This tale began with my elder daughter, Kate, a motor-sports journalist who specializes in Formula 1 races and their history. Knowing my interest in the French Resistance during World War II, she asked if I knew the story of William Grover-Williams and Robert Benoist. They were two legendary drivers of the prewar years and close friends. During World War II they together ran a Resistance network in occupied France, arranging arms drops from Britain and carrying out a number of sabotage operations, principally against the Citroën factories. They were betrayed, arrested and killed, Benoist in Buchenwald and Grover-Williams in Sachsenhausen. My daughter then told me of the lost Bugatti, a Type 57 Atlantic, one of four ever built and the only one whose fate remains unknown. She then showed me a photograph of Yvonne Grover-Williams standing beside it in 1937, and another photo of Ralph Lauren’s Atlantic. These images of this sensationally elegant automobile took my breath away and, at that moment, this novel came into my head and refused to leave.
I have taken a few liberties with the facts as they are known, suggesting that Grover-Williams was in France in 1941. He was parachuted in the following year. The incident of the downed RAF pilot is invented, but the PAT escape network was real and steered some six hundred airmen and other escapees over the mountains into Spain. Save for the presence of the Bugatti, the burning of Château de Rastignac in March 1944 is as described here. It has happily been rebuilt, to display once again its uncanny resemblance to the White House in Washington. Other than the sad fact that the fate of the lost Bugatti remains unknown (like the fate of the paintings stored at Rastignac), everything else is as faithful to the history of that glorious car as I could make it. I was greatly helped by a genial New York–based Bugatti enthusiast and historian, Walter Jamieson, who was extremely generous with his time and his library, and I am very grateful to him.
The amusement park is my invention, but Jérôme’s plan to replace Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette with a nineteenth-century French village owes a lot to the charmingly re-created village of Le Bournat in Le Bugue, on the banks of the Vézère River. It has an old schoolroom and parish church, a windmill and bakery, functioning workshops for the blacksmith and the knife maker and much more. On Wednesday evenings in summer it offers feasts, with vast joints of ham suspended and roasted over cinders, which are strongly recommended. Of the marchés nocturnes, I cannot speak too highly. They have added a wonderful new dimension to the attractions of the Périgord as a great tourist destination. Our family has been attending them since they began in the village of Audrix on Saturdays, which was when my wife first wrote about the culinary charms of these evening events in Gourmet magazine. Beaumont-du-Périgord has another excellent night market on Mondays, and now the big towns are offering their own.
All the Bruno books are indebted to my friends and neighbors in the Périgord and the lovely landscape they nurture. It has fertile soil, wonderful food, excellent wines, a temperate climate and more history packed into its borders than anywhere else on earth. It is a very special place, filled with enchantments. As Henry Miller wrote in The Colossus of Maroussi:
I believe that this great peaceful region of France will always be a sacred spot for man and that when the cities have killed off the poets this will be the refuge and the cradle of the poets to come. I repeat, it was most important for me to have seen the Dordogne: it gives me hope for the future of the race, for the future of the earth itself. France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.
My profound thanks go to my family, who were the first to read this book, with special gratitude to Kate for giving me the idea and to our basset hound, Benson, on whom I practice dialogue during our walks. I am also very grateful to Jane and Caroline Wood in Britain, to Jonathan Segal in New York, and Anna von Planta in Zurich for their matchless editing skills.