Excerpt from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Having been denied that chance, having gotten no response to my requests for interviews, having encountered, time and again, the concerted efforts to remove Lou Villars from history and, one could say, from the planet, I have had to embroider a bit, fill in gaps, invent dialogue, make an occasional imaginative leap or informed guess about what my subject would have thought and felt.

I realize that this method is frowned upon in strict biographical circles. But by the conclusion of my research, and thanks to my education in literary and political theory, I have come to believe—and I hope my readers will agree—that I have partly answered the question of what drives, so to speak, a person like Lou Villars. Not that there ever was another person like Lou Villars. Without claiming too much for my little book, I will only say that I have tried to make my humble contribution to the literature on the mystery of evil.

How could someone, how could anyone, do what Lou Villars did? How did she sleep at night? Why would a French patriot who worshiped Joan of Arc tell the German army where the Maginot Line ended? And why, during the Occupation, would she work for the Gestapo?

Before I realized that my career would involve teaching the French classics to first-formers and correcting papers, I dreamed of becoming a philosopher, of spending my time contemplating (and perhaps solving) the great philosophical riddles. Though this has not been my destiny, I now find myself faced with a moral quandary worthy, in my opinion, of serious consideration:

Lou Villars did evil, unforgiveable things. So what does it say about the biographer, me, that researching and writing her life has given new meaning and purpose to my own less dramatic, less reprehensible existence?

Excerpted from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose Copyright © 2014 by Francine Prose. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.