At the Edge of Summer

There’s a new painting hanging now in the old refectory, one that hangs above the rows of curly-headed girls, swinging their legs and doggedly sketching apricots for young Maître Crépet. It’s another self-portrait of a woman swathed in robes. She, too, is cradling her stomach for the secret inside. But only with one hand. In the other she holds a wet paintbrush. The woman won’t stop for the baby in her stomach. No. But she also won’t leave her baby behind. She’ll put the paintbrush in her child’s hand and, together, they’ll paint the world.

Love,

Patricia Clare

The core of this novel—artist and soldier meeting over a copper mask in a Paris studio—was inspired by very real history. In researching Letters from Skye and the prostheses available during World War I, I came across a footnote mentioning advances in craniofacial prostheses. Intrigued, I dug deeper. While doctors were making strides in plastic surgery and engineers were improving artificial limbs, artists were helping soldiers with facial scars and disfigurements. British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, while volunteering at the Third London General Hospital during the war, pioneered techniques to create lightweight copper masks. Under the administration of the American Red Cross, Boston sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd opened a studio in Paris offering the same for French soldiers.

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art holds Anna Coleman Ladd’s papers and photos from her time at the Studio for Portrait Masks and I was fortunate to have access to these in researching At the Edge of Summer. Most of the archived documents were used as wartime publicity for the studio—contemporary articles meant to encourage donations, photos of French soldiers both with and without their masks. From the photos alone, the studio’s work was impressive. Before their masks, many of the soldiers had disfigurements and scarring so extensive that they hadn’t been home in years. They didn’t want their families and friends to see them like that. As impressive as the photos of the masks were, more impressive were the personal letters to Anna Coleman Ladd from women writing to thank her for giving their husbands and sons the courage to stop hiding and return to them.

Thank you to the Archives of American Art for accommodating my research, despite an ice storm that closed much of the city. Thanks also go to my mother, Beth Turza, for joining me on a road trip to Washington D.C. and for patiently listening to all of my research-fueled ramblings on the drive home. That’s what you get for raising a history nerd!

A research trip to France allowed me to not only walk the Parisian streets near where the Studio for Portrait Masks once was, but to take an illuminating guided tour of WWI battlefields and memorials. Many thanks to Olivier Dirson of Chemins d’Histoire tours for showing me the France that my characters would have known. His expertise was boundless and his enthusiasm for the history of the area was infectious.

One of our stops was at the medieval quarries beneath Confrécourt, near to the village of Nouvron-Vingré. Used as a hospital and, later, as a shelter for French troops and their horses, the caves at Confrécourt became a place for artistic soldiers to record and react to the war on the fields above their heads. Like my fictional caves, these are full of carvings, from formal rolls of honor to quick initials scratched into the limestone, from crude pictures of women or wine to studied scenes carved in relief. One of the most poignant is a woman’s face, sketched in on the wall, but the carving itself only half-finished. A reminder of how, even in the relative peace away from the lines, war could disrupt. Thank you to the tourism office in Soissons for arranging a private tour of the caves at Confrécourt. To see the artwork, to soak in the history, to just be to feel and hear and sense, all was invaluable.

Thank you to my mother-in-law, Candace Brockmole, for tirelessly accompanying me through Paris’s art museums and across snowy battlefields. Somebody had to come with me to France, if only to help me eat all those macarons and chocolate crepes.

I would be amiss if I did not offer a few other thank-yous.