The Queen of Cups by Mina Samuels is an an engaging story--it is the imagined life of a real woman. Juliette Peirce was the wife of Charles Peirce, a mathematician, logician, and philosopher amongst other things. Although there is much written about Peirce, little is known about his wife Juliette. I read that Mina Samuels read a book about several post-Civil War thinkers, one of whom was Charles Peirce, which was the impetus for writing The Queen of Cups.
"There were references to Peirce's mysterious wife," Samuels recalls. "I was fascinated by this enigmatic woman who, according to many historians, bore so much blame for Peirce's failure. I thought her story was worth telling and started my novel as a defense of a woman maligned by history."
Charles Peirce, although a brilliant man in his field of study (actually a sort of renaissance man really as his work touched upon a variety of disciplines), he suffered from something then known as "facial neuralgia" (which today would be diagnosed as Trigeminal neuralgia)--a very painful nervous/facial disorder. His behavior was at times erratic. Peirce was already married when he met Juliette some time in the 1870s. Eventually he divorced his wife and married Juliette, but they had already been having an affair, which will ( as you can imagine) cause severe repercussions in the lives of both Peirces. Nothing is known about Juliette's life before she met Peirce including her maiden name or where she came from. It is believed she was French. This is where Samuels' story begins--with the imagined history of Juliette Peirce.
Juliette's story begins in Russia--in a gypsy camp--where she is Marie, a young woman of 15. One of two daughters of a Jewish woman who left a comfortable home (much to her parents disappointment) for a gypsy. When Dina and Marie come of age, their mother takes them west to see what other type of life was open to them. Although virtually abandoned by her parents, Dina and Marie's mother still had money set aside that her father had left her. If her daughters married outside the gypsy world, they would be able to come into an inheritance. This is what their mother hoped for them. Going first to St. Petersburg, and then on to Paris, the sisters experience a life quite unlike the one they were used to. I don't want to go into great detail here as this is a section I really enjoyed in this book, and I hate to give away too much of the story.
Eventually Marie has to reinvent her life yet again as Juliette, and this time on her own. She emigrates to America and in New York City meets the charismatic Peirce, who is 20 years her senior. It is an interesting pairing and one I at times questioned. Juliette Peirce did not live an easy life, and not simply as a woman in 19th century America with few opportunities open to her. By the time she came to America she had already endured many hardships. She was the lover and eventually wife of a very difficult man--the sort of man who may be a genius, but is not terribly practical. Suffering as he did from the disease he had, he also experienced black moods, which would completely debilitate him. He was driven to take morphine and cocaine to ease the extreme pain he was in, which he became addicted to. Although he may have loved her, he did not always treat Juliette well. It was at these times I would have problems with the story. How can a woman be with a man like that? It is hard sometimes not to impose my 21st-century sensibilities on a story, but I had to remind myself that this was a completely different era--one where a woman did not easily leave her husband when she had no other family to turn to. At one point in the story she is ready to leave him, but recognizes that her husband was sick. It was the disease and pain that would make him lash out, and although still not excusable (in my eyes), it at least explained why she stayed with him.
I found The Queen of Cups to be a very readable novel--an interesting slice of life of very interesting and real people. There is much in the novel to contemplate, and I can see how Mina Samuels would have been intrigued by the enigmatic Juliette Peirce and want to tell her story.