Kate Forsyth

My treasures are actually quite important to me.

I have a very visual imagination and I have a very tactile imagination.

kind of sensuality about how things inspire me.

When I'm writing a book, I do collect treasures along the way.

So when I made my first trip to France while researching The Blue Rose, I actually found in a very old secondhand shop in Brittany, I found an old key and

And the man in the shop who spoke much better English than I spoke French told me that it was a key to a chateau and it had been found only recently at the bottom of a well.

And the idea had been that during the French Revolution, the family had fled their chateau and they'd locked the great chateau.

iron gates or they'd locked the iron bound door and then they flung the key into the well and this meant that their chateau was safe it was not burned to the ground now I loved that story so much it's about as long as my hand very heavy and it's quite pitted and rusted I bought it of course it hangs on the wall of my study I have many of my treasures hanging on the wall of my study

So that was the first thing, my first found object.

And of course it worked its way into the novel.

The second thing that I found on that first trip was in Paris.

And again, like I love to hang around flea markets and old, I don't want antique stores.

I want old junk stores where you rummage around in a box full of stuff and you find things.

And what I found was a miniature, a painting of,

It's about the size of the palm of my hand.

It's the painting of a woman in pre-revolutionary France.

She is holding a rose.

She has roses at her breast and she has a hat with a big kind of feather in it.

The man who sold it to me tried to tell me it was a miniature of Marie Antoinette, but I know this is not true.

But I like to imagine that it was a miniature of my heroine's dead mother, Viviane.