The Paris Thief

by Lisa Rochon

Genres: World War II

Synopsis

For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, The Paris Library and The Paris Bookseller, a story of love, betrayal and sacrifice. In wartime Paris, a woman is entrusted with saving the Mona Lisa during the Nazi occupation - until her first love walks back into her life now wearing the uniform of the enemy.

She feels the weight of her responsibility, the weight of her secret. With bitter hands, she wraps up the portrait, closes the case and clicks the latches in place.

1910: Eighteen-year-old Matilde has escaped her lonely provincial childhood to become a painter in Montmartre. Moving in bohemian circles, she models for Picasso and lives hedonistically amongst the artists, writers and intellectuals of Paris. But when the Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, and a number of Matilde's friends and lovers become suspects, life will never be the same again.

1940: As the enemy marches into Paris, Matilde, now an archivist at the Louvre, is tasked with the evacuation of hundreds of priceless masterpieces to the Château de Chambord. With her she carries a secret - the Mona Lisa is now under her sole protection, safe from looters. Nobody must discover its whereabouts. But when a face from her past arrives at the château, dressed in Nazi uniform, Matilde finds herself agonisingly torn between love and duty . . .

Release date: July 14, 2026

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Mathilde stands at the edge of the forest, blue shirt, canvas pants, a thin gold chain around her neck. The late morning sun beats down on the top of her head. Glistening above her lips, a slick of sweat. There is no breeze. She wants to be in control like a ship’s captain or a French patron, the way that men look puffed up with their own magnificence. She crosses her arms in front of her chest but thinks it too casual. She sets her shoulders and clasps her hands behind her back. This seems unnatural to her, one wrist slapped on top of the other, as if arresting herself. Finally, she shoves her hands into the pockets of her pants to hide the trembling of her fingers. Church bells clang in the distance; there is the unrelenting buzz of a cicada. She feels more animal than human; she senses everything, all the uninvited changes in her world.

Behind her rises the forest, vast and unknown, bigger than all of Paris. She has been warned that wild boar and deer rut and stampede here. But not in the summer. Not now. This is not their season. Now the land is sleepy. The people are sleepy. Ahead, an epic grassy courtyard parched by the sun. Beyond the courtyard, there is a château, a folly of ostentation that looms impossibly large on the horizon. She had imagined a robust hunting lodge low to the floor of the Loire Valley but instead, rising before her, a spectacle of vanity and wealth, hundreds of chimneys and towers spiralling into the sky. Her fingers tighten inside her pant pockets. She imagines trying to draw the monument and running out of paper.

More than four hundred rooms inside. Likely many of them never occupied. Designed for a king to impress other kings. She doubts the ancient castle can resist fire and rain, or those who want what she has.

“Madame, it is time.”

She exhales loudly and nods at the soldier, distracted. She tastes lavender on her tongue, smells engine oil, fresh straw pressed into wooden crates.

She fixes her gaze on the château, this place she must occupy to stay safe, and hesitates because of its grasping, wheezing self-importance. Heaps and heaps of stone quarried and stacked by unlucky men, spires, chimneys and towers enough for ten villages, all collaged together to bring an old French king closer to God.

The soldier positions himself in front of her, his rifle at the ready. Another has arrived behind her, carrying Mathilde’s leather bag in one hand, manoeuvring a luggage cart with the other. He pushes the load onto the gravel path and it lurches forward. The sharp edge rams into Mathilde’s ankles. She turns, dazzled by the pain, but is subdued by the sight of the large wooden case sitting pristinely on the metal cart. With a jerk of her head, she signals for the soldier to step away to make room for her. Moving into position, she wraps her fingers around the handles of the cart. They are crusted with dirt but she cares not at all. During the long drive from Paris, she rehearsed the unloading. Her grip is sure. Small discomforts will not interfere.

“Madame, you’re a long way from the city. This path is for pigs.” The soldier in the front scoffs and kicks a boot at the pebbled track.

She squints at the sun and does not look at the soldiers. Her dark bangs hang bluntly above her eyebrows. “I will manage.”

“But, madame,” says the other, his face slick with the heat, “the cart will be a brute to push.”

“Thank you for stepping away.” There is a long silence and she knows the soldiers are exchanging glances. She smells their onion sweat, their ignorance about the treasure they are shepherding along an inglorious path. “She is my responsibility.”

