On Sunday July 24th, as part of Windrush Estate Winery’s Summer Chateau series, I had the pleasure of introducing Eva Stachniak and her new novel, The School or Mirrors, to my friends and acquaintances in Caledon and the GTA. A nice gathering of people around beautifully made, award-winning wine, in addition to the incredible view and setting, lent itself magnificently to a fantastic event that explored  many aspects of culture and politics from a book set in 18th Century France, but so relevant to the events currently shaping our world. 

I’ve known Eva for about a decade, having first met her at a talk to promote her best-selling novel Empress of the Night, one of two books she has written about Catherine the Great after extensive research. We bonded over shared Polish heritage and an interest in writing female-driven historical fiction set in Russia and Eastern Europe. The School of Mirrors, however, is Stachniak’s first real departure from that geographical location, apart from describing the character of Queen Maria Leszczynska, the consort of Louis XV and mother of his ten legitimate children (legitimate being the key word in this story). 

During the course of the book, and in history itself, the King of France also impersonates a Polish count, supposedly a second cousin of his wife’s, to satisfy his desire for the young, impoverished girls being provided for his sexual satisfaction by his longtime mistress, Madame de Pompadour, complicit with many of the Palace staff and villagers of Versailles in what we would call today sex trafficking. 

Sold by parents from poor families and told they are being trained for a life as a lady’s maid, these girls are sequestered away in Deer Park (Parc-aux-Cerfs) in an unremarkable middle-class home and trained. However, once these girls have served their purpose, however long or short that may be, they take their education and the inevitable consequences of their affair and are, if they are lucky, married off. 

This is where Stachniak’s book really came alive, and took a surprising turn for the author. She became absorbed in the few surviving historical accounts of these often nameless girls. “Very quickly that voice continued,” she says. “You know from that first scene that there’s going to be a child- I need a midwife. And that’s where the novel exploded and opened a new world.” 

Without giving too much of this incredibly well-researched and written book away, the second half of the novel goes in a very different and compelling direction surrounding Angelique du Coudray, or “The King’s Midwife”, who convinced Louis XV, himself an avid follower of medical advancements who had always wished to be a doctor himself, to fund du Courdray with a stipend of 8000 livres annually to educate women across France in the art of midwifery. This was in an effort to deal with a population problem that was a result of imperial wars and epidemics, and to staunch the loss of both women and children to death and disfigurement during childbirth. 

The program du Coudray designed for peasant women from provinces was extremely progressive and clever, and ensured there would always be a competent and well-educated midwife available in every French village and town (not just someone who may or may not be qualified due to luck and experience, or that happened to be on hand). She drew up a three-month course of practical hands-on knowledge which she oversaw personally, where du Coudray went to each town and instructed women, leaving them with an illustrated manual, a certificate, and two machines she designed herself on which to practice birthing. “Those machines,” asserts Stachniak, as she shows the audience a slide of the one remaining example from the Flaubert Museum in Rouen, “saved a lot of lives.”

In big cities, like Paris, an apprentice midwife would work with her tutor for three years, learning the art of midwifery,  before performing an examination in front of sixty people. Part of her training included watching  autopsies of pregnancies and births gone wrong in order to learn best from other’s mistakes. Once they became  licensed midwives, these women were charged with care before, during, and after birth, and arranged adoptions if necessary. “These women,” comments Stachniak, “carried a lot of secrets with them.”

Secrets certainly inform the second half of the novel, which heavily involves midwifery interlaced with the politics and intrigue of revolutionary Paris. “The French Revolution was made by young lawyers,” Stachniak says as she discusses some of her main characters revolving around Georges Danton and his continually pregnant wife, “and Marie-Louise and her husband became my guides through the Revolution”, as the former navigates both the politics of men while attending the births of their wives and children simultaneously. 

This is where Stachniak brilliantly interweaves the political and the practical, the historical and the current. The parallels between the events of France in the tumultuous years around 1789 and what I would argue are the equally unstable events rocking our modern world at this very moment practically rise off the page, in equal measure to the emotions towards the characters.

Epidemics, violent civil conflicts, women’s reproductive rights and agency, imperial wars- it’s all then and there but also here and now. As Stachniak herself remarks, “My primary goal is that my topics have to be very relevant to me as a writer with current events. I was born in Poland, where, I think, in Europe, history is very important, perhaps more so than here. I tend to write about the history of women…and [in The School of Mirrors] we have two experiences of women: one as an object, and one as a professional. That’s what I like to think about, the parallels and the differences. To make a connection, to make a connection which I grew up with about a connection between the past and the present. And how that experience of history was different from the men. That’s my goal as a writer- to bring those everyday things to life.”

“It’s an interesting life,” commented Stachniak during her talk, “being a writer. You get to have many lives. I have been the Empress of Russia, I have been, my clumsy self, the brilliant dancer Bronislawa Nijinska, I have been a midwife, I have been the King of France. As a writer, I have to live through it. It’s like meditation. You have to write about the touch, you have to write about the smells, about the taste. I spend a lot of time preparing for these scenes and becoming the characters in that book…I do go through the emotions, about what it would be like to be [one of these women],” Stachniak says in response to an audience question. “But it becomes a blessing, going through the tragedies to get to the triumphs.”

And triumph it was, both the novel and the event at Windrush. With a beautiful setting, delicious wine, and Revolutionary France to discuss (as well as current events), this has to have been the best book event I have been able to enjoy in some time. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend picking up a copy of The School of Mirrors, and Stachniak’s other published works. A glass of wine or two of Windrush’s internationally award-winning pino grigio would pair well with that book.

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