I need to keep reminding everyone what’s going on here, I know, I know. What follows is an afternoon’s work, in tandem with ChatGPT. Day Two in the writers’ room. IRL I’d be doing this for a long while before trying to write a word. Honing each sentence and idea in Moleskines and notes mode, giving it real people with an ear and an eye for what’s good, hip, sellable, etc. etc. to tear apart.
Here at HARD BOOKS we’re on a speedier trajectory…
OK. We have seen the three main protagonists. [I’ll post an additional family profile of the Marsacs, Greville, Bella, Arri & Clemmie later today, just for completeness]. Now we need to consider plotting. If A Harlot High and Low was just a reader-friendly 12 chapter novel, updated for now. What, as briefly and succinctly as you can, happens?
If A Harlot High and Low were a twelve-chapter novel, it would unfold like a grand operatic deception, each act stitched in silk and shadow. Lucien de Rubempré, newly adored by Paris, rises under the sinister tutelage of Abbé Carlos Herrera—none other than Vautrin in ecclesiastical drag, orchestrating Lucien’s ascent like a maestro of moral ruin. Meanwhile, Esther van Gobseck, his hidden mistress and a courtesan reformed by love, is drawn back into the world she fled. She becomes bait in a dazzling con: seduce the banker Nucingen without surrendering, inflame him until he pays a fortune for the fantasy. As Lucien flirts with nobility and Esther with self-sacrifice, the city hums with intrigue. When Esther finally gives herself to Nucingen to save Lucien from debt, the act kills something in her. She dies the next night, silent and adorned, as Lucien prepares to announce his engagement to another.
With Esther gone, the house of cards shivers. Her death draws police attention; Lucien and Vautrin are caught in the glare of suspicion. Lucien, delicate as spun sugar, cannot endure prison. He buckles under interrogation, writes a final flourish of guilt and longing, and hangs himself in his cell. Vautrin, unmasked as the legendary Jacques Collin, turns the law into theatre and walks free, having once again leveraged death into dominion. In the end, there are no lessons—only consequences. Power is redistributed, reputations preserved, and the ledger of sin remains elegantly unbalanced. Balzac closes the curtain not with judgement but with a smirk.
I said: please give me the Map of Emotional Connections of the four main protagonists:
Lucien and Esther:
Lovers, but not equals. She gives all; he gives what he can afford. Their intimacy is real, but tainted by hierarchy—his beauty is capital, hers is collateral.Lucien and Herrera (Vautrin):
A grotesque father-son relationship, with undertones of seduction and control. Lucien is Vautrin’s investment, and Vautrin will kill or die to protect it. Lucien, half-aware, submits because submission pays.Esther and Herrera:
She loathes him, but obeys. He sees her as necessary—her purity turned to profit. He manipulates her into returning to Nucingen not out of cruelty, but efficiency. Her death is the cost of his plan.Esther and Nucingen:
He desires her with the hungry idiocy of wealth. She detests him. Their 'relationship' is a transaction of ultimate irony: he believes he buys love, she sells only the appearance of it, then kills herself before the cheque clears.Nucingen and Herrera:
Two types of power: financial and criminal. Vautrin plays the banker like a violin. Nucingen thinks he’s buying Esther; he’s actually funding Lucien’s social resurrection and Vautrin’s scheme.Lucien and Nucingen:
Barely interact—but Nucingen’s lust and Lucien’s ambition are two ends of the same circuit. The banker pays; the poet rises.
SAFE WORD: democracy….The [same] Map of Emotional Connections please:
Noor and Ezra:
Secret lovers, urgent and precise. They meet inside predictive blind spots. She calls it protocol breach; he calls it clarity. Their affair is known by Senta, suspected by Greville, and utterly invisible to Halston Dane. That’s the initial suggestionNoor and Senta:
Daughter substitute, and architect. Noor believes she is being shaped for power by the master builder. Senta knows she’s being shaped for grief. Their intimacy is real, but Senta holds the pen on the story.Noor and Greville:
Mentor and marionette. He sees Noor as the Restoration’s idealized future—until she touches Ezra, even though she is about to marry queer Halston. Then she becomes dangerous. He will protect her only if she obeys the arc he wrote.Ezra and Senta:
Tested, vetted, passed. Senta slept with him to see what Noor would inherit - how she would. What she saw disturbed her. Not weakness—feeling. She now watches him with a kind of maternal contempt, and cold desire.Ezra and Greville:
A tragic obsession. Greville sees ‘Alan’, sees doomed Etonian youth, sees everything he can no longer touch. Ezra is polite, professional, devastating. He never gives Greville what he wants. That’s why Greville keeps paying his OnlyFans lookalike.Senta and Greville:
Unacknowledged blood. He doesn't know he fathered her. She does. She considers it an inconvenience. He shaped a world to rule; she shaped herself to survive it.