The sun pounds down its terrible heat. She steps her feet back to gain purchase and channels the energy of a stubborn mule. The wheels spit and pop. The cart advances.

“Well, look at that, this one’s stronger than I thought,” mutters the older soldier to the other.

She thinks, Va te faire foutre. Instead, she leans her body hard against the metal bars and advances, fixing her gaze on the château far, far ahead.

Suddenly the cart lunges sideways and the wooden case wobbles before hitting the grass. “No damage,” she says, whispering through her teeth. “No damage.” The soldier from behind pulls a length of rope from his satchel. He shows the cord to Mathilde and raises his eyebrows, asking for approval. She nods, giving him permission to rope the box to the cart. He works carefully and efficiently. She straightens the wheels to centre them on the path. The cart inches ahead. In her estimation, there are two hundred more steps to accomplish. She does not concentrate on the soldiers but on the figure who has appeared at the front entrance of Chambord, who has travelled down the elegant stone stairs, where a small stone bridge crosses over the moat. He is wearing a suit and is walking briskly toward her. The sun is punishing her entire body. She wants to rest her head on the handles of the cart but wills herself to move forward. This is her job, she has been commissioned to do this; she will find the power and there will be no goddamn damage. She can see the man’s face, angled cheekbones, eyes shaded below his straw hat. Wearing a bow tie. How absurd, she thinks, in this heat and with their nation on the brink of collapse. His leather shoes crunching lightly, all efficiency, on the gravel. “Welcome. Welcome to your humble new home,” he says, extending his hand, laughing. “Pierre Schommer, special envoy.”

She nods and shakes his hand. “Mathilde.” She does not use her last name, she rarely does. She notices the slight lift of his eyebrows, his surprise at the sight of her. A woman with large circles of sweat blooming over her shirt, a tiny ivory button that has been lost, her dusty shoes.

Pierre’s brown eyes are alert and watchful. He offers her a cigarette and lights hers with his. “It’s a strange world,” he says. “Great artworks are created. And war decides where they end up.”

She watches him cast his eyes over the wooden case, taking in the leather handles, the custom fittings, the three red circles painted in a row. He nods as if in agreement with something she has thought, not said. They stand under the sun and take the heat. She inhales the last of the cigarette and drops the butt to the gravel. “Monsieur, I would be grateful if you could . . .”

She stops herself, aware that she is being unfriendly. A pushy bureaucrat from Paris. If only he knew that she comes from humble stock. She needs to reset her watch and get on rural time. Forcing a smile, she looks down at her shoes and back at her host. “If you would show me where the work will be kept safe.”

Pierre pulls a large clutch of keys from his satchel. They are orange with rust. “Four hundred keys, none of them marked.” He waves a hand at the enormous château. “Welcome to Chambord. Pick a room. Pick some stairs. There are seventy-seven of them. It’s all yours.”

She has studied the interior from her desk in Paris, knows about the rooms and the stairs, the dozens of vast courtyards big enough to launch hot-air balloons or grow bushels of tomatoes. To the west is a soaring chapel, and above that architectural elegance, timbered bedrooms set high above the moat, that incision cut into the earth holding lightless water. “This box will stay with me in my room. I’ll need a guard with a gun.”

The man lifts his hat, fans his face, and settles it back on his head. “Madame, with the greatest respect”—she follows his gaze to the single duck floating in the moat and catches a whiff of the still, fetid water—“our staff is not as extensive as you might expect.”

“Monsieur Schommer, I need a man with a gun,” she repeats, looking steadily at his eyes below the brim of his hat. “Can you provide that?”

She can hear the soldiers shifting on their feet, growing impatient.

“The cook’s husband,” he says at last. “Bad leg from the last great war, but a good shot.”

These crates are not filled with oats for the horses, she wants to say. But this man is from Paris, he is her boss, responsible for the Chambord depot, with more experience than she can imagine. Instead, lowering her voice, she says, “You and I understand these are masterpieces.”

The roar of the trucks pulling up at the edge of the forest distracts them, the squeal of the brakes being applied hard.

“These are world treasures,” she says, bending toward him, shouting to be heard above the noise.

He smiles and shrugs, indicating that, of course, he already knows this.

She feels stupid, stating the obvious, and yet she needed to say it out loud, to steady her mind, her commitment to the project. She looks again at the trucks. There are at least fifty of them. Drivers are yelling, horns are blowing loudly. “We’ll protect them as best we can, madame,” he says. “I only arrived a few days ago. There is much work to be done.”

