Beatrice Chanler might have been involved in a car crash with her mother in 1909, but I turned that into a drunken wreck with Willie years later and combined the several bombardments Beatrice endured with the shelling at Poperinge, where Furlaud did offer the services of his car. It seemed like the easiest explanation for what drove a new intensity in Beatrice’s relationship with the French officer, as evidenced by her letters. Which brings me to my most important invention in this novel . . . Marthe.
Though Beatrice was directly responsible for saving thousands of children in her lifetime, and indirectly responsible for saving tens of thousands more after, I did not find evidence of a special relationship with any of them. That doesn’t mean such relationships didn’t exist; having worked on a book about another orphanage founder, Eliza Hamilton, I found it unlikely that Beatrice didn’t form an attachment to any child she rescued . . . so I decided to give her one.
MARTHE
When I first learned that Jewish children were saved at Chavaniac during the Holocaust, I was deeply moved. French Resistance fighter Charles Boissier testified that almost the whole village was pledged to the cause of opposing the Nazis. Chavaniac is a very small village, and yet maquisard Aimé Monteil—a valet at the castle who was the inspiration behind Samir Bensa?d—testified that almost sixty of these villagers fought alongside him. And in apparent defiance of Nazi occupation, the chateau issued a pamphlet saying they did not discriminate on the basis of religion.
In light of all this, I was excited to show how the work of Adrienne and Beatrice culminated in heroism at Chavaniac. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that this most modern period at the castle was the one about which the least is discoverable. Though communications between the Free Zone and America were possible before 1942, my research uncovered complaints from the chateau’s American benefactors that they weren’t even sure the Lafayette Preventorium was still operating. There wasn’t much more information to be gleaned on the other side of the ocean. When I visited Chavaniac, guides told me castle records for the Second World War no longer exist. This was later confirmed by Myriam Waze, founder of Le Club Lafayette. Thus I was forced to rely on other sources—like Gisèle Naichouler Feldman’s touching memoir, entitled Saved by the Spirit of Lafayette.
Gisèle and her brother were hidden and protected at the chateau—and she recounts that an additional fifteen Jewish children were brought to the preventorium, betrayed by a supervisor, and escaped high into the mountains with the help of staff and resistance fighters. Unfortunately, this recollection does not name the persons involved in orchestrating the escape. Ms. Feldman also asserts that her brother witnessed resistance fighters storing weapons under the floorboards in the boys’ dormitory of the preventorium, but again does not say which staff members aided or abetted them. The Resistance had a friend in the aging Marie-Louise LeVerrier, whose carefully worded letters, reprinted in The Gazette of the American Friends of Lafayette, tell us about the young German soldier who was beaten to death at the train station. In another issue, Clara Greenleaf Perry reported from her correspondence with those at the chateau that the castle’s museum collection, including George Washington’s dueling pistols, were hidden from the Nazis. Yet she doesn’t say where or by whom. Resistants praised the women of Chavaniac for marching on Bastille Day in defiance of the Nazis, but didn’t name which women of the castle took part. Charles Boissier tells us a fifteen-year-old boy from the preventorium joined the Resistance, but not which one. These mysteries presented a real challenge. I had overwhelming evidence that heroic acts took place at and around Chavaniac—often by women and often in Lafayette’s name, as the true story of Lafayette’s stolen statue and the Secret Army of Lafayette attests—but I couldn’t know who the heroes and heroines were.
I did know that after the Fall of France, the Baron de LaGrange served as interim president of the preventorium, and his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Anne, took over as acting president after her father’s arrest by the Gestapo in 1943. Yet there are questions surrounding his arrest, which is commemorated by a brass plaque across from the Church of Saint-Roch. Discussions with modern-day residents of Chavaniac indicate that the baron’s reputation is complicated. It’s likely that he was not arrested for heroic resistance, but simply because he could serve as a high-status hostage. Yet in Témoignages de résistants: 1940–1945, a collection of firsthand recollections from the French Resistance—excerpts of which were generously provided to me by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—one resistance fighter went out of his way to say that Amaury de LaGrange was arrested by the Nazis because he refused to collaborate in connection with his aviation training school.