I’m grateful to Annalori Ferrell and Karenna Sarney for research assistance; SarahScott Brett Dietz, MD, for consulting with me on medical questions; Megan Brett, Heather Webb, Janet Oakley, Melanie Meadors, Erin Bartie Krueger, Gérard Gotte, Jane Lee, Jason Jorgenson, Keith Massey, Erin Ahlstrom, Craig Hooker, and Jane Lee for help with French translations; Aimie Trumbly Runyan for help with telephone protocol; Stephen Wycoff for help with ships; Donna Lucey and Carol Rigolot for advice on research materials; Keith Massey, Jr., for help with legal questions; Andrew Cooper, Evan Singleton, David Passmore, Dave D’Alessio, and especially Christopher Otero and George William Claxton, for questions about weapons; Julia Faye Smith, Jennifer Hartley, Caroline Zarzar, Angie McCain, Kathy Wasserlein, and Jennifer Hartley, who gave early feedback; my mom, who put her eagle editor eye to work and helped me with some research to boot; and Kate Quinn, Lea Nolan, Laura Kamoie, Cara Kamoie, Michelle Moran, and Stephanie Thornton for brilliant time-sensitive critiquing—and all of them plus Christi Barth, Misty Waters, and Eliza Knight for being my writer besties, for years’ worth of listening to me agonize over story problems, and for offering brilliant solutions and help whenever I asked.
For scenes with the duc d’Ayen, I was inspired by Charles Dance’s performance in HBO’s Game of Thrones. And for Adrienne’s grandmother, I injected a little bit of my own great-grandmother, who was crazy like a fox.
Other books not previously cited in the Author’s Note that were especially helpful sources include Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac; Adrienne: The Life of the Marquise de La Fayette by André Maurois; Jason Lane’s General and Madame de Lafayette: Partners in Liberty’s Cause in the American and French Revolutions; Stephen Halbrook’s Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance; Victor Chapman’s Letters from France, with Memoir by John Jay Chapman; Gérard M. Hunt’s Rambling on Saint Martin: A Witnessing; Charles Inman Barnard’s Paris War Days: Diary of an American; and Constance Wright’s Madame de Lafayette, the last of which served as an important resource for details about Adrienne’s harrowing flight from Chavaniac.
Finally, I would like to credit Lafayette College for their interpretation of the motto Cur non as a rallying cry for service, leadership, and bold living—an interpretation that the Lafayettes would assuredly have approved: Why not you? Why not here? Why not now?