The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

importance for the successful securing of the Normandy bridgehead.”
    Details of rationing under Vichy, the organization of Vichy security forces (including the notorious North African unit), the location of German Headquarters, and the texts of BBC messages are as accurate as current research can make them. The Centre Jean Moulin in Bordeaux is an imposing and helpful library and a memorial to the Resistance. I am indebted to André Roulland’s La Vie en Périgord sous l’Occupation, to Jacques Lagrange’s 1944 en Dordogne, to the memoirs of René Coustellier in Le Groupe Soleil, and to Guy Penaud’s magnificent Histoire de la Résistance en Périgord . I also sought within the limits of fiction to base my accounts of sabotage and military operations on reality. Readers of George Millar’s Maquis, one of the outstanding books to emerge from the Resistance, will recognize my debt to him. I must also cite my reliance on Max Hastings’s Das Reich, an admirable work of research and reconstruction.
    I was introduced to the Périgord by my friends of three decades Gabrielle Merchez and Michael Mills, whose kindness and welcome kept bringing me back. My friend Jean-Henri Picot, son of the renowned Compagnon de la Résistance Paul Picot, opened for me his family archive and recounted his boyhood reminiscences of being able to eat eggs and chicken daily in the Périgord countryside in 1942-44. Other friends and neighbors in the Périgord were generous with their dinner tables, their time, and their memories. I have borrowed some of their names, some of their personalities, and tried to recapture some of their warmth in this novel. Jean-Louis and Kati Perusin introduced me to the songs of Charles Trenet. And I am indebted to Jo and Collette da Cunha, and their invaluable personal library. It was Jo who first acquainted me with the local pineau, which he makes himself, and whose charms ensured that this book took rather longer to write than expected.
    Anyone who has seen the extraordinary paintings of the Lascaux caves has probably asked themselves why artists of such genius limited themselves to the paintings of horses, bulls, deer, ibex, and bear, and did not seek to depict their landscapes and settings, or indeed themselves. Art and humanity are so closely entwined that the urge to portrait, whether in the statues of ancient Greece or in the paintings of the Renaissance, seems to be a logical and even inevitable part of the artistic process. But there are prehistoric images of the human form, in statuettes and in the caricatures of faces engraved at a Marche, near Poitiers. The lifestyle I ascribe to the people who created Lascaux, which seems to have borne great similarity to that of the North American Indians and Siberian tribes like the Evenk, is based on the fractional achaeological and anthropological evidence. The work and theories of l’Abbé Breuil and of André Leroi-Gourhan, allowing for fictional embellishment, are much as I describe. Without their efforts, we would know far, far less than we do, and M. Leroi-Gourhan, and Arlette Leroi-Gourhan, and Brigitte and Gilles Dellux have been, along with Ann Sieveking’s The Cave Artists and the museum at Les Eyzies, my constant guides.
    Finally, there is nothing outlandish about my suggestion that there remain undiscovered caves that could contain artistic riches to rival Lascaux. Two or three new caves are discovered, or rediscovered, in southwestern France each year. In 1994, cave explorers in the Ardeche region of France discovered what is now known as the Chauvet cave, containing over four hundred paintings and engravings that are at least thirty thousand years old. And in the year 2000, another magnificent cave gallery of engravings dating from a similar period was discovered at Cussac, near le Buisson, within strolling distance from the house at which this novel was being written. The Cussac cave, some 900 yards long, also contains some silhouettes of women, and erotic designs. Who knows what might emerge next in this cradle of humanity that the people of Périgord call the Vallée de l’Homme? It remains the small, enchanting part of Europe that has known the longest continuous human habitation. And anyone who knows its climate, its geography, its food, its people and their generous welcome will understand why after over thirty thousand years it is still going strong. And as the English learned in the fifteenth century, the Germans in the twentieth, and