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Summary
Summary
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française --the first two parts of a planned five-part novel--she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France--where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis -- she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky's literary masterpiece
The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival--some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives--but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers--from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants--cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation--at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic--of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
Author Notes
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. After attending the Sorbonne, she began to write and swiftly achieved success with her first novel, David Golder , which was followed by The Ball , The Flies of Autumn, Dogs and Wolves and The Courilof Affair . She died in 1942.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Nemirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Nemirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Nemirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing-with compassion and clarity-on individual human dramas. (Apr. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Nemirovsky, a young Russian Jewish emigre, became a celebrated novelist in Paris at age 26 in 1929. She wrote eight more novels; then, even though she was certain that she wouldn't survive Germany's occupation of France, she embarked on a grandly symphonic, courageous, and scathing work about France's collaboration with the Nazis. She completed two of five planned movements before she was sent to Auschwitz, a heart-wrenching story meticulously documented in a supplemental section. As for Nemirovsky's masterpiece, it begins with the tumultuous Storm in June, in which diverse Parisians frantically evacuate Paris during the June 1940 German invasion. Nemirovsky's gift for combining the panoramic with the intimate, high emotion with stinging wit, is reminiscent of Turgenev, Babel, and Berberova. Acutely sensitive to class differences, and mordantly scornful of hypocrisy, she orchestrates a veritable carnival of cowardice, lies, larceny, and murder as a panicked populace drops all pretense of civilization. The second movement, Dolce, evokes the eye of the storm in the village of Bussy, where German officers are billeted in French homes, and life and love resume. Suite Francaise is a magnificent novel of the insidious devastation of occupation, and Nemirovsky is brilliant and heroic, summoning up profound empathy for all, including regretful German soldiers. Everything about this transcendent novel is miraculous. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise was the literary success of 2006, chosen by many critics as their book of the year. This success is international. Since first publication in France in 2004 - where it became an instant bestseller - translations in some 30 different languages have been, or are to be, published. Suite Francaise comprises two novels, Storm in June and Dolce , the first in an epic, symphonic novel sequence about France and its people during the German occupation. Exiled from Paris in 1940, forbidden to publish, Nemirovsky began to write about the fall of France. She had written fin on the last page of only two of the novels, but she left in her notebooks detailed sketches of the three that were to come. The French police came for her on July 13 1942. She was sent first to Pithiviers concentration camp, near Orleans, and then to Auschwitz. She left behind a husband, who followed her four months later, and two children, Denise and Elizabeth. They were hunted throughout the remaining war years, carrying always with them the suitcase that contained their mother's notebooks. In the 1990s the elder daughter, Denise Epstein, could finally bear to look at them, and there she discovered the first two novels of Suite Francaise . The rest is publishing history. The story behind Nemirovsky's work is as affecting as Suite Francaise itself. The author was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy banker. After the Russian revolution, the family fled St Petersburg for France, by way of Moscow, Finland and Sweden. In Paris the Nemirovskys made a new life, and the 16-year- old Irene took to her new country with joy - she already spoke many languages fluently and her French was perfect. This she demonstrated with her first novel, published when she was 23, but most of all with her second, David Golder . In 1929, when it was first published, she was only 26, and she became a celebrated writer overnight. David Golder was translated into English, filmed and turned into a play. Nemirovsky poured out novels, stories, plays and novellas throughout the decade that followed. In all ways, Irene Nemirovsky seemed a fortunate woman. She published 14 works in her lifetime, and six more were published posthumously - novellas, short stories, a biography of Chekhov among them. Now, in the wake of the success of Suite Francaise , many are to be re-published, and Irene Nemirovsky is set to become a worldwide literary industry. In Britain, this begins in February, when the paperback edition of Suite Francaise appears, along with the reissue of David Golder . Chaleur du Sang , an unpublished novella found in the archives, follows later this year. Then the books published in her lifetime begin: Le Bal and Les Mouches d'automne in one volume in the autumn, and L'Affaire Courilof and Les Chiens et les Loups in 2008. Critics have likened her to Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and indeed Nemirovsky had Tolstoy's War and Peace in mind as she worked on Suite Francaise . But no comparisons are necessary, nor do they honour the absolute originality of her intelligent voice. Her writing - often imperfect, and sometimes over- sentimental - is to be loved or admired for itself. Not a bird, flower or saucepan escapes her contemplation, and she applies the same lucid perception to the members of the human race she so vividly brings to life. She has a particular talent, a nearness to her readers, so that you almost feel the flesh of the characters she creates, however vile, rapacious and idiotic they may be. This is where she is irresistible - addictive - so that once you pick up one of her novels, you cannot put it down. This is the case with David Golder . He is an international financier, rich as Croesus, with a grasping wife and a heartless daughter. Shylock meets King Lear in this novel, but that is only a part of its interest. Nemirovsky's mother