Given that the baron was the president of the influential Aéro-Club de France, that’s certainly possible, and because of his honorable and heroic service in the First World War—not to mention his generally favorable view of Western democratic ideals—I would very much like to believe it. Unfortunately, the evidence is mixed. LaGrange seems to have been on good terms with the Vichy puppet government of France, and in a letter to his son, he praised Marshal Pétain for his negotiating skills. On the other hand, the baron also praised the Marshal for trying to be rid of Pierre Laval, who was seen as a far more malevolent collaborator. （Coincidentally, Laval’s daughter and fierce defender married Lafayette’s direct descendant René de Chambrun, son of Aldebert de Chambrun, whom I have Beatrice meet with in this novel. The loyalty of the Chambruns to the Vichy regime is beyond the scope of this novel because, of course, the Lafayette legacy was never about heredity.） Amaury de LaGrange’s sympathies are difficult to unravel. LaGrange himself corresponded with the German Baron von Sichart, who wanted his opinion on how to gauge Americans entering the war. Yet far more damning is the fact that the baron testified for the collaborationist prosecution at the Riom Trial.
To paraphrase LaGrange biographer André Vignon: In the darkest hour of his country’s moral need, LaGrange gave his support not to the forces of moderation, democracy, and progress, for which he had fought most of his life, but to a fascist regime. To put it mildly, taking part in a show trial was not the baron’s finest hour, and though it’s easy to judge from a distance of more than fifty years, it remains difficult to make sense of the family position on these matters. I don’t know what Emily thought about the Riom Trial, but chose to portray her as disapproving, simply because I hope she was.
How the baron’s daughter and successor felt can only be surmised. Anne, who was actually a young mother raising a baby in the village during the war, left behind little for me to unearth. In letters, Beatrice described Anne as being very beautiful but seemingly unaware of it. She also described Anne as being athletic and having knitted for the orphans when she was herself a young person. Unfortunately, I was unable to get much more of a picture from Anne’s descendants. How much about Anne’s political opinions could I infer from her husband, who became a conservative Catholic newspaperman in the aftermath of his release from a German prison camp? Did Anne know Jewish children were being sheltered at the preventorium—and if so, did she approve? Given her family’s long-standing public service, I think it likely she would shelter Jewish children, but given her father’s casual anti-Semitism, I couldn’t be sure. Did Anne know guns were being hidden under the floorboards in the boys’ dormitory? Again, I think it highly likely, since her brother-in-law, American spymaster Henry Hyde, was arming the French Resistance. （Fun fact: Henry Hyde was the son of James Hazen Hyde, who first took Beatrice Chanler to see Chavaniac.）
Given the instrumental role that Anne and her mother, Emily, played at the castle, it would have been unconscionable to leave their valiance out of a story about its history. But without more information, I couldn’t make either of them the heroines of the novel. I love to write biographical fiction, but when the history is fraught and relatively recent, I’m wary of lionizing real historical figures who might not deserve credit, or demonizing any real person who might not be guilty.
That’s where fiction came to the rescue. I decided to put a little distance between the historical Anne and her fictitious counterpart, Anna, by looking for a different heroine around which to center the story.
I noticed that in the 1918 yearbook for the preventorium, a bishop in Amiens refers to the plight of thousands of so-called children of the frontier: orphans and refugees, many of whom had unknown origins, and who were saved by the women of Chateau Lafayette. Then I found a picture from the castle—a child with flaxen braids, a lone girl sitting in a classroom of boys, looking straight at the camera with challenge in her eyes, as if demanding to be noticed.
I see you, I thought. And thus Marthe was born.
Historical fiction authors look for patterns and omissions in the records, and what I found was a Marthe-shaped hole. I made Marthe a teacher, because Pétain’s National Revolution was first directed at educators. They were endlessly lectured against the French Revolution and Lafayettist notions of liberty, and they were coerced into spreading the Vichy regime’s propaganda. I also made Marthe an artist as a tribute to Chavaniac artist-in-residence Clara Greenleaf Perry and the nearly 150 known forgers working in occupied France.