They walk together, taking turns pushing the cart.

“Are there locks on the rooms? We’ll need iron security bars . . .” She can’t help herself.

“Madame, where there are shutters, there are no windows. No locks that function,” he says, frowning. “The château is old, Renaissance era, the biggest in France. Built by King Francois I as a hunting lodge, used occasionally, infrequently, by Henry II and Louis XIV. Hundreds of rooms, as you know. One working toilet. I’m afraid it’s a relic from the past.”

“Electricity? Lights?”

He shakes his head. “Oil lamps and torches are the best we can do but we rarely use them.”

She stiffens. She needs to recalibrate. After tending to every detail of her fastidious plan in Paris, she had forgotten to consider all of this. This was not part of her mind’s rehearsal. Her system is broken. The château is not safe.

“Fire risk?”

“Of course.”

“The men will have to unload the trucks as fast as they can before nightfall.”

He stops abruptly and looks over at her. “Madame, may I call you by your first name?”

She hesitates and finally offers something like a smile.

“Mathilde, perhaps you will grant me a personal inquiry.”

With the back of her hand, she wipes the sweat from her mouth. The heat has given her away. She is nothing if not coarse.

“Why are you here? Surely you have a family?” He reaches into a pants pocket and pulls out a linen handkerchief. “It’s clean,” he says, handing it to her, sniffing with a touch of Parisian arrogance.

“I do. I have a son.”

She already misses Philippe, brilliant at law school, talented in art, handsome and shy. She said goodbye to him that morning at their apartment on the Left Bank, forcing a smile and calling out, “See you soon! I’ll be back for your birthday. Twenty-one candles!” He did not roll his eyes and say something witty or sarcastic in return as he normally would have. Instead, he looked at her with intensity, his eyes locked with hers, willing her to stay, asking her to, until she offered a final wave. She went alone down the spiral staircase, and when she was sure to be out of sight, she collapsed against the carved wooden banister, sick with grief as the weight of the new reality, the imminent occupation of her beloved country, suddenly came crashing down. One year ago, Germany had annexed Austria and hung their flags of Nazi swastikas throughout Vienna and Strasbourg. Fascist Italy had invaded and annexed Albania in the springtime. All of the papers in the Paris newsstands were reporting that the next country to be seized by the Nazis would be Poland, which would provoke a world war to erupt in a matter of weeks. France, everybody assumed, would be quickly mowed down.

Her fear changed the smell of her sweat. She washed her cotton shirts daily and still the stench of the unknown seeped from her pores into her clothes. The Nazi military was equipped with modern firepower, a formidable Luftwaffe air force, and one million highly disciplined soldiers. By comparison, France was preparing to fight with obsolescent planes and tanks.

“Mathilde, there is still time. Go back to him and save yourselves,” Monsieur Schommer says.

She looks to the sky to stop the tears. She will not cry in front of this man.

“You’re a pretty woman. War is never pretty. It is ugly.”

“This is my job.” She touches one hand to her gold necklace and rubs her stiff neck. She wants to tell him that she is frightened and cannot do this. The secret of what lies packed inside the wooden case must be hers alone to bear. She feels the knowledge as a weight, something of a new, uninvited circumstance, like Persephone eating pomegranate seeds. Did the goddess happily munch the seeds to satisfy her need for deceit or was she forced to choke them back in some dark, forbidden corner? Mathilde considers this, looking to the magnificent, monstrous castle. She only wants to do her job and go back home to her son in Paris, reclaim the banality of the familiar. Her sweet morning pleasures, the feel of her linen sheets against her skin, the trace of daylight pressing through the metal shutters of her apartment, the smell of coffee lifting from her glass French press. Even the sound of Philippe in the mornings, his feet slapping along the wooden floors, how he looked half asleep, lost to the world, while eating jam on a baguette. All the daily routines and familiar comforts are gone. The odds are against her now. She feels herself spinning, rudderless, unmoored. One minute frying an egg in an iron skillet, wondering whether to flip or go for sunny side up, and the next forced to grapple with the wretched shape and depth of human evil. Foreigners—uninvited, illegally, aggressively—will march in heavy boots over her city. At least that is the nightmarish vision invading the minds of the French. The Nazis will be armed with machine guns, mortars, and howitzers. They will follow orders, no matter how brutal. She wonders how much she will have to endure, as a mother, as a French citizen.

