Our neighbours were Dunoyer de Segonzac, Louis Jouvet, Marshal Lyautey, the Marquise de Lafayette and the Duncans, an astonishing hippie tribe avant la lettre who adopted Redskin fashions in the hope of regaining Greek purity.

As for my family, it was normally composed of my father, an industrialist, my mother, a keen bridge player, my younger sister, with no specific qualifications, and my grandfather, a formidable septuagenarian with a moustache that smelled of pipes and cognac. He was an old miscreant who had been fed on the milk of Jaurès and who had, in his younger years, smelled with delight the powder of the guns of the Commune.

Because of this, he was rather frowned upon in the family, and also because he slyly maintained a "creature". The latter had the bad taste to be called "Juliette"! The memory I have of my grandfather is a memory of a bowler hat. He almost never removed it and I think he was buried in it.

I also had a maternal grandmother who was usually confined to Reims, the royal city from where she left as little as possible. She didn't go out at all and finally gave up visiting the capital because one morning in June, on her way to the 6 o'clock mass in St Germain des Prés, she met, in the rue Bonaparte, an individual painted in green, warmly dressed with a kettledrum tied to his waist by a string and a pair à champagne straws as slippers, returning as best she could from the Quat-z 'Arts ball, the culmination of studies at the Beaux Arts and the great annual, very stripped-down artistic evening of future French painters, sculptors and architects. By then my grandmother had packed her suitcase and disappeared from the Parisian horizon for good.

My parents' choice of school marked a double and contradictory tendency towards inveterate snobbery combined with a perfectly hypocritical attempt at democracy. I was first sent to the elegant "course" of the Misses Désir, one of the most uptight institutes, despite its surprising name, and attended by the young sisters of the Countess of Paris. Unfortunately, the course called Désir did not work for me. Accustomed to devouring everything I could get my hands on in the family library, I had read Notre-Dame de Paris at the age of nine, and had boasted about it in all innocence. Whether it was because of Esmeralda's gambols or Claude Frollo's libidinous machinations, the event caused as big a scandal as if I had declared myself a subscriber to the Vie Parisienne. I was therefore removed from this institution and introduced to the Lycée Fénelon in classes packed like the metro at six o'clock in the evening (it was the beginning of free education). I did what I could, which was not much.

Fortunately, the resounding trial of a former pupil of the Lycée in the Assize Court (the Violette Nozière affair) gave my family so much to think about that they parachuted me into a quieter house, the aristocratic Collège d'Hulst, in the rue de Varennes, where I was to remain until my baccalauréat. There I acquired an aversion to maths, a passion for history and literature, a taste for friendship and a slight inclination for politics, thanks to which, in 1936-1937, I found myself several times at the local police station for tearing up posters on the public highway.

From there I went to the Catholic Institute where I nonchalantly started a degree. The war put an end to my personal Dolce Vita. My father died. As for me, after a meteoric passage as an auxiliary at the Prefecture of the Seine where I became acquainted with the magnificent library hidden under the roofs of the town hall, I found myself married to a doctor from Dijon, Dr Maurice Gallois, buried up to my neck in the good society of Burgundy and soon to be mother of two children.

While my husband divided his time between his patients and the various underground units of the region to carry out missions that were only remotely related to medicine, I spent hours in libraries, studying the history of Burgundy in the Middle Ages. It was during these studies that I discovered the legend of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which would later give rise to the Catherine series

A few years after the liberation, I lost my husband to heart failure in a matter of minutes. I was thirty years old and I had to consider working if I wanted to be able to bring up my children as I wished and maintain a certain standard of living. But in a provincial town, going from being a woman of the world to being a salary-earner is a difficult accomplishment, and one that is frowned upon. My husband had relatives in Morocco. I went there and joined the advertising department of a radio station: Radio-Internationale.

This is not an extraordinary situation. Morocco, moreover, was living in the last days of the protectorate and it was difficult to create a stable situation there. But I met an officer there, Captain Benzoni, and married him a few weeks before his departure for Indochina where he was to join the 6th Moroccan Spahis Regiment in Hué.

But because of the uncertainty of the Moroccan future, my husband wanted me to stay in Paris with my family while he was away. It was then that I started to work in journalism. I had always been fascinated by this profession and, at fifteen, I had expressed the desire to devote myself to it, but my father had discouraged me, citing a host of pretexts but prudently avoiding the only real one: journalism was not popular among young girls, at a certain time and in a certain milieu.

I worked simultaneously for l'Histoire nous tous, for the Journal du Dimanche, which was the seventh day of France Soir, and for Confidences where I wrote many historical articles (I still write them, by the way, they are Confidences de l'Histoire). Who will ever say the great distress of the historian in the grip of a pack, eager to know his ancestors. My mail was, and still is, overflowing with letters of this type. 

"My name is Bidule but an old aunt told me that one of my ancestors who was a nobleman suppressed (or sold, or gave up or dumped however...) the particle and the title at the revolution. Can you help me to find them? 

