Strong Forces in Difficult Times: The Paris Thief by Lisa Rochon
BY TERRI BAKER
The scandalous theft of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in 1911, the Paris avant-garde art scene in the decade before World War I, and the well-planned but often frantic strategies to save the Louvre’s art from the grasping hands of the Nazis during their occupation of France in World War II. Lisa Rochon connects these disparate historical events in her latest novel, The Paris Thief (HarperCollins, July 2026), through her main character, Mathilde. This is a well-researched novel that transports you to the Alsatian countryside before World War I, Picasso’s art studio in Montmartre, Paris under the Occupation, and Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley.
Mathilde, who grows up with her father and brothers on a farm, lost her mother when she was born, depriving her of any maternal guidance that would help her navigate the male world of the farm and beyond, no one to support her when her brothers called her porcine (piggy). This is a critical backstory that contributes to Mathilde’s early affair with a German art teacher, and her subsequent move to Paris to find a place in Montmartre’s art scene, specifically, the artists’ commune known as Bateau-Lavoir. In that world, she meets, and becomes the lover of, Vincenzo Peruggia, the man who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Mathilde’s experience suggests that, in the absence of maternal love and strong emotional bonds with family, young women will try to find love elsewhere, in often inappropriate or desperate ways.
Rochon, a national architecture columnist with Canada’s revered Globe and Mail, reveals that her work as a journalist has honed strong research techniques. For her novel, this research included visiting sites such as the Chateau de Chambord and the Place Émile-Goudeau in Montmartre—where Bateau-Lavoir was located—and scouring the personal accounts of women during this historic era. Some of the most famous artists who rubbed shoulders in Bateau-Lavoir populate this novel: Pablo Picasso, for whom Mathilde models; Georges Braque; Guillaume Apollinaire. However, Rochon also includes women, “recast[ing] the male-dominated gaze of history”: Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), dubbed “Our Lady of Cubism” by Apollinaire; Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts; and Fernande Olivier (1881-1966), artist, model and Picasso’s muse.
In the novel’s other timeline, it is 1939 and Mathilde, who has buried her past and taken a new, married name, works for the Louvre and has been chosen by its director, Jacques Jaujard, to accompany the Louvre’s most precious art treasures – especially the Mona Lisa – into hiding. Mathilde’s protectiveness of Leonardo’s masterpiece is incredibly fierce, so fierce that, despite being a mother herself to an eighteen-year-old son and anxious about leaving him alone in Paris as the Nazis invade that city, she travels to Chambord to oversee the storage of works of art. The Mona Lisa is always at her side.
Perhaps the most interesting secondary character of the novel is Franz Wolff Metternich, a real historical figure and the German art teacher Mathilde fell in love with in Alsace. To dig further into the critical work of Metternich, Rochon worked closely with the Chateau de Chambord, learning that Metternich was known as the “protector of French works.” During this specific research, Rochon was invited to sleep over in the castle: “That night, I was the only one occupying a bedroom among more than 400 rooms!” For Rochon, Metternich not only represents the important theme about complicity during war time, but also how the enemy can be perceived as both evil “but also a decent human being.” The allusions to older historical plunders of the cultural works of countries under siege–the British Museum’s Grecian artifacts; the French display of Egyptian artifacts from Napoleon’s plunder—raises the fierce debate about repatriating these stolen cultural artifacts, something the thief, Peruggia, argued in his defence.
Although the historical time frames provide an interesting backdrop for this story about art—what it means to a nation, and what it means to be an artist—at the centre of this story is a woman who, deprived of a mother’s guiding influence at critical moments of her life, has made mistakes that she regrets. Rochon goes so far as to say that “being motherless leads Mathilde to become unhinged, manipulative and selfish.” As the mother of two daughters and two sons, with close relationships with them all, Rochon recognizes how mothers are “universally recognized as the grounding force of families and, indeed, community.” This certainly translates into Mathilde’s transformation in the 1939-1941 timeline of the novel. Mathilde’s leadership of those required to move the Louvre’s artworks into the French countryside and her reliance on personal connections to free her son when he is arrested by the Nazis, show how female networks are indeed strong forces at work in difficult times.
About the contributor: Terri Baker is an English Literature and Composition instructor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. The focus of her PhD was historical fiction, in particular the contemporary critique found in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
