction was forbidden as a matter of principle; and our life, like that of the Jews, had been the memory of a great happiness in the past. I could not even assure myself that Sasha’s death, the invented misfortune that served to nourish my young emotions, had touched me directly. But now, in this life deprived of affection, empty of adventure, entirely concentrated on an event anterior to my own past, something had suddenly appeared; a prodigy had taken place; I had seen the miraculous rift in the skies through which the unpredictable future invades the present and occupies it wholly.

KIM: Beautiful.

AMY: And I think it’s interesting, Lauren, that you referenced Nabokov earlier in our talk, because this whole portion of the book where she becomes obsessed, basically, with the green parrot, I was reminded of Nabokov’s Lolita. Just the way she talks about her desire for this bird (which doesn’t yet come through in the passage you just read, but you start to see it) and it’s a desire which, I dare say borders on sexual. Am I right? Kim? 

KIM: How about I read a passage from the book? 

AMY: Okay. [laughing]

LAUREN: We can only speak to the book right now. [laughing].

KIM: Exactly.

Love at first sight, the coupe de foudre …. Neither the wildest nor the wisest of the remarks I was later to hear on this burning question were destined to surprise me in the least. I was both credulous and forewarned. I knew all about passion, though my marriage was completely unromantic, and though I had the reputation of never falling in love. I had only to think of the green parrot to understand the truth of the improbable words that the chronicler of Verona assigns to Juliet a few moments after the meeting with Romeo. “Prodigious birth of love!” she exclaims after telling her nurse: 

Go, ask his name — if he be married, 

My grave is like to be my wedding bed. 

Why were the mysteries of passion revealed to me prematurely, with the help of a green parrot? I cannot say. It was not until long afterwards that I discovered a partial explanation for this overpowering emotion. 

AMY: Basically, she finds this green parrot as a child and longs for it, and an old family doctor tells her that she has fallen in love with this bird because of the boredom and lack of love from her parents (who were obsessed with her dead older brother). And so right now I think it’s a good time to point out that the theories of Sigmund Freud were really coming into vogue when this book was published and maybe that explains a lot where this novel is concerned. Lauren, what do you think her obsession with the green parrot is really all about?

LAUREN: I mean I think the green parrot is the absolute symbol of just this kind of wave of sensuality that has absolutely no other way of expressing itself in her life. Like, she’s not even allowed kind of simple, basic sensual pleasure that we sort of associate with the sun shining on us or taking a bite of a peach. All of these things are denied to her and she sort of has the sense of being no one’s favorite and so this idea of being chosen by this kind of larger-than-life animating force that has this just incredible force of will inside of it, I think is very powerful. I went falconing once and when I was holding the hawk on my hands I actually understood completely and wholly for the first time in my life that animals are completely different from us. That we anthropomorphize them, that we make up stories about them, that we have relationships with them, but this hawk and I, we wanted nothing of the same thing. So I think that she’s sort of projecting her desire to be free from what she sees as the constraints of civility onto this bird. But I would like to better express myself with a short passage from the next page!

AMY: Okay!

LAUREN: My eye had kept the delightful impression of the green parrot resting like a bouquet of young leaves on my dark muff, and afterwards I frequently endeavored to create this harmony about me. Of all the paintings I had ever seen, the one that delighted me most was the Annunciation of Lippo Memmi and Simone Martini, which hangs in the Uffizi galleries in Florence. When I came upon this picture, I felt almost the same shock as on seeing my bird for the first time. I could not believe my eyes; instinctively I closed them to protect myself from a joy that was too keen. The gleaming angel who kneeled like a sleeping whirlwind at the feet of the terrified Virgin — this angel whose wings are as sharp as knives, whose face bears a look of malice, and whose eyes slant upwards under the crest of his diadem — resembled my lovely parrot like a brother.

That’s a painting that I know, so I find it very meaningful. 

AMY: I also just want to say, Kim, how cool is it that we have a guest on that says, “I went falconing once.”

KIM: I’m not surprised at all. It’s perfect.

LAUREN: I was in this really beautiful part of Vermont called The Northeast Kingdom with my best friend, and we were out in the woods and there were like moose everywhere and I grew up around deer in Maryland and I’m really used to deer, but everyone just sort of explained that if a moose saw you it was kind of too late, and I became really really terrified, and I couldn’t really enjoy myself and walk around. I was like, “We’re going to go falconing so we can have a new relationship with animals.” I think I was way more obsessed with it than he was, which is a direct throughline to this conversation right now, but I remember very clearly looking into the bird’s eyes and just thinking, “We are not the same.” All of the Disneyfication of my childhood was just swept away, so yeah, I do understand that idea of a sort of transformative enlightenment that’s received by a surprise arrival.

