IT was when Maggie Ritchie was on honeymoon in the French capital that she first came across the love story of sculptor Auguste Rodin and his young protege Camille Claudel.

 

Camille was the great artist's assistant but quickly became his inspiration and his lover with Belle Epoque Paris the setting for their 10 years of passion. Ultimately, Rodin wouldn't leave his partner and the aftermath of the affair left Camille a tortured soul, spending 30 years in an asylum.

The tale stayed with the Pollokshields-based freelance journalist and 10 years later, when she joined the creative writing MLitt course at the University of Glasgow, the drama finally started to take shape.

Now Maggie's first novel Paris Kiss is ready for release next month and has already received acclaim in the publishing world.

"At my first writing workshop on the course we had to produce some fiction so I just plunged right in and did the first chapter," remembers Maggie. "It took about two years to write the first draft."

Still working as a journalist while she studied, Maggie left her three-year-old son Adam at home with her husband Michael and went to the University of Glasgow library every Saturday to write.

Like a sculptor bringing life to a piece of clay, she fleshed out the characters and their stories. The finished novel is based on a true story, blended with fiction.

"The new way I found into it was through Jessie, Camille's best friend who was an English sculptor," explains Maggie. "I thought it would be good to have her point of view, and then you could talk about Paris as an outsider.

"My difficulty was Jessie was a real person, I had a bit of a dilemma because she was quite a straight character, from what you could glean from biographies. At first when I wrote it I had a problem with her voice because I just made her too tentative and timid.

"When I went back to rewriting her I thought, 'What kind of woman would go to Paris at the age of 21 in the 19th century, work in Rodin's studio and be friends with this vivacious French sculptor?'

"I thought Jessie would be a really formidable, feisty woman. To balance the story and make Jessie more interesting I took the liberty of giving her a love interest in Paris. She has an English fiancé who is a scientist but I invented a character who pursued her, a French artist who was far more enticing.

"I did it with love; I didn't turn her into a baddie. I thought, you're young and in Paris on your own and they were unchaperoned, you're bound to get up to something."

JESSIE and Camille forge a close friendship and explore the demi monde of the City of Light, meeting artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and the boldly unconventional Rosa Bonheur along the way.

It is when Rodin and Camille embark on a scandalous affair, Jessie becomes their unwilling go-between and their friendship unravels. Years later Jessie tracks her friend down to an asylum where Camille reveals an explosive secret.

Maggie only made one more trip back to Paris, with Mike on their first anniversary, to research the novel. After that all the work was done in Glasgow.

The university library proved to be a rich source of material from that period, including Victorian fashion, memoirs of female artists working in Paris and travel guidebooks.

"I did a lot of reading but also practical research - one of my husband's friends is a sculptor who works in marble, which is quite rare now. He took me to Glasgow Sculpture Studios and let me touch the marble and break it," says Maggie.

"I didn't realise how pliable it is, like sugar, and how cold it was to work in that environment, and how dusty.

"I found it helpful researching a late Victorian novel in Glasgow because it is such a fantastic Victorian city. After I finished the MLitt I started a writing group and we met in Glasgow Art Club.

"You had those surroundings and Glasgow School of Art just around the corner. It was very easy to imagine yourself in the Victorian era.

"Glasgow has been a great inspiration, we have Rodin sculptures - the Burrell has The Thinker and a few others, there is one or two at Kelvingrove and the Hunterian has Camille Claudel's bust of Rodin.

"Glasgow University gave Rodin an honorary degree, was very welcome and recognised here before he was in France."

Maggie's childhood dream of being a novelist has finally materialised, though she admits Paris Kiss came after four attempts at books that never came to anything.

Now she has finished the first draft of her second novel, set in post-colonial Zambia where she lived with her family from the ages of five to nine.

The ideas for the third are already percolating and will take Maggie back to the 19th century.

She cites Nancy Mitford's Pursuit of Love as a favourite read for being wickedly funny, romantic and crucially, partly set in Paris. A title she always goes back to is Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, which tells the story of Rochester's mad wife in the attic.

"It's another 19th century woman driven mad," says Maggie. "It is so evocative of the smells and colours of the Caribbean where she grew up and conjured up memories of my childhood in Africa and in Venezuela, and inspired me to write my second novel."

Paris Kiss is published by Saraband on February 26.