The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau

Annabel, Colette’s mother, is a minor supporting character who acts first as a mentor and guide to Colette, then later as a foil when Colette tries to live up to her mother’s memory. Annabel is a caring and compassionate woman who is devoted to her daughters and teaches them the value of family tradition, honor, and belonging. Annabel is proud of her family’s supposed descent from Robin Hood and finds this both a calling and her passion—a passion that supersedes her love for her husband, Roger, which, it’s suggested, was a youthful infatuation that faded once she realized how little she has in common with the actual man.

Given the Nazi occupation of Paris, Annabel believes that she’s striking a blow for justice when she steals jewels and uses the money gained from Frédéric’s sale of those jewels to fund Le Paon’s underground network. Roger doesn’t support Annabel’s work, and they quarrel often about it. Annabel’s friendship with Hélène Rosman proves the moral value that she passes to Colette: the understanding that shared humanity transcends differences in culture, ethnicity, or religion. However, Annabel’s outrage over the injustice done to Jewish families during the July 1942 roundup motivates her to steal back Hélène’s bracelets more out of revenge than a sense of justice. This, Annabel fears, clouds her motives as well as resulting in her family’s arrest by German officials.

Annabel is brave to the end, resisting Möckel’s interrogation and intuiting that he’s a small, narrow-minded, self-important, and selfish man led astray. Though she deeply regrets leaving her daughters and makes one last desperate effort to see her husband and help Colette, she feels peace at the end of her life with a vision that comes to pass, that of her daughters as older women sitting together beneath a hazel tree. Her influence on Colette provides an example of the novel’s examination of the importance of family legacy as well as the impacts of grief.

Aviva Haskell is briefly a point-of-view character but, for the most part, a supporting character in the novel, a foil and companion to Colette and the only family she has remaining at the beginning of the 2018 storyline. Aviva is 38, attractive, and a successful lawyer. She’s intelligent, determined, and kind, but she’s also someone who believes in upholding the law, and she’s shocked to learn Colette is a jewel thief. That Aviva ultimately understands and accepts this, despite her professional ethics, shows her capacity for compassion.

Aviva’s father left when she was small, and though he continued to live in Boston, he never stayed in contact with or supported her. When her mother, Rachel, died when Aviva was 18, Aviva felt orphaned and alone. Staying with Colette made Aviva feel she still had family. Aviva spends part of her time volunteering at the Holocaust Center, and though she feels this might be influencing her advancement in her career, it’s important to her to support this cause and the institution to which her mother devoted her life. In the end, Aviva takes on the role of Colette’s adopted daughter, destined to inherit Colette’s half of the bracelet. Her love affair with Lucas leaves Aviva, too, with an enlarged family as well as the satisfaction of seeing Colette put aside the grief of her past to look to the future.

Marty is a supporting character who plays a key role in certain events that serve the plot of the novel. Marty owns Weaver’s Diamond Exchange, which was founded by his grandfather, Joseph Weaver, and then passed to Marty’s father, Joseph Jr., who passed the store to Marty in 1967. Colette describes him as having golden hair, “his eyes a brilliant blue, and his strong jaw and high cheekbones looked like they’d been carved from marble” (27). Marty tried several times to get Colette to date him, but she was too guarded and reserved to accept, and he went on to marry someone else.

After dating younger women, Marty tries one more time to ask if Colette would see him as a potential romantic partner, showing that his larger role, aside from supporting Colette’s efforts to locate certain jewels and solve certain mysteries, is to help her clarify what she would like in a romantic partner. Marty graciously accepts that Colette values their friendship and continues to provide his help and advice as events of the novel unfold. In the end, his support of her marriage shows that his affection for Colette is genuine. He proves the foil and opposite of her father, who abandoned Colette, by remaining a faithful and devoted friend.

Lucas begins as a background character whose role gains in importance as his connection to the bracelets, and consequently to Colette’s family, emerges throughout the novel. Lucas is in his forties, a “tall, broad-shouldered man with gray-flecked dark hair” and green eyes (89). The green eyes will later prove a connection to Liliane. Lucas’s father was Ronan O’Mara, a construction worker of Irish descent, who was killed in a work-related accident when Lucas was three. As a consequence, his mother moved back to be near her parents, and Lucas became close to his grandfather, Bill Carpenter. He also knew the family friends, Hubert and Odile Verdier, and their daughter, Vanessa. Lucas married Vanessa, but her passing before the story opens has left him to raise his college-age daughter, Millie, alone.

Lucas has a calm personality, strong principles, and deep integrity. He’s dedicated to his family and his work at the Diamond Museum. Lucas believes in fair treatment and justice, which puts him in the center of the struggle between Hubert Verdier, who is part of Lucas’s family, and Colette’s wish to find the truth about what happened to her sister. Lucas tries to walk a middle ground that encompasses what is morally true as well as legally correct, but his grandfather’s confession teaches him that these distinctions aren’t always clear.