In fact, according to Peter Grose’s A Good Place to Hide, while some forgers laboriously carved stamps modeled on the official versions, others made clever use of the primitive copying tablets used by schoolteachers. One of the actual resistance fighters from Chavaniac, Eugène Laurent, describes having been helped to go into hiding by a teacher at Chavaniac, so I decided that would be Marthe.
Marthe’s method of using photograph paper to forge official documents comes from Marian Pretzel’s Portrait of a Young Forger. And the method by which I had Marthe spring Monsieur Kohn from Rivesaltes prison camp, including the confusion of the German invasion, was the same means used by forger Oscar Rosowsky. Dr. Anglade and Dr. Boulagnon were true-life heroes, as was the Pinton family, who helped protect Jews in Paulhaguet, but Henri Pinton and his mother specifically are my own inventions. Meanwhile, I based Oscar on the historical figure of Madame Foch’s son and the unknown fifteen-year-old resistance fighter from the preventorium. （The tragic anecdote of the boys, the cherries, and the ambulance comes straight from Madame LeVerrier’s letters.）
As for Yves Travert, he was inspired by local police officer Marcel Fachaux, who was in charge of arresting Jews, but he and his wife, Marcelle, gave them forged papers instead. And Madame Xavier is representative of many Pétainist collaborators in France.
As for outright liberties, I made the fifteen Jewish children all girls to ease the logistics of getting them in and out of the castle through the historic secret tunnels. （The boys were housed separately.） How their escape was actually managed, we don’t know. The stamping of French identity cards with the word Juif was not required in the Free Zone until a little after I posit in the novel. What happened to the foreign children Beatrice saved at the castle—if they were sent home after the war or allowed to remain as French citizens—is unclear except in the instance of Sétrak Simonian, who went on to become the village shoemaker. As for Washington’s dueling pistols, they are now missing. Some stories say they were stolen from the chateau in the lifetime of Gilbert Bureaux de Pusy Du Motier de Lafayette, and others say they went missing later, but I like to believe that they’re still there in the tunnels where I had Marthe hide them.
Finally, I have mentioned the French tricolor and the American flag flying side by side in 1939, but this might not have been a convention until after the war. You can see them flying at Chavaniac at the time of this writing, and I encourage you to visit this inspiring historic place if you’re at all able.
For more information about my choices and changes in this novel, please see StephanieDray.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project is the most consuming I’ve ever undertaken, and I couldn’t have done it without “my own dear heart,” my incredible husband, who lived in the dungeon with me, fed and watered me like a houseplant, and pulled me back from the brink on more occasions than I care to recall. In addition to my wonderful sister and the rest of my family, there are so many other people to whom I am endlessly grateful, including especially William A. Chanler, whose dedication to his grandmother’s memory was so touching and who granted me permission to incorporate Beatrice’s own words into the novel and bring her story to life. I will miss our adventures together as historical detectives, but I know that we only uncovered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Beatrice, and I’m hoping we can eventually explore another project about her beginnings!
In the meantime, I’d like to thank my long-suffering agent, Kevan Lyon, and my whip-smart and whip-cracking editor, Amanda Bergeron, without whom this would have never come to fruition. Thanks to the whole wonderful, scrappy team at Berkley, but especially Jin Yu, Bridget O’Toole, Lauren Burnstein, Loren Jaggers, Craig Burke, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Claire Zion, Sareer Khader, Lindsey Tulloch, and Emily Osborne. Thanks also go to Richard Furlaud, Jr., who offered some insight into his grandfather Maxime; LaGrange descendants, including Jean Nicolay and Lorna Graev, who shed light on their family’s accomplishments in and out of Chavaniac; Chuck Schwam and the American Friends of Lafayette; and Myriam Waze for all her knowledge about Chavaniac and the many theories we bounced back and forth across the ocean, as well as for the footwork she did asking current and former residents of the village for information. Thank you to Jean Masse for her recollections; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for testimonies of French Resistance fighters; and Odette Begon, Marjolaine Lacaze, and particularly Claire Pratviel for leading me on the tour at Chavaniac and answering my many questions.