The Riviera House is about a group of people working to save precious artworks from the Nazis during WWII in Paris. It opens with the famous Louvre museum being emptied, and the Mona Lisa and all the other treasures being sent to the countryside, hidden away from the Germans. It’s incredible to think this really happened – in fact, the Mona Lisa travelled in a red velvet-lined case marked with a secret code, which is just the kind of detail that makes a novelist sit up and pay attention!
Natasha Lester, The Riviera House
Luckily for me, the Musées Nationaux has a huge archive in Paris where I was able to look at some incredible pictures of the painting’s coded case and her journey around France. One photograph of a proud curator resting his hand on the Mona Lisa’s crate gave me a real sense of how passionate these art spies were about their mission and that the characters in my novel needed to be willing to give their lives to protect the art, just as people did in reality.
I’ve also placed Rose Valland, real life Resistance heroine, in the story. Rose pretended she couldn’t speak German, but used her knowledge of the language to spy on the Nazis as they catalogued, stored and then sent on to Germany tens of thousands of artworks they stole from Jewish families. Rose knew the Germans would kill her if they found out what she was doing, but she did it anyway. Because of the huge stakes involved – many of the looted artworks are still missing – it was important to write about Rose Valland and these events with sensitivity and respect. But I quickly discovered that the papers relating to the Nazis’ art pillaging during WWII are spread over thirty-five archives in ten different countries. And Rose Valland’s memoir is only available in French, not English!
Luckily, I love a challenge – and a dusty archive! And luckily I speak French, although not perfectly. So I made my way through Rose’s memoir, one chapter a day, but found she documented her story almost prosaically, as if she’d done nothing at all remarkable, when the opposite is true. A novel needs to capture the drama and human emotion, so I had to look for other ways to imagine how Rose might have felt.
That meant, while I was in Paris, visiting the Jeu de Paume museum where Rose worked. There, I stared out through the arched windows at the Eiffel Tower, which was backdropped by a glorious golden sunset and I realised Rose would have seen that same sight most evenings. And I wondered – how must it have felt to be staring out at the tower, this symbol of Paris, a city under Occupation, with an armed guard behind her, a guard she knew would kill her if he discovered the secret notebooks she was using to spy on the Nazis? Those are the moments that make a novel and it’s the reason why I always try to follow in the footsteps of the brave and extraordinary women I write about.
Set between war-torn Paris and the present day, The Riviera House by Natasha Lester is a breathtakingly beautiful story of love and sacrifice, from the internationally bestselling author of The Paris Secret. Out now in paperback, ebook and audiobook.
Natasha Lester is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels such as The Paris Secret and The French Photographer, which also won her a Romantic Novelists’ Association award in 2020. She lives in Perth.