Pierre nods in agreement and leans toward her. “I’m not trying to push you away. You come highly recommended from your superiors at the Louvre. It’s an honour to have you here.”

She does not acknowledge his kindness but pauses to look back again at the mounting chaos behind them. Crammed onto the driveway and the lawn is a crush of vehicles, Citroën light lorries and a handful of cube trucks typically used to move stage sets from the Comédie-Française. She sees the small florist’s delivery truck she and her guards travelled in from Paris, avoiding all the major roads heading south. Unpacked on the lawn, there are rolls of carpets and tapestries wrapped in brown paper. Next to them, stone sculptures of Roman gladiators and disc throwers. She sees the wings of a white marble goddess glinting in the sunshine. Advancing fast along the path, dozens of soldiers and volunteers pushing buggies, carts, and dollies heaped with crates. “Now it begins,” she says, signalling to the soldiers to lift the heavy wooden case from its cart, leading them over the narrow stone bridge spanning the moat. The lone duck beats its wings in panic, desperate to fly, sending ripples across the black water. “Show me to my room,” she says. A trail of sweat trickles down her chest. Pierre heaves open the thick wooden doors and waves her inside the château. She feels cool air on her face, sees the heads of antlered deer mounted inside on the walls.

“Madame, may I help carry something?” he asks, extending his arms.

“No, thank you.” She hoists her leather bag over her shoulder and jerks her head to the soldiers. “I only need—” She thinks of everything that is wrong with the day, the absurdity of the evacuation, the civic panic that’s careening through Paris like a mudslide. She knows that the château is in the safe zone. She knows this is why the masterworks from the Louvre museum have been evacuated here so that no harm can come to them. But who can say that a mudslide obeys borders drawn on paper? Her voice is rough with emotion: “I’m here to save some of the beauty. Please, call the man with the gun.”

Picasso has told Mathilde that Montmartre is a dump for all the rejects of the world. He tells her this with a shrug of his shoulders. “Naturally, it’s the same here or in Spain, everywhere you go, the artists, the insane people, the workers who break their backs and fail to get ahead.” She can see what he means. The housing is squalid. It’s easy to tell who belongs to the doomed of the city by their appendages. Red, bloated hands on the women who wash clothes in scalding water all day; purple, frozen feet of children without shoes. But sometimes Montmartre feels like enlightenment. There’s a conviction that, perched high above Paris, the artists working on the hilltop are creating a new world. She has seen the soft northern light washing over Picasso’s studio like a gentle baptism. All the rules chucked aside so that a new kind of jagged art can be born.

Mathilde walks up the steep hill, past construction workers dragging shovels and picks behind them, heading back from work sites in the city to their shanty homes, pack horses trudging beside them. The air in Montmartre seems heavier than in the rest of Paris below, as if the dust from the old gypsum mine on its slope is still gathering in its particles. The rain has stopped, the roads are slick. She passes a couple kissing in a doorway, knocking over pots of geraniums to get at each other’s bodies. She walks toward Place Ravignan, where iron street lights flicker next to a few ragged trees. It’s hard to know how to navigate through the crowd. Barely 9 p.m., and everywhere are artists in berets, women in dresses hiked seductively above their ankles. A mime with a white powdered face and red lipstick smeared over his mouth pulls Mathilde into a swirling dance. They make several rounds on the square, bumping hard into other people, and the man laughs with his ghoulish head thrown back before tossing her aside.

Released, she steps lightly to the low-lying building at the far side of the square. The double wooden doors are painted green and adorned with a single sign: Ateliers du Bateau-Lavoir. She travels up some rotting wooden stairs, glad to be off the streets and inside the old piano factory where artists have staked a claim. It’s dirty. It’s cheap. The plaster on the walls is faded and chipped. There’s a single faucet and one toilet with a broken door for all twelve tenants to share. Ignoring the scattering mice, she walks down a hallway, cloudy with plaster dust, toward the sound of laughter and shouting. Her heart is pounding. Eighteen years old. She feels exhilarated and terribly alone.

It takes her eyes several minutes to adjust. The smoke is heavy in the studio, and the crowd of artists seems heaved against her. She does not recognize individuals, only shapes and lines. Arms hoisting drinks to lips as diagonals, heads as ovals, bodies as cylinders. Her clothes feel suddenly all wrong. Her long hair, caught in a loose ponytail with some of it coiled on top of her head, is too provincial. She has been living several months in Paris and modelled for Picasso for some of that. But here in the studio, among these artists, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s an imposter who has come empty-handed.

