Claude's father was the marquist before her, and her grandfather before him; her mother was the daughter of a family of Caerdicci cloth and alum merchants originally from La Serenissima, come to establish an outpost in Marsilikos. She had one brother and one sister, neither of whom showed much early aptitude for artistic pursuits, while Claude herself was drawing her world and improving upon it from the age at which she could pick up a piece of chalk.
Till she was sixteen she was her grandfather's apprentice. She spent much of her childhood in his quiet and patient company, receiving all his skill from his hands to her own as they grew, while her father ran the shop and marqued the adepts and was known as the Lanthenay in Marsilikos. Later she spent a year or so with her mother's kin in La Serenissima, learning how to run a business and learning, too, from their sprawling web of family and trade connections among that city's artisans, something of the techniques and the secrets by which the finest Caerdicci pigments are produced and their hues imparted to canvas and to cloth. Marquistry is a particularly d'Angeline profession; but an artist, in any medium, can profit from a broadening of her knowledge of related disciplines. Besides, such learning was intended as her dowry. Claude returned to Marsilikos to marry a local lad, Thomas Magoulet, the heir to a prosperous dyeworks looking to expand. This arrangement in the interests of two families was also a love match between childhood sweethearts, who grew up just a couple of streets apart from one another and never knew a time when they weren't best friends.
The marriage nonetheless failed. Two years later Claude was living above her family’s shop again. Her husband in his regret went to the lengths of obtaining not merely a divorce but an annulment: under the law she is not a divorced woman, she was never wed in the first place. Those two years from eighteen to twenty, which might have been her best, have simply been cut out of the tapestry of her life, leaving a few frayed ends at either side.
The business side of the arrangement was eventually woven together again: the Magoulet dyeworks enjoys alum imported from the far east via La Serenissima at a very favourable rate, and Claude’s advice on colours and dyes has over the years become invaluable to them. Thomas calls on her regularly, albeit sometimes just to complain about his family life and the constant demands placed upon him by his wife and nine children. Once a year or so in the autumn he comes round drunk and begs her to take him back. (She doesn't.)
Claude had a few more years with her grandfather, who was much her favourite relative, before he passed away at a startlingly ripe old age in 1287. She was absent from the shop for a few weeks after his funeral, and then returned to work with such zeal that at times it seemed there were hardly enough adepts in the salons of Marsilikos to occupy the hands of two full-time marquists. Still, despite how many preferred a woman’s touch — Alyssum girls for modesty’s sake, Mandrake boys who made sport of disconcerting her when they could — she was always a little in her father’s shadow until a persistent infection of the lungs, contracted in 1295, kept him out of the shop and away from the clients for the last winter of his life. Early in 1296 he died, and Claude’s widowed mother elected to go home to La Serenissima. (They write.)
At the lateish age of thirty-three Claude thus became the mistress of her own home and her own shop, and the first choice of any Marsilikos adept yearning for adornment and independence. She loves her work, and relishes the challenges presented by the differing proportions of her many living canvases — second only to that, she loves to draw and to paint. Most of her business comes by appointment rather than from casual trade, so it isn’t too difficult to arrange to shut the shop for an afternoon and trot off with her easel and her box of colours, to sketch a view of Marsilikos from some peculiar angle that’s taken her fancy. A wall with an interesting windowbox, a curious cloud over the harbour… As long as she’s creating something to please her own eye, she’s a happy woman.
Though now and again when she was younger enterprising local fellows came courting, Claude has undertaken no further marital experiments and borne no children of her own. She has her sister's son, Felix Tallard, for an apprentice. He’s coming along nicely — though he wishes she’d let him do more of the interesting bits, instead of keeping him shut up grinding pigments.
