To Capture What We Cannot Keep

Beatrice Colin’s novel To Capture What We Cannot Keep (2016) takes place in the late Victorian period and concerns the romance that develops between Cait, a young widow with an uncertain future, and Émile, the second-in-command to engineer Gustave Eiffel during the building of his soon to be an iconic Parisian landmark. Though the novel satisfies the requirements of historical fiction, its overriding preoccupation with the romance between protagonists Caitriona Wallace and Émile Nouguier places it most squarely in the category of historical romance. Beatrice Colin was a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde at the time of her death in 2019. She produced many books, for both children and adults, and plays during her lifetime. She also wrote the award-winning 2016 short film The Hide, as well as a feature-length adaptation.

It is 1886, and La Tour Eiffel is in the earliest stages of its construction. Gustave Eiffel and his assistant, Émile Nouguier oversee the construction. Their goal is to have the edifice completed in time for its unveiling at the World's Fair of 1889, where it will stand as the centennial commemoration of the French Revolution. Although he has attained a certain amount prestige, Émile's elderly mother cannot fathom his not having gone into the family glassworks business. She also wishes him to provide her with grandchildren, but Émile is unattached.

Around this time, Émile meets Glaswegian Caitriona Wallace, a 31-year-old widow of middling standing whose husband died in a bridge collapse, leaving her no fortune. To make ends meet, she has taken up one of the few professions available to a woman like herself (aside from remarriage, which eventually surfaces as an option for Cait but to a thoroughly off-putting suitor). Cait is chaperoning the young and well-to-do Alice and Jamie Arrol on their Grand Tour of Europe – which includes, of course, a de rigueur stop in Paris. Alice and Jamie are the pampered niece and nephew of a wealthy and childless civil engineer from Scotland. Among the delights of Paris, Cait takes them for a hot air balloon ride – quite a novelty at the time. Émile first glimpses Cait in the hot air balloon.



Cait and Émile's attraction is immediate, but in true Victorian fashion, their romance unfurls slowly, complicated by their different social classes. Gustave cautions Émile, “My dear boy…we may be able to span huge ravines with iron, but in France men like us, professional men, no matter how wealthy, still cannot cross the social divide.” Before their courtship can begin in earnest, Cait is called back to Glasgow. Émile experiences further pressure from his mother to take the reigns of the family business, find himself a suitable wife, and settle down.

Before long, however, Cait makes her way back to Paris with Alice and Jamie. Cait and Émile's romance begins to simmer again, but a series of obstacles intervene. First, Jamie, meant to help Émile on his engineering project, prefers to spend his time in Paris' seedy underbelly of brothels and gambling dens—work is the last thing on his mind. Meanwhile, even as Cait and Émile's romance blossoms, Alice, not Cait, is deemed the best match for Émile. Alice, however, has her sights set on a handsome but undeniably disreputable Count who threatens her virtue. In the background and holding the strings, looms Gabrielle, Émile's vengeful former mistress, who is intent on ruining the romance between Émile and his new ladylove. As Cait learns the extent of Gabrielle's corruption of the young Arrols, she is reluctant to communicate it to her employer, for fear of the repercussions.

To Capture What We Cannot Keep is one of the more delicate and well-researched examples of work sometimes derided as “chick lit” for its romantic focus. Nevertheless, Colin's depiction of Paris during the Belle Époque is extremely detailed and accurate, from clothing to architecture, social mores to class struggles. That the novel does not end with Cait and Émile's happily-ever-after is, in fact, an apt portrayal of the difficulties of inter-class romance at the turn of the century—especially, how women were constrained by their limited economic freedoms during this time.