AMY: So yes, you understand our narrator’s captivity with this bird. Her fascination with the parrot just ties into everything about this book that feels very mystical. As a child, the narrator has these visions of her dead brother while staring into cloud formations that are like waking dreams. Then there’s an incident with a medium who predicts her future, there’s also a religious commune that the narrator visits, and talk of time travel and a pair of fabled Persian lovers. And then there’s also this theme of physical doubles. Lauren, would you care to elaborate on that?

LAUREN: Well, I think that part of what is so fascinating (and in some ways intoxicating) about this book is the search for understanding that the narrator undergoes. She kind of travels throughout the book looking for that in all of these different things. The parrot is a kind of grief and an overwhelming kind of introduction to her life, and then her relationships become a way to connect with other people. It’s a kind of very interesting, sort of almost like a Russian nesting doll kind of aspect to many of the relationships where there are twos, there are threes… there are people that seem to have the physical characteristics that represent the direct opposite of the person that’s being addressed, and it’s like so stark that you can’t believe it. It’s almost an allegory. So I found it very interesting when I was reading the book and re-reading it I just kept thinking “This is so incredibly surreal.” But I think it also lends it the quality of a fable because you start to see … the characters are kind of reduced sometimes to a description of the way that they are: I am the opposite of you, or I am the other half of you, or I’m a mythical figure and you’re my cosmic counterpart, and so it’s definitely an idea of doubling, but I also see it as an idea of duality that echoes back to the idea of the parrot being this sort of missing central part of her life, you know, that has suddenly come to reclaim his place.

AMY: And so we have this younger sister, Marie, who is basically a doppelganger for the narrator. She’s the narrator’s “mini me” and she is strikingly beautiful like the narrator. And because I know that Bibesco was described as gorgeous in her life, her commentary that she gives on Marie’s beauty and her own beauty really stuck out to me in the book. That it’s a sort of curse that alienates you from everyone after a certain point. I could totally imagine Bibesco feeling this way in her life. And so I’m just going to read that passage:

The first effect of beauty is the only one that is not mixed with bitterness; It puts men in unison and makes them understand one another. Later, they begin to quarrel over the ownership of this treasure, which at first was held in common. The charm is broken immediately; what had caused agreement becomes a reason for dispute; what had pleased is now a source for unhappiness; and in this second phase, which follows all too soon after the first, Marie would have to pay dearly for the joy she was thought to give. When this time comes, the girl with “looks” should, if she loves peace, hasten to disappear from the eyes of the world. The same quality that made her loved will cause her to be hated…” 

And this commentary on beauty goes on for several more pages. I just totally could picture Marthe feeling this way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean, to return to your jewelry metaphor, I do think that most, if not all, of the characters in the book are a facet of her consciousness that she wants to interrogate in a way that allows her to really kind of analyze the characteristics of this part of herself.

KIM: One thing I wanted to circle back to was the dedication of the novel to her cousin Antoine. I can’t help but wonder about her dedicating it to a male relative and he was a known womanizer, as we said, with whom she clearly had a close relationship. As I said, I couldn’t find anything more about it. It is a bit mysterious. It reminds me of the nesting dolls you were mentioning, Lauren. And I was also thinking back when you were speaking earlier about the fable-like quality… Amy mentioned in the beginning, I think we were talking a little bit about Marthe and the stuff that she studied. She also, I think, had a governess that taught her the Romanian folk tales, so she was immersed in that in addition to all of the other Francophile-type things. 

LAUREN: Yeah, and I mean, she would have spoken (for someone in her social level and the time that she lived in) she would have spoken at least five languages. Five or six. And certainly everyone who would have come into her orbit would have shared something of their own life, and so I can see how some of the parts of the story that feel like a bit of a pastiche, you know, for someone who probably never received any formal education, it would have been encyclopedic in a way.

KIM: There’s such a mysterious, lovely quality to her writing that is really haunting. Lauren, is there anything else you wanted to say about The Green Parrot?

