Tinker, tailor, soldier, scholar, spy. Who could have imagined that the young man with modest beginnings who had grown up in a farming village in the Loire valley, was made destitute by the Great Depression, went on to serve in the Foreign Legion, was educated and taught at the Louvre, captured after Dunkirk by the Wehrmacht during the German invasion of France, escaped and found his way to Valençay where he was charged with safeguarding in his bedroom Leonardo’s immortal Mona Lisa from destruction by the Nazis, then joined the Resistance and finally would become Curator-in-Charge of one of the world’s most significant monuments, the fabulous Chateau de Versailles?

Roberta Downs’ gripping story of Gerald Van der Kemp takes the listener from the moment she was in Paris at a grand celebration at Versailles backward to the earliest days of her stepfather’s life, then forward to his death in 2001 and to the rescue of Claude Monet’s house and gardens at Giverny. She speaks both in her voice and that of her stepfather, but also in the voice of the Mona Lisa, as if Leonardo’s subject were alive and in the same room.

Born in Washington, D.C., Roberta Downs was educated at private schools and Bryn Mawr College. She has lived in Mexico City, Paris, London, Hong Kong, and New York City. The Man Who Slept with the Mona Lisa is her first novel. A second audiobook, based on the so-called 1973 Battle of Versailles, which brought American fashion design onto the world stage, is in process.