“The beautiful blonde from Alsace. You must be Mathilde.” A woman approaches and kisses her cheeks three times, Paris-style. “I’m Suzanne Valadon.” She steps back and waits to be recognized.

Mathilde stares at the woman, at her glittering blue eyes, her shock of red hair. “Enchantée,” she says at last, using an expression that Parisians use and overuse. It seems to cover a lot of territory: acceptance, engagement, civilization.

The woman pouts, her lips dipping wide and full. “You do not recognize me? I will give you a hint. I grew up rough in Montmartre, did circus acts, often on a horse, mostly naked. My mother was a laundress. Renoir has painted my portrait many times.”

Mathilde is desperate to touch this woman, discover her source of power. “And so you are famous,” she says, resisting the urge, spreading her arms wide instead.

“Let Henri Matisse be famous with money from his Russian patrons,” says the woman. “Being famous does not interest me. Degas is my friend. Do you know him?”

“No, not yet, but . . .”

“Montmartre is like an opera that never stops. All day. All night. Get on stage with it. I am showing my latest oil painting about Adam and Eve for the Salon d’Automne this year. Make sure you attend.”

Mathilde feels Suzanne’s eyes taking in her oversized canvas pants and embroidered white blouse.

Her heart is pounding, trying to keep up. “Why Adam and Eve? I thought the Bible wrote enough about them.”

“Oh, that old story. The God-controlled world.” Suzanne swirls her wine and tips the glass to Mathilde’s mouth for her to taste. “You will appreciate my interpretation. Mine depicts an older woman with her much younger lover.”

“An older woman with a younger man?” says Mathilde. “No judgment?”

“No sin. No Catholic guilt. Freedom! And who said she’s with a man?”

“That sounds”—strange is what she is thinking, but she searches for the right word—“like intoxication,” she says, smiling.

“Exactly right,” Suzanne says. “I like your honesty.” She kisses Mathilde on the lips. “Come visit me at my studio down the hall.”

“Have a real drink,” says another man, handing her a glass of green liquid. The smell of anise pierces her nose. Absinthe. Not her favourite. “I’m Giorgio de Chirico. Welcome to my party.”

She takes the drink and glances at the colourful canvases hanging on the walls. “These are yours?” she asks him.

“Tell me, what do you think?” he asks, lifting his chin, showing the extent of his bulbous nose and a brow that seems furrowed with invisible mathematical equations.

She looks closely at his paintings of human figures looming large and silent like statues. “They’re menacing,” she says, peering at the way they seem to be guarding ancient Italian piazzas and colonnades.

“Art needs to destroy the rules of the past.”

She has heard this before from artists who take themselves very seriously. “Why destroy?”

“So that people can see the world, how tragic and empty; that’s what I want to capture in my paintings, the truth of the human condition. Life is molto povera,” he says, looking sadly out the window. “It makes me want to cry.”

She laughs at the way Giorgio delivers the speech like an old Greek philosopher, or a statue of one.

“You’re laughing at me?”

“Not at you. Just the way you speak like an actor in a theatre.”

“That’s from my mother. My father was Greek. Both of them from the Italian aristocracy.”

“I’m glad for you.” She suddenly feels resentful. Recovering herself, she says, “You sound very wise. But how old are you?”

“Twenty-one. But I have lived many lives, like a gatto,” he says, meowing loudly.

She laughs and meows back at him.

“You’re an artist?” asks Giorgio.

“I guess. But I don’t know,” says Mathilde. She feels nervous and restless, looking around at these people. All of them are artists with the guts to throw themselves fearlessly at the making of art. She knows that her art is technically proficient, but, compared to the visions produced by Giorgio or Suzanne, it lacks originality, as if she were a dull student copying lines on a blackboard.

“Why doubt yourself?” he says, shrugging his shoulders, gesturing to all his paintings on the wall. “Pick up your golden thread and let it guide you.”

“I should. I’ll try. I need to find . . .” But before she can finish, another man approaches the artist. They clink glasses and start speaking in Italian. Finally, Giorgio introduces Vincenzo Peruggia. Mathilde eyes his tweed suit and high-necked white shirt, the formal style of his clothes in this, the most unleash. . .