First Background: The Shadow Court – A Theory
Every capital has two courts. The first is visible: official, institutional, ceremonial. It’s where Noor Santiago is headed when she accepts Halston Dane’s proposal. His family offers jewels, lineage, and a guaranteed seat at the diplomatic banquet. This court is governed by legacy and protocol—what you wear, who you marry, what you say when the cameras are on. But in the second court—the Shadow Court—legacy isn’t enough. Here, transgression is the coin of the realm. Beauty is dangerous, not decorative. And power is expressed through knowing who breaks the rules, and how well they perform it.
The Shadow Court is invisible, but present: in private salons, encrypted streams, off-the-record galas, and curated surveillance feeds. It is watched by “the highest monarchs and friends”—not kings or presidents, but the true Restoration elite: dynasts, spymasters, founders, cultural choreographers. These people no longer crave policy or control. They crave narrative—especially forbidden, exquisite ones.
And Noor and Ezra are the narrative. They are the secret show everyone pretends not to know. By sleeping with Ezra while engaged to Halston, Noor breaks the contract of her ascent—but ascends higher. She enters the realm where power is no longer administered but desired when desire is weakness. Where the only real capital is what people say about you when you're not in the room.
Noor gives the Restoration its last pleasure: the thrill of watching two beautiful people do something they shouldn't— their safe word is democracy. It’s transgressive, ironic, and heartbreakingly sincere. In a world ruled by predictive capitalism, legacy power, and aesthetic compliance, “democracy” becomes the one word that means: stop, remember, choose, consent.
Again.
It’s not a system. It’s not a right. It’s a whisper between two people trying to stay human.
In Chapter one, The Ball we introduce the triangle of Noor, Senta and Ezra.
Chapter Two: The Fold
In 2023, as the Restoration quietly formalizes its grip on Washington, a new cohort is inducted into the soft machinery of state. Among them is Ezra Chase, gliding into Protocol Tier 2 after a misjudged intimacy derails his academic career. Assigned to Cognitive Trust Assurance, he begins moderating AI-generated scripts for emotional fidelity. He is a textbook specimen of the Interface Class: designed to absorb heat, trained to reflect beauty, and never meant to leave a mark. Meanwhile, Senta Ross makes her first appearance—elegant, unreadable, and already watching.
Chapter Three: Legacy Protocol
Senta Ross moves like policy dressed in silk—remaking men, repositioning girls, refining chaos into influence. She curates the optics of Restoration succession with absolute precision: inheritance must feel earned, protocol must feel natural. Meanwhile, Ezra glides upward, barely touching the walls of power as he rises. His beauty is working. His edits are quietly perfect. He’s being noticed. At the close of the chapter, the notice becomes personal: a call from Greville Marsac, sixty-three, father of the Restoration, mentor to Noor—and suddenly, inexplicably, in love. Ezra reminds him of something. Someone. A boy with perfect posture and tragic hands. His name was Alan.
Chapter Four: The Idiot Returns
Greville Marsac returns to Washington from a summer in Umbria like a retired general summoned to a stage he built but no longer fully controls. He brings with him the usual Restoration cargo: his American wife, Bella (all charm and curated graciousness), and their two daughters, sculpted in legacy and quiet rebellion. But Greville is unsettled. Ezra Chase has disrupted something old in him—something Alan-shaped, long buried beneath decades of protocol. He studies Ezra’s recordings late at night, unable to reconcile the precision with the humanity. And so the mind does what the system has taught it: he begins to suspect Ezra isn’t real. A synthetic. A simulation. The perfect interface. The feeling, he tells himself, is just the algorithm doing its job. But Greville’s hands tremble when he closes the file. He’s sixty-three, married, and in love with a man who might not exist.
“Do be careful, darling,” Bella murmured as she closed the decanter. “You’ve always had trouble distinguishing real from expensive.” Placed at the end of Chapter Four, it’s a knowing dismissal and a veiled threat:
Here’s a pair of pitch-perfect Gen-Z Restoration lines from Arabella ("Arri") and Clemmie, the daughters of Greville and Bella Marsac—raised in the gilded shadows of legacy, fluent in irony, and entirely aware of their father’s obsessions. They speak in curated deadpan, like girls who grew up surrounded by surveillance, soft power, and very good lighting. Arri (Arabella), 22, quiet and lethal:“Dad’s in love with a deepfake again. This one blinks after it’s come.”
