The Paris Understudy by Aurelie Thiele, Excerpt

The Paris Understudy

This powerful debut novel brings to life the hard choices Parisians made–or failed to make–under Nazi occupation, in the tradition of Pam Jenoff and Fiona Davis.

1938. Paris Opera legend Madeleine Moreau must keep newcomer Yvonne Chevallier, whose talent she fears, off the stage. As the long-standing star of the opera, she is nowhere near ready to give up her spotlight. The perfect solution: enlist Yvonne as her understudy so she can never be upstaged. When Madeleine is invited to headline at Germany’s pre-eminent opera festival, she is sure this will cement her legacy. But war is looming, and when she learns that Adolf Hitler himself will be in attendance, she knows she’s made a grave error. As Madeleine makes a hurried escape back to France, Yvonne finds herself unexpectedly thrown into the limelight on the German stage.

When a newspaper photograph shows Hitler seemingly enraptured by Yvonne, Yvonne’s life is upended. While she is trying frantically to repair her reputation at home, Yvonne’s son is captured and held as a prisoner of war. Desperate to free her son, she makes an impossible choice: turn to the enemy.

As the Nazis invade Paris, both women must decide what they are willing to do in pursuit of their art. They form an unlikely alliance, using their fame to protect themselves and the people they love from the maelstrom of history.

Painting an enrapturing portrait of resilient wartime women, The Paris Understudy is a love letter to the arts and a stark depiction of the choices we make to survive, for fans of Kate Quinn and Kristen Harmel.

Excerpted from The Paris Understudy, by Aurélie Thiele. Alcove Press, 2024. Reprinted with permission.

Yvonne Chevallier stepped onto the stage of the National Conservatory of Music as if she weren’t afraid. The audience, composed mostly of her competitors’ relatives, greeted her with indifferent applause. Soon they were fanning themselves with the program again, slumped in threadbare seats. The one burst of clapping surely came from Yvonne’s husband and son. She took her place at the edge of the wooden planks, chin high, shoulders back, and turned toward the first row, where the judges sat. Beads of sweat ran down her neck. For a moment, she forgot to breathe. At last, she nodded to Madeleine Moreau, the most famous soprano in Paris, who’d won the same contest two decades earlier and served as that year’s judge of honor. Madeleine met Yvonne’s gaze but didn’t nod back.

Yvonne pressed her hands against the sequins of her sleeveless dress. She’d bought the Elsa Schiaparelli gown in a consignment store on the rue Vieille du Temple. Cut low in front and glittering under the spotlights, the blue dress had raised eyebrows among the other female contestants. They would’ve ruined their reputation in that dress, but at thirty-two Yvonne was older, more respectable too, because she was married, and she could wear clothes they couldn’t. The gown matched the color of her eyes and brought out the golden shade of her hair. She wasn’t above trying to impress the judges by every means.

Madeleine tapped the lead of her pencil onto her notebook. She was more heavyset than Yvonne, always had been, even before the trips to sing all over Europe—London, Milan, Vienna—had taken their toll. She claimed to have turned forty-eight that spring, but it was an open secret that she was fifty-four and dyed her hair raven black every other week. Her Vionnet dress in red silk chiffon stretched awkwardly across the bulge of her hips. Her jawline sagged. She enjoyed enough fame, though, that opera singers who believed she could help them claimed to see remnants of great beauty in her. Her most striking feature was her eyes, piercing like those of a falcon.

Yvonne searched for Paul and Jules in the few seconds she had before the crowd became impatient. She found them on tattered armchairs eight rows behind the judges, at the exact spot Yvonne had told them to sit, where her voice would best merge with the music. Paul, a mop of hair falling over his face, wore a wrinkled linen suit that hung loosely over his shoulders. He looked anxious about Yvonne’s performance. Both Yvonne and he knew much depended on it. Jules, seemingly older than fifteen in the Sunday clothes Yvonne had ironed for him, chewed the tip of a pencil. It relieved Yvonne to find him. Locating her son in the room would bring her good luck, she was certain of it. She dabbed a handkerchief on the back of her neck and gave her signal to the accompanist.

Yvonne had chosen the “Vissi d’arte” aria in Tosca. She loved picturing herself as a famous singer who anguishes about the fate of her beloved after a dictator’s henchmen has captured him and wails that God has abandoned her. Opera wasn’t known for minor story lines, which suited Yvonne perfectly. Her life had been insignificant enough. She enjoyed imagining herself in someone else’s skin. Audience members, sitting up after her first bar of music, leaned forward in their seats. Yvonne’s voice rose in the hall and wrapped itself around them like a spell. She lived for moments like these: for the way the energy in a room shifted when she shared her gift with the world, the feeling she was doing what she’d been put on earth to accomplish, and the certainty no one could replace her if she remained silent. While the other contestants had only sung, she acted too—shook her head in sorrow, paced the floor, conjured a memory with a sweep of her arm. Most opera sing- ers demonstrated little acting skill, but Yvonne became Tosca in that instant. She hoped—no, she was sure—spectators who’d come only to support their relatives forgot they sat in a hot, dreary room near the Gare Saint-Lazare and found themselves transported into other worlds thanks to her artistry.

The applause thrilled Yvonne when she finished singing. She’d expected her competitors’ relatives to keep their acclaim for their family member, and Paul and Jules couldn’t make that much noise on their own. Yvonne bowed left and right, grateful the crowd had appreciated her aria, and struggled not to lose her balance in the emotion of the moment.

What a pity the little ladies of Dijon didn’t attend—those women who’d ostracized Yvonne’s parents after they’d counted the months between her wedding and the birth of her son. Seven months. God help us, the end of civilization is coming nigh. But once Yvonne became a famous opera singer, the mayor would host a luncheon for her at the Grand Hôtel La Cloche and the notables’ wives would have to sing her praises twenty different ways before she sat down next to them.

At last, Yvonne saluted the judges. She searched Madeleine’s face for a hint of approval but didn’t find any. Her smile vanished. She stared at Madeleine, almost imploring. Madeleine waved the back of her hand at Yvonne with the nonchalance of a queen dismissing a subject.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aurélie Thiele is French American and lives in Dallas, TX. She has studied writing at the UCLA Extension School and Bennington Writing Seminars. The Paris Understudy is her debut novel.

 

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Category: On Writing