“Thank you, Juliette,” Elise whispered, and Juliette wanted to open her eyes and demand to know what Elise was thanking her for when all Juliette had done was to steal happiness that was never meant to be hers. But then, Elise’s voice caught and she added, “Thank you for saving her. She will be my whole life from this day forward. I promise you.”
And with a great sweep of sadness and joy, Juliette understood. She had done something worthwhile after all, but she couldn’t turn away from the fact that the mistakes she’d made had far outweighed the good deeds. Life is a scale of wrongs and rights, and the balance of hers had tipped long ago.
As Elise pulled away, Juliette could hear the voice of Lucie, or the girl she’d raised as Lucie, and she felt a great peace settle over her. She wanted to reach for her one last time, to hold in her arms the child she’d spent seventeen years loving as her own, though she’d never had the right. But she couldn’t move, and just as she was beginning to despair, she heard another voice, and suddenly, the world was awash in a strange glow.
“Maman?” It was Lucie speaking, but it wasn’t the Lucie who loomed over her hospital bed like a specter, but rather the Lucie who was walking toward her now with her hand outstretched, the little girl she had lost so long ago.
“I’m so sorry, my love,” Juliette whispered, and above her, in the hospital room, she heard crying, and she thought that perhaps the women there believed she was speaking to them. But she wasn’t. She was apologizing to her three-year-old daughter for letting her die, and then for trying to replace her because there was no other way forward.
But little Lucie was smiling, and she didn’t look angry, not at all. “Mathilde has her mother now, Maman. They’ll be all right, both of them,” she said, her eyes sparkling like the waters of the Seine. “Come. Papa and the others are waiting. It is time to go home.”
And so, her heart overflowing with joy, Juliette Foulon reached out and, holding tightly to the tiny hand of her little girl, followed her into the light.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I sat down to write The Paris Daughter in the summer of 2021, the world seemed to be getting back to normal after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. I went on a book tour for The Forest of Vanishing Stars; businesses and schools were reopening; and we were reflecting, as a society, about having made it through a period of great darkness—the kind of trial by fire that is often a component of books about World War II.
I spent much of my book tour talking about how World War II novels remind us of our resilience in trying times, and I hoped, as I began to write The Paris Daughter, that this book would be another powerful affirmation of the human capacity for goodness, strength, and faith in the face of adversity.
I had no idea, though, that we would soon have an even stronger reminder of the terror ordinary people had to endure during World War II.
Of course you know by now that a huge part of the plot revolves around innocent civilians being bombed, which happened not just in France but all over Europe and Asia (as well as in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and even Dutch Harbor, Alaska) during the Second World War. I spent a lot of time trying to imagine the fear and helplessness one would feel in the midst of war, knowing that any day, a bomb could fall from the sky, obliterating everything in its path.
And then, just after I wrapped up the first draft of the book, that situation suddenly became a reality for millions in modern-day Europe. Watching the heartbreaking events of 2022 unfold in Ukraine gave us all an intimate look at the price that so many innocent people, especially children, pay in wartime—but it also reminded us of the horrific cost of deadly weapons being deployed in civilian neighborhoods.
Such is the case in The Paris Daughter, which includes the real-life Allied bombing raids of the German-controlled Renault factory in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. In the book, Juliette and Paul Foulon spy strange-looking phosphorescent markers drifting down from the sky one dark night, in the way that many residents of western Paris realized, mere seconds before the first blast, that they were about to be bombed. That night, March 3, 1942, 235 RAF aircraft dropped 540 bombs, fewer than half of which fell in the target area, according to Lindsey Dodd’s French Children Under the Allied Bombs, 1940–45, one of the many helpful books I used in my research. In Boulogne-Billancourt during that raid, 371 civilians were killed and another 317 were injured—but the Renault factory was back up and running again within six months.
Thirteen months and one day after that first bombing, the Allies came again, determined to wipe out the German-controlled factory. This time, though, it was the U.S. Air Force, arriving in broad daylight just as the famed Longchamp racecourse opened for the season. Eighty-eight aircraft dropped 650 bombs that day, with only 41 percent hitting their targets, according to Dodd’s book. Three hundred twenty-seven civilians died as a result of the raid, and more than five hundred were injured in Boulogne-Billancourt alone. Like the Foulons, many were simply at home, going about their daily routines, when they lost everything.
I was still trying to understand what it would feel like to be a child under constant threat of bombing when I got an intriguing email. It was from a Holocaust survivor named Herb Barasch, who had lived in Belgium when World War II began, and who had just finished reading my 2020 novel, The Book of Lost Names. “I am a child survivor, hidden during the Holocaust,” he wrote. “Your fiction is truly the reality of what happened during the Holocaust.”
Fascinated, I wrote back, and we set up a time to chat by phone. During our call, he told me about the wrenching decision his parents made: they sent him off to live under a false identity at a Catholic orphanage, similar to the decision Ruth makes to send her children off with strangers in The Paris Daughter. “I was taken by a group of Underground people who placed the children in different locations,” he told me. “My parents had no idea where I was going to be. The arrangement was that you won’t know where your children are, and if you can’t agree to that, we can’t go forward.”
Much like Elise in The Paris Daughter when she leaves Mathilde with Juliette, Barasch’s parents left him behind knowing that they’d have no control over his safety—and heartbreakingly, no way to know, until the war ended, that he was all right.
“Their inner strength was unbelievable,” he said. “They allowed someone to come take their son, knowing that they might not live, but they wanted me to survive. It was a lot for them to do that. It really scarred them for life.”
Barasch stayed hidden for more than two years, and not only did he make it through, but so, too, did his parents, hiding in a basement. The family moved to the United States in 1948, and he now lives in San Francisco. Though the war is nearly eighty years in the past, Barasch still has clear memories of what it felt like to know that a bomb could fall from the sky at any moment.
“We had a bomb shelter in the monastery where I lived,” he explained. “Sometimes you’d be there for seven, eight hours, because the Allies were bombing. We were all scared. If the bomb hit the building, chances were you wouldn’t survive.”
In addition to talking to Barasch, I read numerous firsthand accounts from people who lived in the suburbs of Paris and grew accustomed to grabbing gas masks and running for shelter whenever the air raid sirens sounded. Such stories and documents are vital in preserving our collective memory of the events that shape our world.
There are many other historical threads that run through this book, too. Those of you who have read The Book of Lost Names might recognize the town of Aurignon, where Elise winds up after leaving Mathilde behind, as well as Père Clément, the priest at the ?glise Saint-Alban. The town, which featured heavily in that book, is fictional, but it’s based closely on the real-life escape lines that ran through south-central France, relying on forgers to create identity papers to move Jewish refugees—many of them children—to safety. In The Paris Daughter, Elise works briefly with this very same based-on-reality network—which was in part a nod to the many readers who asked for a follow-up to The Book of Lost Names. I generally don’t write sequels, but it was wonderful for me to revisit Aurignon for a few chapters, and to see what became of some of the children who survive thanks to the escape lines that ran through France.