I don't want to make comparisons to today in America, but it was very divisive and it went on for 10, 11 years, didn't it?

It did.

It went on for 12 years.

I mean, you know, the thing that always reminds...

It's the same in Britain, by the way, is the sort of the polarising nature of it.

It so echoes with us now, which is you're on one side or the other and there was no room for doubt.

So it was all so random and strange.

As I'm reading it, and I'm reading about this wonderful time in Paris where there's peace and prosperity, and there's this underlining of anti-Semitism, as a reader, I couldn't help But think of the impending doom that was coming and that these people were living their lives in such a, you know, free spirited way, not knowing that World War One was right around the corner and World War Two was right around the corner.

Why don't you tell everybody where your interest came in this topic and then, you know, what you found?

Okay, sure.

I came at this from several angles, really.

One was in another book, which is where I seem to find lots of my ideas, which was a mention in Edmund Duval's The Hair with Amber Eyes, where he talked about...

Charles de Frussy, the great art critic of 19th century Paris, who collected these tiny Japanese sculptures, the Netsuke.

And I was rather smitten by his mistress, who was called Louise Cayenne d'Anvers.

And he mentioned that he persuaded her to get Renoir to paint portraits of her three daughters.

Speak a little bit about that and how that emotion comes across so clearly.

I asked Katherine Ostler about Elizabeth's complex situation.

As we know by now, she was sort of married, but at that point it was very unclear what a marriage actually was.

She unfortunately had married Augustus Hervey nine years before the 1753 Marriage Act, and before that it was very unclear what counted as a legal marriage.

What this act did was try and codify legal marriage, because this wasn't just her, it was quite a common problem.

Interestingly, this law still operates here and in America.

The majority of it has stayed the same since 1753.

[laughs]

So she sails to Saint Petersburg in this boat, which has an orchestra and a menagerie of animals, and she decides she will befriend Catherine the Great and Potemkin, which she does, and she's famous and notorious.

I mean, what happened at the time, you know, for all those families?

Yeah, so I suppose the most impactful one was the, weirdly, was the assassination of the Tsar in St. Petersburg in 1881 when the People's Will Party killed the Tsar Alexander.

And amongst the people who killed him, there was a small Jewish element involved.

and his successor blamed the Jews, and the pogroms start in Russia, and there were four million Jews at that point living in Russia, and it's estimated that a third of them left, and many of them came to Paris, and they arrived in the Marais.

So anti-Semitism was stoked by envy of the rich, which is the bankers buying the chateaus, and then suspicion of the immigrants who were coming who might take our jobs, and so There's this sort of terrible context where wherever you look and whatever the problems are, the Jews are scapegoated during that period and then Dreyfus kicks off and then everybody has to put their cards on the table and unfortunately many of them put their cards on the wrong table.

So the girls, Irene, the oldest sister, has had an arranged marriage, just like her mother, to a man called Moise de Camondo, who is a great art collector, like her parents.

He's a lot older than her.

Catherine, two of the Karen d'Anvers will survive, Alice and Irene, for different reasons.