Lauren: Well, I find it really interesting that this book continues to bring intriguing new people and dimensions into my life. When I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to have this conversation and I invited people to share their thoughts, I discovered another book with a green parrot as a very important plot device. It’s A Simple Heart by Flaubert, and it’s a completely different story. It’s about a woman who’s a maid in a house and it’s a very similar psychological portrait. I actually think that these two works are read really gorgeously in conversation. Flaubert has this kind of quality of telling the story of overlooked lives, and it’s just really, really incredible, and it has a very kind of similar arc. It’s about a woman who feels quite unloved, has no family, no one to look after her. She begins to admire someone’s pet parrot, so much so that they give it to her when they leave town. She nurtures it, and it dies, and the rest of her life is about her kind of keeping the parrot in an altar and then it talks about the arc of her life, but no detail is overlooked. I found it just incredibly, incredibly touching and incredibly charming. There are so many points in the book where the people in the book are determined to overlook this woman, and yet the author just keeps the focus so totally on this love story between her and her parrot, and I think that they’re both unhappy, to quote another great writer, in their own way. I started to think, “Should I read all the books with parrots in them?” And then I was like, I think two French books from more or less the same time period is enough! But I started thinking a lot about women's lives and regardless of your socio-economic class, what kind of feelings you would have been allowed to feel. Some of the kind of huge passions of French novels of the 19th century I think have a lot to do with this fact that like sensuality cannot be legislated. It was Adam Moody on Twitter who was talking about A Simple Heart, and I’m really glad that I read it. It was one of those nice connections that you have online where you think, “Oh, I remember why I’m here!” So I promised that I would give him a shout-out.

AMY: Now you’re raising memories for me of another novel where a caged bird factors in prominently, and I cannot figure it out. I don’t know if it’s The Awakening [by Kate Chopin] ... But there’s some book like that… Birds are suddenly becoming a theme.

KIM: Yeah, Michael Chabon I thought had… I don’t know if his was a green parrot but I think it’s a novella or a short story [The Final Solution]. I’ll have to look now that we’re talking about this.

AMY: Who knew parrots could stir up so much passion in people? I guess parrot owners.

KIM: Yeah. And it makes me want to read more of her books, and I don’t know… I don't know how many of them are actually translated, or Lauren, if you’ve read any of them. She wrote the popular romances under a pseudonym, Lucile Décaux. Do you know anything about other translated works by her, or have you read any other works by her in French? 

LAUREN: No, there’s very little in print. I mean, The Green Parrot is considered her towering achievement, for sure.

AMY: I just want to point out that The Green Parrot was a really quick read, but it’s also one that I can see myself going back to for another look, and I don’t typically re-read novels that I’ve read. I just move on to the next one, but this is one that has so much packed into a little tidy package. The little “snuff box” that we mention in the introduction. There’s so much involved that I think on a second or third reading I would just get more and more out of it, and it’s so gorgeously written.

LAUREN: Oh, absolutely. The level of detail alone. Like if you were looking for inspiration on how to set a scene or even a table, I mean, you can just picture these rooms, you know and the door and then the door and then the door and door and doors kind of going on forever.

AMY: And the fact that she died almost penniless is really sad given that her life was so sparkling. The ending just feels like something out of a novel in a strange way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I feel that that kind of casualty of the world changing was something that was lived so closely. I studied Russian in college and actually, working as a dance publicist in my 20s, I remember reading a lot and understanding a lot about the kind of exiles in Paris from various countries across Europe, you know, that just were not able to live where they were from anymore. So I think we’ve lost a lot of stories that way, where someone just doesn’t necessarily live happily ever after, although I wouldn’t say anything about her life, you know... I feel like the thing about Marthe is that she… she always gets the last word.

KIM: Lauren, it was an absolute delight to have you. You were perfect, perfect to talk about The Green Parrot with us! I am just thrilled.

LAUREN: Thank you, it’s so great to connect. It’s great to be here and obviously, I’ve been living my life … I started the lockdown living in Florence and then I came back to New York in the middle of it and sort of restarted my life here, and the entire time, whenever I’m feeling uncertain about anything I just repeat that epitaph from Howard’s End, “Only connect.” So I have done it for today!

KIM: Thank you so much, Lauren. Thanks again. So be sure to find a copy of The Green Parrot. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit Lostladiesoflit.com for further reading materials. 

AMY: If you liked what you’ve heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast…

KIM: And also check out our mini episode next week because we’re going to be talking about The Gilded Age. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes