Character focus: Josette Barbier

Painting: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, "Reverie sur le seuil"

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting characters from my second Alpine Dawn novel, The Invisible Path. Don't forget to sign up to my mailing list for advance notice of publication!

Two kinds of characters inhabit my novels: those who were once real historical figures, and those who are entirely the products of my imagination. I love both kinds for different reasons, but I can have the most fun with characters who are entirely mine. Josette is of that class.

I've been complimented before on the strength of my female characters, but I don't really make a distinction; I try to create strong characters, and gender is incidental. Never has that been more true than of Josette Barbier. She is one of the main characters of The Invisible Path, and her character arc is absolutely critical to the future of the entire series.

The portrait above is from an 1893 painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It's the closest image I can find to her likeness, although it isn't quite right; I see Josette wearing an old-fashioned frock coat with missing buttons, face smeared with red brick dust, and a percussion pistol concealed under layers of ragged clothing. Her eyes are savage. Maybe there's blood on her sleeve.

Who is Josette? She's at once fragile and dangerous — a little bird, a starving creature from the slums of Paris, but she has known more heartbreak and suffering in her nineteen years than many experience in their entire lives. Although from a wealthy middle-class background, her family disintegrated years before the events of the story. Her father, Armand Barbier, had been a successful lecturer at the Hôtel-Dieu, but gradually surrendered to an obsession regarding a mythical peak lost in the wilderness of the Alps, and the legend surrounding it: the Pégremont.

After the family fell apart, Josette's mother died in poverty, leaving the child to fend for herself at the age of fourteen.

She has lived alone on the streets ever since. She has suffered rape, starvation, misery, and has been forced to steal and kill in order to survive. Josette is tough, but she doesn't always look it. In the revolutionary year 1848, Josette joins the fight for bread or death against General Cavaignac's armies.

So what is her role in the story?

When she was a child, her father was tutor to a young English medical student named Albert Smith. Smith and Josette became friends, but Smith left Paris years before Josette and her mother began their life on the streets. Smith returns to Paris in 1848 to find his old tutor, seeking answers to questions about the Pégremont legend.

The Barricade Saint-Martin, where Smith and Josette fight for their lives in The Invisible Path

He is caught up in the revolutionary war sweeping the city and plucked from death by the more streetwise Josette — a woman he hardly recognises from the bright child he once knew. Reluctantly (for she did not part from her father on good terms) she helps Smith seek an audience with the old man. They find him living in reduced circumstances; his obsession has driven him to poverty, just as it did the rest of his family.

Disastrous events follow (spoilers, so I won't give the plot away just yet!) and Smith finds his destiny intertwined with Josette's. They leave the wreck of Paris together and travel to Zermatt, seeking the answers to questions posed by Barbier. Although the trail went cold decades ago, Smith thinks he can be the one to solve the mystery of the Pégremont. His motivations — and the grand quest which consumes the thoughts of several of my characters — will be the subject of a future article.

Josette is permanently damaged by the events of Paris. Smith has a promise to keep, but he is too blinded by the thrill of the adventure to recognise what is happening to his travelling companion — and she has been very silent over the past few weeks. When the dam bursts, it bursts with violence.

Section I of the book concerns Albert Smith's first attempt to follow the invisible path, but Section II is all about Josette and how she pushes against the forces that seek to govern her future. Despite all her efforts to avoid it, she gradually becomes just as committed to the quest for the Pégremont as Albert Smith — although she has absolutely no intention of performing the role he has in mind for her. And she is haunted by the obsession that destroyed her family when she was a child and ruined all the happiness she once knew.

Josette is one of my favourite characters in this project, and she continues to be unpredictable and difficult to work with — which is usually a good sign!

How Zermatt would have looked when Smith and Josette visited in 1848

Alpine Dawn II — a teaser

As many of you know, I am currently writing the much-delayed second volume to my Alpine Dawn series. The first volume, The Atholl Expedition, is currently available on Kindle and in paperback. I hope to release the second, The Invisible Path, this year.

Here's a portion of a scene in which Josette Barbier sees the mountains of the Alps for the first time, and meets a significant character. As always, this is uncorrected rough draft material.

***

1848 — JUNE

Josette wandered alone.

Smith had not seen her leave the inn. He was busy with his work, and since they had left the smoking wreck of Paris he had spoken of little but his quest.

