Quotes from SUSANNE ALLEYN

Isn't it just as much the duty of the police to free the innocent, as to bring the guilty to justice?

Essentially I am a history geek trapped somewhere between the creative arts and academic scholarship. The natural result of this is to become an author of historical fiction.

All you can do, every day, is to learn the truth as best you can.

Two of the most productive writers in history, Voltaire and Balzac, were also among the greatest coffee addicts in history. So far, caffeine hasn't made me nearly that productive, but I can hope.

Men can sleep with a different woman every night and indulge in the most revolting practices--but let an unmarried woman make one mistake, be led astray when she's young and silly and knows nothing of the world, and she's tainted for life and called a harlot!

Men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge.

I cannot even earn a living as a whore.

There are times, too, when the law doesn't give a damn who gets caught beneath its wheels.

Women, of whatever age, share secrets with each other more readily than they share them with men.

Fiction, also--if done well--can perhaps allow the reader a greater feeling of recognition with people of the past. If we read a novel about people trying to control the Revolution, we're reading about them as people who have desires, ambitions, and neuroses just like ours, and we can relate to them, rather than seeing them just as stiff portraits with funny-looking hair--or as the one-dimensional monsters or saints that many pop histories have made them.

Love can make people do funny things, inexplicable things. And thwarted love can turn some people into madmen--or madwomen. People who never had much of a grip on reality, sometimes they spin pretty illusions ... and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.

May we never again read about Dark Ages peasants eating tomatoes; unbelievably plucky/feisty liberated medieval heroines with names like Dominique; 18th-century travelers crossing Europe or the Atlantic in a week; slang that's sixty years ahead of its time and many, many other such common anachronisms of fact and attitude...

or even mid September 1793, when Terror—the policy of intimidation—was officially declared "the order of the day" and the Law of Suspects was passed, which made it far too easy for a citizen to be suspected and imprisoned for counter-revolutionary sympathies or even for apathy, and which greatly expanded the powers of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes—many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph—were punishable by death.

turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.

A likely thing, too!" replied the strong woman. "If it was ever intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence would have cast my lot in an island?

A dangerous thrift it is to amass Only a treasury of regrets. He who holds them too close to his heart Suffers justly, and nothing forgets.

Though religious houses had long had a reputation for being both prisons and hotbeds of vice, they had always served as homes for the many surplus, unmarried, dowerless women who, lacking families to support them, would otherwise have lived out their lives in lonely, hopeless poverty.

Long considered godless vagabonds, professional performers in France had officially been forbidden the sacraments until 1790. Many, in past centuries, had never bothered to secure the necessary dispensations—obtainable through confession to a sympathetic priest and a few discreet bribes—that would have allowed them to marry with the blessing of the Church, and so the immorality of actors had become notorious.

Oh, silly people at court care, because they're the sort of fools who believe that one's ancestors are much more important than one's personal merit. Prove you're the great-great-great granddaughter of some medieval king's illegitimate whelp, as she did, and they'll fawn all over you and give you money, entry into the right houses, introductions to the right people…