Lisette's List (51 page)

Bernard, the tallest, peered over everyone’s head. “The still life in miniature on the cabinet.”

“Oui! Oui!”
Théo squealed, hopping up and down. “It’s magic. Look!” He went around the room tugging at sleeves and skirts, making sure everyone saw, and everyone marveled.

Maxime tipped his head toward Bernard and said something amusing just to him, perhaps about my marzipan efforts, and Bernard chuckled. Then he said, “The entire room is magical.”

Maurice pretended to be weeping, and when no one noticed, he increased the volume, sobbing so loudly that everyone laughed.

“So now that you have the paintings back, you’re going to leave us,” Maurice whined. “You will come back sometime, won’t you?”

“Òc, òc,”
I said, and a cheer rose up around me.

“Aha! She speaks the Occitan of Provence!” cried Monsieur Voisin, the café owner. I felt redeemed in his eyes.

“How can I leave for good? I’ll have to be back to harvest my almonds and to help with the
vendange
and”—I shook my index finger at Aimé and his son—“to celebrate the installation of plumbing.” I glanced at Bernard. “It
is
possible, I know that. And I’ll be here the next Midsummer Night.”

“Don’t forget. Don’t forget,” said Théo. “The little fruits.”

“Oh, yes! Théo, my hero, who found the Picasso all by himself, will give out these marzipans. A toast to Théo, the magical cowboy.”

I followed him, passing around the plate of marzipan mine galleries, which delighted everyone, even though they fell apart in people’s
hands. That didn’t matter. They looked splendid on the plate, and people ate the crumbles.

Each person embraced me and thanked me, some of them overcome with emotion, others enjoying the paintings, still others enjoying René’s
francesco
. They lingered awhile, then slowly began to leave. Claude appeared most reluctant to go, so I invited him to come anytime to see the paintings again. After surviving Madame Bonnelly’s iron clamp around my back, I picked up Théo and swung him in a circle.

“You won’t forget me, will you?” I asked.

“No, madame. I will remember you every time I chew some Hollywood gum.”

“And I,
jamais je ne t’oublierai,
” I sang to the tune of the children’s song.

And very quietly, following Théo, Bernard asked, “You won’t forget me either?”

“Never. You are engraved on my heart.”

“You are a remarkable woman, madame,” he blurted out, then ducked out the door.

M
AXIME AND
I
STOOD ALONE
.

“Thank you for inviting him. It was right that he should be here.”

I sat on the settee and brushed a crumb off my blue skirt. Maxime came to sit next to me.

“This will be the last time we will see all the paintings together,” he said.

That made us contemplative. I remembered what Max had said about what makes a painting great—its power to enrich us with a truth, to enlighten us so that we understand our lives more clearly. I felt a gentle warmth come over me as I saw that the yellow-ochre path leading beyond our vision had been leading me through the Roussillon years to my purpose, to André’s purpose, to Max, and
back to Paris all along, only I had not recognized it. With that thought, peace descended. André would have wanted it so.

Then my gaze shifted to Cézanne’s fruit and Provençal pottery.

“I have to think it out to be sure,” I said. “At times it seems selfish of me to hold on to two Cézannes, to keep the still life hidden in a house away from people who need its freshness and colors. It seems almost against my conscience. It belongs to France. Marc would agree.

“There will come a day, when I have come to know every brushstroke as I know the lines in my palm, when I have nourished my soul with these fruits and have set the lesson of the lone pear to rest and can value my own uniqueness, when I can cherish solitude and companionship with equal grace—then perhaps I will be able to part with it, if I were permitted to stand before it as long and as often as I wanted to. Do you think the Jeu de Paume would buy it?”

He drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, my dear!” His eyes swam with wonder, although his mouth tightened in concern.

“Then I could maintain a Paris apartment for us.”

“For
us
?” His eyes glistened as they had so long ago.

“Yes. Us.”

“You astound me,
chérie
.”

“One more thing. The Picasso. It’s yours, Max. Keep it or sell it to start your own gallery, as you wish.”

“Oh, no. I can’t accept that. It’s too valuable.”

His hint of a smile told me that some thought was stirring in him. He drew me to him and whispered, “I won’t take it unless you come along with it.”

“I’m already packed.”

AFTERWORD

Lisette’s List
is a work of fiction. Fabled Roussillon does exist, truly deserving its designation as “one of the most beautiful villages in France,” well worth a visit. The Sentier des Ocres, the Usine Mathieu, the Bruoux Mines, and Gulini’s bakery are all still there. The
boules
terrain is still alongside the public toilet opposite place de la Marie, where there is still a café and the town hall. But the spirit is new. To the visitor, there is no evidence of struggle, only of the enjoyment of life in the warm south.

Except for the artists, the principal characters emerged from my imagination, and I assembled them like beads on a thread. Sentences, even paragraphs in two cases, can be directly ascribed to Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Marc Chagall. I felt I was honoring them by employing these passages. For more about these painters, please see
www.susanvreeland.com
.

The question of the authenticity of the paintings is a natural one. At the suggestion of my former editor Jane von Mehren, who encouraged me to free myself from the limitations of biographical fact in shaping this novel in its early stages, as well as by following my precedent of a fictional Vermeer painting in
Girl in Hyacinth Blue
, I invented two of the eight paintings—Pissarro’s
Girl with a Goat
and Cézanne’s still life. The latter I assembled using items
borrowed from his other still lifes, which I needed for their significance to Provençal material culture. In the case of Pissarro’s
Girl
, I have spent frustrating months trying to relocate a painting that I seem to recall in an art history book of a girl, a vegetable garden, a goat, and a path, which inspired its role in the novel, but to no avail. Therefore, I concede that it must have been a wisp of insupportable imagination. I am dreadfully sorry if this disappoints you. To be in accord with the novel, Pissarro’s
Côte Jalet
, appearing on the cover, has been altered. The painting given to Lisette by Marc Chagall is titled
Bella with Cock in the Window
, aka
The Window
(1938, private collection). All the other paintings are verifiable using the names I have used. Apparently, there are many studies of faces that Picasso drew in preparation for
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
. That was my reason for being vague on the number and positioning of the heads.