La Pégremont. Her heart broke a little more each time she heard him utter that name. She did not even know precisely what it was, but she knew what it meant to her — the destruction of a once-happy family, the abandonment of her mother to a life of shame and poverty; finally the death of her father and the city she had loved above all else.

Her life had been filled with happiness before the quest had consumed her father's mind, leaving room for nothing more.

Now Albert, her childhood friend and the last untainted memory from the time before all had failed and wilted, could think of nothing but the quest which had ruined every moment of her life.

Tormented, she trod the crooked alleys of Zermatt, giving no thought to her direction of travel. She passed beneath the eaves of the church and the hummocky earth of the burial ground. To her surprise, the charnel house had no door. Morbid curiosity got the better of her and she peered into the timber structure to see a raven pecking at a skull.

She shivered and drew her ragged dress more tightly around her shoulders. She had heard of the savage practices of these remote valleys.

Within a few minutes of walking she had left the village. She was astonished that it could be so small, but then she had never before left Paris. They had passed through many villages on the long stagecoach journey across France and through Geneva, but none appeared to merge into the wilderness as abruptly as this one. After the last ramshackle hay loft, the road plunged directly into an ocean of rippling grassland, painted iridescent shades of green and magenta by the brisk sun and a steady wind from the valley head. Her gaze followed a wave in the long grass as it sped away from her with a sound like dry grain falling through her fingers. The ripple passed through a cloud shadow, parted at a gigantic boulder, and finally died a little way up the slope where the first stands of trees stood guarding the mountain ramparts above.

She had felt absent on the journey from Paris: a ghost, her mind imprisoned by the carefree betrayal of her genial travelling companion; blind to her surroundings as visions of fire, death, and the annihilation of the world she knew occupied all of her senses.

Now her senses were open. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Outside the stale atmosphere of the village, she breathed the purest air she had ever tasted. It was ... cold, yet also warm. She smelled what she imagined to be the scent of distant snow, and flowers, and ripe grass, and animals free to roam and to live — not confined in stinking cellar pens that smelt of death.

She opened her eyes, and allowed that lowest fringe of forest to capture her gaze and sweep upward. Trees, trees by the million, stretched in an unbroken swathe from the edge of the grassland to a point higher in the sky that she would have believed possible. The textures delighted her as much as the colours. The world she knew was made of hard lines and dull shades, and mud, everywhere mud; but here was a rich, random, organic tapestry like nothing she had ever seen.

Only after her eyes had drank in every detail of that wild forest did she dare raise her head and look higher still.

And she beheld the ice world.

A dome of white dominated the valley. It was the biggest thing she had ever seen. Fractured into crystalline shapes, with a smoothed-over brow that reflected a delicate blue, it seemed as distant as Heaven. When she squinted at it, the light was so powerful that it seared her eyes. A great tendril of snow reached down from that elevated plateau, tumbling in chaotic shapes down the valley a few miles to the south. It looked rather like a slumbering dragon; dark lines or ridges followed the curves of its spine, and a torrent sprang from a cavern where its mouth would be. If she listened carefully she could hear cracks, bangs and echoes carrying on the wind.

She wondered if that was what her father had called a "glacier". It frightened her a little; she wondered when the beast would awaken and bring ruin to the people who lived in the valley below.

So intent had Josette been in her study of the mountain that she failed to notice the approach of a stranger until his shadow fell upon her. She gasped and shrank back, suddenly wary.

'Do not be frightened, miss!'

The man's voice was low, rich, with a curious nasal accent. She understood his French, but it was not Parisian.

She looked up. At first she saw only the silhouette of a powerful man, all wide-brimmed hat and square shoulders; but then her eyes adjusted to the harsh lighting and she found herself able to discern a few details.

He was of medium height — not more than a few inches taller than she was herself — and wore a much-darned shirt of chequered fabric, loose at the collar. He carried a jacket over his left shoulder and supported himself with a long pole. She noted a hatchet wedged in his belt, and beneath his hat the skin of his face was deeply lined and tanned the colour of old leather. An enormous black beard completed the picture, but it was his eyes that captured her attention: uncommonly large, mobile, and imbued with an intelligence she had not expected.

'I am sorry, Monsieur,' she replied instinctively, stepping out of his way, averting her eyes.

'Nothing to be sorry for.' She saw him smile in her peripheral vision. 'And I am no Monsieur. They call me Balmat.'