Chapter Five: Ghost in the System
Noor Santiago performs power with the precision of someone who knows she’s being watched. At 27, she’s already Chief Protocol Advisor to the Sovereign Delegation on Memory and Ethics—a title built for press kits and veiled leverage. Her days are beautifully choreographed, her engagement to Halston Dane a Restoration masterpiece: tasteful, strategic, photogenic. In bed, he praises her discretion. She smiles and thinks of Ezra.
Ezra, meanwhile, is rising—quietly becoming the system’s favorite ghost. His scripts are seamless, his voice trusted, his presence pleasing. Greville Marsac grows obsessed: watching Ezra through layers of encrypted footage, studying his posture, his restraint, the moments he almost breaks. It’s Alan all over again. But this time, the ghost might reach back.
And Senta Ross, cool and composed, begins to calculate. Ezra isn’t just her asset now—he’s her leverage. Against Greville. Against legacy. Against bloodlines. She watches them all move and thinks, a small adjustment here, a moment withheld there, and the future might finally tilt.
She opens a new file, unnamed. Just one sentence so far:
“Your daughter is watching you.
Chapter Six: The Re-entry Spiral
The wedding is flawless—halftone elegance, curated guest list, no visible hunger. Noor Santiago becomes Noor Dane in the eyes of Restoration protocol, her name now a legacy tool. She gains what every good daughter is promised: a family, a surname, and a seat at EXAMMPLE—the sovereign platform for predictive reintegration and reputational sentencing. Her access is historic. Her face appears on internal onboarding decks titled “The Future of Consent.”
But something twitches beneath the success. The whispers start slow: that Noor wasn’t cleared fully. That her vetting was retroactive. That someone—older, disappointed, jealous—has been calling in favors in the dark. They say Greville Marsac suspects the affair with Ezra never ended. They say he’s not above orchestration.
Senta hears the whispers, and files them in silence. She’s not ready to move yet. She’s waiting to see who falls first. At the end of the chapter, Noor finds a new directive in her EXAMMPLE queue. It’s unsigned. It reads: Clean closure. Tier 2 script may require emotional discontinuity.”
Chapter Seven: Loyalty Tests
Cornwall arrives without ceremony, just a shift in ambient clearance levels and the smell of veteran paranoia. He's Greville’s fixer now—an IRL surveillance specialist in an age that’s forgotten how to look with human eyes. The spy who came in from the drone. He works discreetly, affectlessly, always within protocol. Greville trusts him absolutely.
What Greville doesn’t know: Cornwall reports to Senta as well. And Senta keeps everything he sees. As Noor ascends, the sabotage begins. Greville, unable to control desire, redirects it into discipline. Vice gossip is leaked—delicately, expensively—suggesting Noor’s record was edited, her behavior unclean. Worse: whispers about Halston Dane begin to spread. That he’s not stable. That his placement was negotiated too quickly. That Noor’s marriage may be a liability.
Noor notices. She pretends not to. But at night she checks her public sentiment vector and finds a new phrase trending just beneath the glass: “Asset or actress?”
Chapter Eight: Box Office
Greville makes his offer with a voice like velvet cut on bone:
“Give me Ezra. I’ll give Noor the crown you can hide behind.” It’s not a threat. It’s the Restoration’s most intimate bargain: beauty for power, body for succession.
Ezra returns from London looking cleaner, quieter, sharpened by exile. Noor meets him off-protocol. They don’t speak much. Their reunion is sudden, exquisite, and watched. Within the Shadow Court, where synthetic pleasures have flattened desire, their unsanctioned love becomes box office. The highest monarchs and friends tune in like a liturgy. It’s art. It’s a threat. It’s real.
Senta watches the stream from bed, a glass of chilled wine untouched. Roelf du Plessis lies beside her, faintly glistening, recently pleased with himself. When the medics arrive, it’s already too late: a blood transfusion error, a whispered cardiac defect, a moment too real. Death enters the theatre. The mood deepens.
Later, alone, Senta opens a secure channel. She sends Noor just three words:
“Choose: power or the archivist.”
Chapter Nine: Luxury Is Evidence
Senta Ross doesn’t threaten—she invests. When Ezra refuses her first offer (an untraceable exit package, a climate-cooled estate in the Azores), she studies his face like an old map and shifts gears. If he won’t be bought, perhaps he’ll collaborate.