Into Marc Chagall’s historic letter addressed “To the Artists of Paris,” I have inserted the actual cause of Bella Chagall’s death. The event of her death was already in the letter, reprinted in its entirety in
Marc Chagall on Art and Culture
, edited by Benjamin Harshav (Stanford University Press, 2003), some of which I did not use. Bella’s description of coming to Chagall’s studio on his birthday is taken directly from
First Encounter
, by Bella Chagall (Schocken Books, 1983).

I am neither a visual artist nor an art historian. Rather, I am a passionate lover of art, what the French call
une amatrice d’art
. I am grateful to the libraries and museums that have supplied me with information and images from which my imagination could soar.

FOR
Jane von Mehren

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt gratitude extends to so many. To trace their influence from conception to finish, I wish to name the following people:

My former editor, Jane von Mehren, for encouraging me to seek a new direction, freeing me to invent, and helping me shape this story, and for being a gentle guide and friend through all my writing life.

Marcia Mueller, photographer and friend, whose enthusiasm for Roussillon prompted me to discover it for myself. I thank her for her beautiful photographs of the village and its surroundings appearing on my website,
www.susanvreeland.com
, which allowed me to remember and describe it.

Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of literature, Principia College, for introducing me to the female principle of which Lisette is an embodiment and to the two human hungers at work in literature and in this story: the hunger to hurt and the hunger to bless.

Hélène Albertini and Alain Daumen, lifelong residents of Roussillon, who were patient with my fractured French and were generous in giving me information about the community from 1937 to 1948.

Whenever I needed a detail on a subject unfamiliar to me, a
friend came forth with exactly the right information. For this I thank Ellie Gray for her advice on Lisette’s vegetable garden, goat, and cheesemaking; Marian Grayeske for her advice on chickens; Barbara Scott for her advice on fruit and their seasons; and former U.S. Army sergeant Tom Hall for his advice on the battle scene. I thank Jan Thomas for her hospitality in Provence and her generosity in sharing books and recollections of the region.

To aid my leap into another culture, language, and time period, I thank Suzanne Ruffin, Hélène Brown, and Sophie Juster for their help in getting the French right; Rémy Rotenier and Isabelle Telliez for ascertaining details of domestic wartime history; Jim Farr for his knowledge of the events of World War II relating to this novel; and Clotilde Roth-Meyer for her instruction straight from Paris on pigments and painters’ colors.

My gratitude also goes to Marna Hostetler and Karen Brown, my longtime library angels at University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library, for their research into frame moldings, and to Barbara Brink, development director of University of California San Diego Library, for making available to me Marc Chagall’s letter addressed “To the Artists of Paris,” which gave voice to the theme of the resurrection of French art.

I thank Annabelle Mathias of the Musée d’Orsay for leading me to
Le Catalogue des Peintures et Sculptures Exposées au Musée de l’Impressionisme, Jeu de Paume des Tuileries
(Musées Nationaux, 1948); thanks also to Gary Ferdman, co-curator of the exhibition
Chagall in High Falls
, for tracking down
The Window
, Chagall’s painting of a woman with a goat and a rooster looking out a window.

I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of two books in particular:
Village in the Vaucluse
, by Laurence Wylie (3rd ed., Harvard University Press, 1974), and
From Rocks to Riches: Roussillon
—
Time, Change and Ochre in a Village in Provence
, by Graham F. Pringle and Hildgund Schaefer (Middlebury, Vt.: Rural
Society Press, 2010). Some of the characters’ names were taken from these two volumes.

My own
Dear Readers:
John Baker, Barbara Braun working over and above her position as agent, Angela Sage Larson, Marcia Mueller, and, especially, the writers John Ritter and Julie Brickman, who have given astute critical readings of the manuscript in multiple revisions and made the process fun—I cannot thank all of you enough.

I’m profoundly grateful to my new editor at Random House, Celina Spiegel, for her meticulous editing. I owe so much that is good in this novel to her advice, and I’m delighted to have her as the head of my Random House team.

And I’m forever grateful to my agent, Barbara Braun, for her guidance on matters literary, promotional, and business, and for her love and her constant belief in me through thick and thin since 1998.

To my husband, Kip Gray, whose steady encouragement, loving understanding, and ever-ready technical help are essential to me, I give my deepest gratitude and devotion.

P
UBLISHED WORKS THAT DESERVE
mention include:

Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer,
Cézanne and Provence: The Painter and His Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Paul Cézanne,
Conversations with Cézanne
, edited by Michael Doran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

Norman Davies,
No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939–1945
(New York: Viking, 2007)

Julian Jackson,
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion, 1940
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Denis Peschanski, et al., eds.,
Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy, France, 1940–1944
(Harry Abrams, 1988)

Irving Stone,
Depths of Glory: A Biographical Novel of Camille Pissarro
(Doubleday, 1985)

For a complete bibliography of works consulted, as well as for images, see
www.susanvreeland.com
.

BY SUSAN VREELAND

Girl in Hyacinth Blue
The Passion of Artemisia
The Forest Lover
Life Studies
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Clara and Mr. Tiffany
What Love Sees

ABOUT THE AUTHOR