What would Jean Calvin say

My writing projects this year include finally getting Triple Deckers, the anti-war novel to market one way or another, get Family Values to my current publisher, tweak my mysteries Underground Railroads and Murder in Argelès (part of a series) to my publisher (which doesn’t mean they would be accepted) and finish researching the next two Murder in Geneva and Murder in Damascus.

Researching life in Calvin’s time became a dream. I was meeting my housemate and the people who occupy my old flat for lunch when I walked by the used book marché downtown. To my right was the lake, to my left was the fountain de Molard. And there it was nestled in a carboard carton, La Vie en le Temps de Calvin. I picked it up. Everything I needed had been written almost fifty years ago by a UN diplomat from France: what people wore, medicine, the names of the streets, etc. (this was last year and not

part of my no-buy year, but had it been this year I would still have bought it).

Consider how dreary and restrictive life, I wonder what Calvin would think of his city now, especially like the Route du Rhône with its designer shops Yves St. Laurent, Gucci, etc. And what about the mannequins with so much of their bodies exposed.

In a way I wish I could bring him back just to watch his face as he walked down his city streets.
A friend of mine, Dinah Lee Kung wrote a wonderful book A Visit From Voltaire…(When an American mother-of-three finds herself overwhelmed in her new home in Switzerland, a visitor pops up offering to cure her son's asthma, her husband's growing indifference, and her own resentment of life. Is he the village nutter or - as he claims to be - the greatest mind of the eighteenth century? This talkative character wearing kneebreeches and wig is the last straw. Though she begs him to go home, he unpacks his mouldy trunk instead. Slowly V. becomes her warmest friend as they laugh and quarrel, and he teaches her the best lesson of all: how to live life to its fullest.)

I wonder if she would be willing to do something similar with Calvin.