She lays it out plainly:
“Greville is weakening. I’ll bury you with dignity. I’ll even give you Thiel’s old island.” It’s not a joke. The offshore server farms are still warm. The NDA template is already open. Senta doesn’t lie—but she does edit history in advance.
Ezra listens. For the first time, he doesn’t say no. He thinks about the island. About Noor. About becoming a beautiful footnote in someone else’s Restoration memoir. He thinks about survival. Then he says: “And what happens to Noor?”
Senta doesn’t blink. “You just answered my question.”
Chapter Ten: Murders and Acquisition
Greville, furious but composed, commissions a private premium simulation of Ezra—custom-scripted, sensual, and locked behind multi-tiered access protocols. It’s the Restoration’s answer to longing: control the image, erase the original. The likeness is uncanny. The voice is perfect. The real Ezra, however, still breathes—and is suddenly more desirable than ever.
Bella watches the real one. So do the daughters. Whether they know or not is immaterial. The highest monarch herself has tagged Ezra as “super-premium.” What was once private is now performance. What was once obscene is now exclusive. Even Greville cannot stop the view count.
Meanwhile, Noor Santiago sits in the inner sanctum of EXAMMPLE. CEO. Orchestrator of reputational sentencing. She is now two years younger than Senta was when she began her ascent. Noor stares at the ghosted title page of a potential memoir—just a working phrase for now:
“Consent, Revised: A Life in Twelve Protocols.” She knows Senta wrote hers longhand, on a plane to Zurich. Noor opens a blank doc and hesitates. She writes the first sentence, then deletes it. She hasn’t earned her ending yet.
Chapter Eleven: Scandal Sheet
Greville Marsac is hacked. The scandal breaks in elegantly managed bursts—timed leaks, visual archives, old clearance logs—revealing that the real-life Ezra being watched by Bella and the girls was not Ezra at all, but a trained double, curated and placed by Senta years earlier. The real Ezra remained untouched. Until now.
Greville’s authority collapses inward. His legacy network begins to recede. He prepares to vanish quietly—offshore, possibly Monaco. But before he can withdraw, Cornwall delivers one final file: Noor’s unfinished memoir. And a sealed record—a Swiss painter, 2016, invitations sent to a minor, consent blurred by patronage. Noor was fourteen. The painter died in a French Prison before the case came to court. Noor never spoke publicly. Until now.
The Board moves fast. Her CEO title is revoked. Her apartment is cleared by protocol team. She is sent to New York—a containment city for the reputationally unstable. Weeks later, Senta visits. She brings a vintage scarf and an unsent letter from Ezra.
They sit across from each other in a silent museum café. Then Senta leans in: “I gave you legacy. You wanted feelings. Feelings,” she says softly, “are receipts.”
Chapter Twelve: The Sainted File
Ezra is found dead in a flat at the Watergate. The same one where Senta once seduced him, gently, clinically—a test, not a moment. Now there is no trace of her. No DNA. No scent. Just the note, printed on reclaimed stationery:
“I was never real enough for you.”
The note is a fake. The death is not.
Noor receives the news in New York. Her reaction is not recorded. Or if it is, no one admits to watching it. That night, something changes. She reciprocates —but how remains encrypted. A signal scrubbed from social metadata. A shadow act. A final refusal. She’s dead but we don’t know where or how.
Elsewhere, Greville Marsac narrowly survives a fire at a minimalist spa retreat in Austria. The oxygen therapy system malfunctions. His feet are burned. His reputation, more so. He is flown to a private wing and given sedatives. No visitors.
Back in Washington, Senta commissions the final project: an AI Grief Engine built by EXAMMPLE. She provides the training material herself—surveillance footage, intercepted texts, unsanctioned calls. Noor and Ezra, in fragments, become the corpus.
The engine’s name: Safe Word: Democracy.
It is not public. It is not private. It is simply preserved. And far away, Halston Dane buys a beach in New Zealand. The deed is co-signed by Roelf du Plessis’s only son. The ocean does not ask questions.
The file closes. The theatre is dark. Legacy, as always, survives.
Epigraph: “In every age, the beautiful are punished for being visible.
And the powerful, for having once desired them.”
— Fables de la Conformité
So tomorrow we’ll finally write the pitch…on Saturday I’ll publish the first few pages of the novel. We chill on Sunday.
Working like Balzac, being Morgan Leith…
And maybe next week, when I’m reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham with ChatGPT, I’ll go back to this first-first parse and begin the process of making a plan to write (at light speed) this book.