Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  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.​susan​vreeland.​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.

  PUBLISHED 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.​susan​vreeland.​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

  SUSAN VREELAND is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Clara and Mr. Tiffany and Girl in Hyacinth Blue. She lives in San Diego.