An Account of the Catastrophe at the Flower Show

Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale. It looked just like it does in this picture. Most of the papers are an English translation of a sixteenth-century letter written by a French Protestant. I still haven’t read it. What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891.

My mind filled with soft, sunshiney images of parasols, white dresses, straw hats. The back of the invitation, however, contained something unexpectedly dramatic: someone had copied out another letter in a tiny hand, titling it “Mrs. Jacques’s account of the catastrophe that took place at this flower show.” I read it, and felt the shiver of an idea. My friend gave me the packet to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it. I got there eventually, and the result is my story “The Fête,” which appears in the new Summer issue of The Paris Review. The story is almost entirely fictional, since Mrs. Jacques doesn’t really tell us very much, except about the nature of the catastrophe—which is the one detail I always intended to borrow. Perhaps, in order to preserve some suspense, you might like to read my version first.

 

Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, won the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize. He is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.