49 pages • 1-hour read
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination and death (including child death).
The Obligation to Resist Injustice
The novel uses the folklore legend of Robin Hood to center its theme about resisting injustice, which becomes the code of honor that motivates Annabel Clement and Colette. This compulsion expands to the acts of resistance carried out by French citizens during the Nazi occupation, designed to resist programs of genocide that targeted Jewish people and others. The novel upholds the argument that adhering to a moral code of equality and fairness is more important than obedience to the law.
The first chapter with Colette, set in the 2018 timeline, introduces her conviction that punishing an evil doer by stealing their riches is a moral good, if not an imperative. Colette reasons that if Linda Clyborn supports neo-Nazi groups which Colette finds repugnant, Linda deserves to have valuable items stolen from her. Colette further justifies her actions with suspicions that Linda has dealt unfairly with the children of her late husband. Colette adheres to her mother’s teaching: “If you can take from people who are cruel and unkind and use what you’ve taken to make the world a better place, then what you have done is heroic, not criminal” (14). Colette considers her motives pure because she doesn’t intend to personally gain from the theft; rather, she plans to put the funds toward support of the Boston Center for Holocaust Education, which she sees as a fitting use of Linda Clyborn’s riches.
In the same way, when Colette steals an expensive watch from Franklin Gorich, she believes that the man’s corrupt actions make him a deserving target, and she intends to use the funds from the sale of his possession to help fund the Boston food pantry. Again, Colette justifies this action by taking the time to research her targets, telling herself “she was taking only from people who deserved it, whose choices had led them to the kind of justice her family had spent hundreds of years dispensing” (116). This notion of family tradition, even destiny, adds further justification to Colette’s actions. When Colette successfully commits her first theft, taking a watch from the Swiss banker Vallotton, her mother praises her by saying, “You’re going to do so much good in the world” (19). This cements Colette’s belief that her thefts are heroic, even obligatory, because of how she intends to use the money.
Ironically, Colette doesn’t see her thieving as heroic when she steals to support the underground network run by Le Paon during World War II. Rather, she sees this as more like a citizen’s duty, as well as a way to honor her family’s tradition and her mother’s legacy. Annabel used her skill at theft to furnish funds to support the French Resistance, and in like manner, Colette learns after the war that her efforts helped Le Paon smuggle over 100 people out of the city so that they couldn’t be deported to the death camps.
Annabel further exhibits the obligation to resist injustice when she steals Hélène Rosman’s diamond bracelets from the woman Möckel gave them to. Since Möckel originally stole them from the Rosmans, Annabel hopes to return the bracelets to Hélène one day, almost as if the jewels might help ensure her friend’s survival. She commits this theft to correct what she sees as a personal injustice, but it’s also a way to strike back against the Nazi regime and its campaign of genocide. Colette’s support of the Holocaust Education Center continues this fight against injustice more indirectly, using education to make people aware of the impacts of the Holocaust in hopes of preventing such atrocities in the future.
Upholding Family Tradition and Leaving a Legacy
For Annabel and Colette, the obligation to resist injustice works in tandem with their belief that they’re upholding a family tradition. Annabel traces her family back to Robin Hood, treating the legendary figure as a real man who established a family and had descendants. While families often have lore or traditions they hand down, Annabel and Leo both feel they have a duty (even a destiny) to follow in their ancestors’ footsteps by stealing from those who have gained their wealth by unfair or exploitative means. This charge is so embedded in Colette’s mind that, when she discovers that Lucas and Millie are biologically related to her, she resolves to teach them, too, to carry on the family tradition of doing good, up to and including thievery, if they so wish.
The diamond bracelets become a symbol of family tradition and legacy as their original purpose is to be an heirloom for Saloman Rosman’s twin children. Annabel tries, after a fashion, to rescue and reinstate that legacy after Hélène’s bracelets are stolen by the German officer Möckel when he arrests the Rosman family. When he extorts the bracelet from Bill Carpenter, demanding the jewel in return for helping the Charpentiers emigrate to the US, Hubert treats the bracelet as his legacy, using it to gain the attention of Bill’s wife, Francine, and loaning it to the Diamond Museum for the exhibit Lucas is curating. When the true owner, Daniel Rosman, comes forward, he recognizes the bracelets as his family’s legacy, both in the interview with the jeweler, when he sees a note in his father’s handwriting, and in his choice to gift the jewels to Colette. Restoring the bracelets to Daniel also restores them to their original purpose as a family heirloom.