Ah this revolution, with its emigrants, its hiding places, its clandestinity! It is the great recourse of a crowd of good-natured republicans to whom it allows to dream that they had ancestors "born" in the red heels boldly treading the floors of Versailles. As for me, I have to face daily the crowd thirsting for escaped honours and collapsed castles.

While I was making my first steps in the journalism of salon (I frequented many artists, writers and film stars) and in the small History, that of France turned out badly in the Far East and Indochina they gave me back my husband in a very bad state having just escaped the trap of Dieng-Bien-Phu. It took a year to restore his health, after which he was able to return to the Ministry of the Armed Forces as a weapons engineer. At the same time, he entered local politics in the service of General de Gaulle. That was not a novelty: since he had joined, in London, the F.F.L. and later, in Chad, the 2nd D.B., he had been a loyal supporter of the General. President of numerous companies, he is currently deputy mayor of our town of Saint-Mandé.

As for me, a major television show introduced me to a new audience and convinced a publisher, my own, to work on a historical novel. It was: Il suffit d'un amour... the first of the Catherine series. Since then, I haven't stopped writing and I don't think I'll be able to stop writing anytime soon. 

What I would call "the Catherine adventure" began in a strange way. I had just come out of the spotlight of Italian Television and was beginning my series of historical articles, when I was summoned one fine morning by the Secretary General of the OPERA MUNDI press agency, Gérald Gauthier, to the agency's headquarters.

Introduced to the huge conference room that had once been the ballroom of a ducal mansion, I was confronted by a young and dynamic gentleman who, after the usual compliments, asked me if I might have a good idea for a historical novel in a corner. Remembering my readings in Burgundy, I said that I did indeed have that in my drawer... and I saw my questioner leave his seat and run off as if he were being chased.

Thinking that the meeting was over, I was about to take the same route more calmly, a little disappointed, when I saw him return, staggering under the weight of half a dozen gigantic black folios. Behind him, a breathless secretary was carrying three more. The whole thing landed as best it could on a large table.

- You see that?" said Gérald Gauthier in a great dramatic gesture, "these are Angélique's press-books. I promise you the same, the same glory and the same success. And now let's get to work!

When I got home, I was not so convinced. I thought that this Gauthier must have been born somewhere near Marseilles and that I certainly had far less chance than he claimed of achieving international fame. Nevertheless, as I wanted to write this story, I aimed at it with ferocious attention. I had to submit my 'essay' to him every other day and he didn't let even one misplaced comma pass.

I was about a third of the way through the novel and was dreaming of a stay in prison to rest when the said Gauthier phoned me. With admirable composure, he told me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that France Soir was buying this novel, which was still in its infancy, and that I had two months to finish it. I had some difficulty in realising... but it was only then that I understood what the word "work" meant for Gérald Gauthier. I came out of the ordeal exhausted, drained, washed out, soaked in coffee to the core and smoked like a Bayonne ham from cigarettes. But the novel was finished (the first two volumes at least), France Soir was launching it and ten foreign publishers had already bought it. We had won the day.

Since then, it's been a growing success. Catherine has 5 volumes (and by popular demand from publishers, I'm starting on the sixth). Marianne has three and the fourth is on the way, with publishers numbering almost two dozen and readers numbering in the millions. Personally, I can't understand how the life of a fifteenth-century Parisian bourgeois can fascinate people to the same degree as a Wyoming farmer, a Turk from Cappadocia, an Icelandic fisherman, crowds of Moldo-Valachians, Serbo-Croats, Slovenians or Israelis in the same way as several million French people, but the fact is that it fascinates them and they want more. As for me, I'm only just beginning to realise that I've achieved success and that the wild predictions of the man with the black folio were no joke.

There's nothing tumultuous about my present life, I'm a peaceful woman, but I still cultivate a dual passion for the past and for travel, which, one pushing the other, takes me hundreds and even thousands of kilometres to visit the ruins of a castle or to delve into the archives of a prefecture. I believe in ghosts and I also believe that old stones retain some of the emanations of the souls that once inhabited them. So it's impossible for me to write a book, or to capture its atmosphere, if I haven't breathed the air in the various locations where the action takes place, observed the landscape, the faces of the inhabitants and the colours of the sky.

So I travel a lot, but the rest of the time I live in a charming old Napoleon III house, one of the last small mansions from that era still standing on the outskirts of Paris. I grow roses there and live quietly surrounded by countless books and a family that is very close to my heart. I paint, tapestry and cook, like any self-respecting Frenchwoman. My great successes are the chicken in the pot, so dear to King Henri IV, quail with grapes, pike with beurre blanc, leg of lamb with cheese, salmon quenelles... and beefsteak with chips! As for my holidays, I spend them in Corsica, my husband's country of origin, boating, swimming and reading the detective novels in the sun that I didn't have time to read in winter... In fact, I'm a woman with no history who has definitely chosen other people's!
 

With all my love
Linda