The writer and the passion for prints

Writers, like historians, are passionate about prints. But how do they investigate them? Isn't there something specific in the way they track them?

Three years ago, Irène Frain discovered in an archive the exceptional destiny of a woman forgotten by history, Pauline Geuble of Lorraine. This unfinished autobiography recounted how the author, a small French seamstress exiled in Moscow, had crossed paths with a great Russian aristocrat on the eve of the December conspiracy of 1825. This plot against Tsar Nicholas I was immediately foiled; all the conspirators who had escaped the death penalty were deported to the borders of China and Mongolia. The young woman obtained from the Tsar to join her lover there and to marry him. Together with seven other companions of the condemned - Russians, and all of them of high rank - she helped save the deportees from despair and certain death.

In her book Je te suivrai en Sibérie (I will follow you to Siberia), Irène Frain, in her turn, has put her steps in those of Pauline. In the literal sense as well as in the figurative sense, since she set out to find the places where this extraordinary journey took place and that she went there. Why was it so essential for her to cross space and time?