Other characters demonstrate a loyalty to family tradition and legacy through smaller actions. Aviva, for instance, volunteers at the Holocaust Center not just because she enjoys it, but because she feels she honors her mother’s memory with the work. Marty Weaver, Colette’s friend, participates in the family tradition of the jewelry business, keeping alive the business established by his grandfather. In a way, Lucas suggests he was honoring the close bond between their families by marrying Vanessa Verdier, whom he had known throughout childhood.
Liliane illustrates the power of family tradition to instill a sense of belonging when she recalls the cry of the eagle that her birth mother taught her. Though she was only four years old when she was separated from the Marceaus, Liliane remembers that cry all her life and uses it to identify and consolidate her sense of belonging with Colette when they’re at last reunited. The bracelets, the legends of Robin Hood, and the call-and-response of the eagle are all symbols the novel uses to suggest that family traditions and legacies become a powerful means of solace and offer a sense of identity even when family members as individuals are separated or lost.
The Relief of Revealing Secrets
Though the mystery of Liliane’s disappearance lies at the heart of the book, generating necessary dramatic suspense, the novel looks more broadly at the consequences of keeping secrets and the distance that secrets can create between loved ones.
Colette provides the first illustration that revealing secrets can bring emotional relief when she informs Aviva that she’s a jewel thief. Naturally, Aviva, a lawyer, doesn’t welcome the news, but her affection for Colette leads her to consider and try to understand Colette’s motives, though she also understands the legal repercussions. Aviva has a deep personal understanding of the cost of secrets as she realizes that her father, who left her and her mother when she was three, hasn’t told his other family about her. He offers money, but not emotional support, in the devastating moments after 18-year-old Aviva learns her mother has died. Colette, to some extent, became a secret to her father in a similar way when Roger Marceau chose to let it be known that both he and his daughter died in the war. After leaving Colette with their family friends, Frédéric and Marie, Roger breaks contact with Colette, essentially orphaning her. His regarding her as a secret causes Colette acute heartache, compounding the loss of the rest of her family as well as Tristan.
Once Liliane’s half of the diamond bracelet resurfaces, Colette pursues the story of its ownership to uncover the truth about Liliane’s disappearance, a mystery that has pained her for more than 70 years. The relief of learning that secret—that Guillaume Charpentier took Liliane, telling himself he was saving the girl’s life—moves an enormous emotional weight for Colette, and provides an important payoff for the conflict and suspense built throughout the book. At the same time, Guillaume Charpentier’s guilt shows the sense of burden that a lie or a secret can create. He and his wife choose not to tell their adopted daughter about her birth family, leaving Liliane (Anne) with the sense that she couldn’t trust her memories. In a sense, they deprived her of an important piece of her identity, one that is only restored when she’s reunited with Colette. Bill’s death shortly after this event, when he had no other health problems, suggests that the shock of having his secret exposed might have been related to his stroke, further suggesting that the revelation of secrets doesn’t lead to a sense of relief in all cases, or at least not when there is an element of guilt involved.
The revelation that Daniel was Colette’s young pen pal, Tristan, and the Jewish boy who saved her from pursuit by the police, is another source of joy and reconciliation. In their case, adopting the names of Tristan and Isolde for their correspondence was more a romantic gesture than a choice made with intent to deceive. Nevertheless, this relationship functions as a kind of secret past for Colette, one she remembers—as demonstrated by her planting hazel trees in her yard, a gesture toward Marie de France’s lai “Chevrefoil”—but doesn’t speak of. When she finally does consent to discuss this long-ago love with her friends and family, this leads to a discovery that essentially restores her first and lifelong love to her. The reveal that Daniel was Tristan offers one last proof that the revelation of secrets can be healing, restorative, and lay to rest the wounds of the past, freeing a person to pursue a happier future.
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