Until Leaves Fall in Paris
Unbeknownst to each other, two Americans in Paris become resistance workers. He is Paul Aubrey, an industrialist, engineer, owner of Aubrey Automobile, and widowed father to four-year-old Josephine (Josie). She is ballerina Lucille “Lucie” Girard, who leaves the corps de ballet to manage the English-language bookstore Green Leaf Books. Sundin was inspired by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and explores why expatriates would stay in occupied Paris.
While walking along the Left Bank, Josie first spies the bookshop. Later, Paul takes her regularly for Children’s Hour, smitten with the graceful Lucie who “floated over like a wisp of cotton candy… in a pink knee length skirt, pink sweater and toe shoes.” Lucie, a natural with children, recognizes Josie’s creative gift, incorporating a colorful heroine (Josephine’s alter-ego, “Feenie”) who conquers the hard rocks (Nazis) in her story hour. Paul’s cover as collaborator selling trucks to their German occupiers produces information for the U.S. military; he also provides a safe house for downed airmen.
Much of the novel is quietly domestic: scenes of church, book shop, dance lessons as Paul and Lucie fall in love. The most touching scene is when Paul and Lucie pretend to run into each other at Swan Lake. As Lucie enters the red velvet and gilt opera house, “the majesty of the grand escalier in Palais Garnier stole Lucie’s breath” reminding her of everything she’s given up as a ballerina. Paul reaches out, and “only under the concealment of full skirts and dim light could she enjoy the intimacy of entwined hands.”
Days later the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, catapulting American expatriates into imminent danger. American men, formerly neutral, can be imprisoned in labor camps. Suspense is suddenly heightened. By now we are fully invested in these characters, wondering how events will turn out for them.
