Paris 1876 - An artist and a beautiful artist's model; a bottle of wine and a flask of absinthe distilled with laudanum; a unique constellation of family genetics; and, just the right level of sexually-charged hormones make for a heady cocktail leading to a dangerous adventure.
Nicole Bruante, a beautiful young nineteenth-century Parisian artist's model well-known for her erotic posings for the like of Gustave Courbet among others, falls for an unknown sculptor whose brothers are already famous in the world of painting and art-photography. She cautiously enters a relationship with the handsome Rene Caillebotte, and finally succumbs to his romantic overtures right under the 'watchful eye' of Courbet's infamous painting The Origin of the World: a piece under her custodianship. Suddenly, while in the throes of passion, the unthinkable happens. She and her newfound lover are involuntarily sucked into the painting hanging at the foot of her bed, and transported to the future where Nicole finds herself under the very-same painting, in Musee d'Orsay, in 2011. She is still naked, and her lover Rene is lying right next to her - not only as naked as she is but dead, to boot!
It's now 135 years later and young Nicole has some explaining to do - to the museum staff; to her Parisian ancestors that she encounters in the future (including one particularly self-serving relative who could oddly enough pass as her identical twin); to a medical researcher who seems to be falling hard for her; to herself; and especially to the police!
Nicole enjoyed life in 1876 as she worked and planned for her future. Little did she know that she was about to see first-hand what the future had planned for her . . .
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Charles J. Schneider is a GI Medical Oncologist at The University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His fiction-writing hobby has produced 3 fiction4all releases so far, which are: DEITIES AND DEMONS (an anthology containing second-edition re-writes of CYTHEREA and WITH TOWER AND TURRETS, CROWNED); UNDER THE FORGOTTEN OAK (second edition); and TIME’S FICKLE GLASS—a substantially-revised and rewritten version of the previously released and now out-of-print A PORTRAIT IN TIME . The author is currently working on a sequel to TIME’S FICKLE GLASS, soon to be released at fiction4all as THE ARRIVAL OF AN HOUR. Dr. Schneider lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his family.