could not bear the company of her daughter, who, banished throughout childhood, returned the compliment. Gloria Golder, rapacious Jewish wife and mother, was Irene's revenge - hated mothers often appear in her later work, too. Nemirovsky challenged most conceptions of Jewish identity, nowhere more so than in David Golder . She was cosmopolitan. She wanted to be a French, not Jewish, writer, so she by no means confined her literary world to writing about Jewish characters and moeurs . Worse, she published her work in the weeklies Gringoire and Candide (as did Colette) - both were notoriously anti-Semitic French journals - and in David Golder she delivers a remarkable portrait of the ruthless, demonic, wandering Jew, the Jew as stereotyped by the anti-Semitic imagination. For this, the politically correct will take umbrage, but they will be missing her irony, so much a part of the Nemirovsky oeuvre. She was surrounded by a French haute bourgeoisie rigid with chauvinism and anti-Semitism. In David Golder she sets out to show these fools that the vilified Jew could have a heart larger than the petty organs of a Christian elite. While David Golder demonstrates that she was aware of a French anti-Semitism, she knew, too, that her family had chosen to live in a country noted for its ready acceptance of the persecuted. She could not foresee a time when a minority would sweep away the France she loved. This must have been the reason Nemirovsky did not bother to apply for French citizenship until the republic of Liberte , Egalite , Fraternite that had sheltered her had been corroded by a decade - the 1930s - of increasing and violent xenophobia, which expressed itself in hatred of all foreigners, in anti-Semitism, anti- communism and anti-socialism. By 1930, there were some three million foreigners living in France, refugees from everywhere. They were Polish, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Austrian, African, but the conservative, traditionalist, Catholic right liked to think of most of them as Jewish. Words of hate were publicly bandied about as the country played out its own version of the civil war blazing in nearby Spain. By the time such hatred - often funded by the Nazis - had crescendoed into frenzied activity, it was too late. Nemirovsky applied for French citizenship in 1938, but it was not granted. She was baptised into the Catholic church in 1939, joining a select band of converted stateless Jews who were marked for special persecution in the wrath to come. When France fell in June 1940, the German conquerors divided it into sections, the two largest being the Nazi-controlled northern zone - Occupied France - with Paris as its capital, and a southern zone that came to be called Vichy France, because its newly chosen leader, Marshal Petain, settled his headquarters in that spa town. A month later, his government passed the first of five laws and decrees regulating the lives and freedoms of Jews, particularly those foreign Jews who had sought refuge in France. Jewish censuses were taken in both the occupied and non-occupied zones. In June 1941, after an experimental year of arrests and internments, Vichy issued a revised and stricter Jewish statute. In January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Central Security Office, mapped out Hitler's plans for the Final Solution throughout Europe, and on May 5 1942 he came to Paris to present the Vichy government with the numbers of Jews it had to supply for deportation. Thus the summer of 1942 was devastating, as the mass arrests began in a sequence of round-ups by French police. Nemirovsky was arrested three days before the largest, the round-up called the Vel' d'Hiv', named after the cycling stadium in Paris (the Velodrome d'Hiver) into which Jews were herded on July 16 1942. Before that, on June 7, all Jews in Occupied France were required to wear a yellow star. Nemirovsky, therefore, would have worn one for less than six weeks. The German occupiers and Vichy France always fought over which Jews to deport. Vichy did not like to deport those with French citizenship, particularly "old" French Jews and war veterans. On July 2 German and French functionaries began a series of meetings in Paris to organise the deportations. The round-up in Paris was scheduled for July 13, the eve of Bastille day, so it was decided to move it to July 16. The conflict between the German desire to send all Jews and Vichy's desire to protect its French Jews came to a temporary compromise: for the moment only stateless, foreign Jews would be deported. And so Nemirovsky was the perfect candidate. At this point her fate was sealed. She was arrested on July 13 because the change of date seems not to have reached Issy-l'Eveque, the small village in Burgundy, in Occupied France, where first her children, then her husband and herself had sought refuge. Two days earlier, she wrote in her notebooks: 11 July 1942: The pine trees all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night's storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs tucked under me! In my bag, I have put Volume 11 of Anna Karenina , the diary of KM [Katharine Mansfield - Nemirovsky considered her to be Chekhov's "spiritual heir"] and an orange. My friends the bumblebees, delightful insects, seem pleased with themselves and their buzzing is profound and grave. In the acclaim that greeted the pos-thumous publication of Suite Francaise , these lines from her notebooks are the most quoted. The same notebooks make it clear that Nemirovsky knew exactly what was to become of her. "I am dying . . . just as a chicken has its throat slit to be served to these traitors for dinner." Not for her any euphemisms about labour camps in the east; she states un- equivocally that she was to die. Perhaps she listened (illegally) to the BBC, which on July 1 announced the death of 700,000 Polish Jews in gas chambers. After two days in prison, on July 16 she was sent to Pithiviers camp. As arranged, the round-up of Vel' d'Hiv' began in Paris on that day. Some 13,000 Jews were taken, of whom more than 4,000 were children. Pithiviers had to be cleared out for the women and children about to flood in from the Paris round-up, which ended at 5pm on July 17. This is why Nemirovsky spent only a day in a French concentration camp. She and 927 others left Pithiviers at 6.15am that morning to make way for them. Her train, Convoy 6, was the first to be sent off under the new dispensations of the Final Solution and, although hasty, it was a clear-out operation. Records, written on flimsy onion paper, are almost unreadable, but there are two Gestapo documents that give name, date and place of birth, profession and town of residence of each deportee. Most of Nemirovsky's fellows were Parisians, most were Polish, most of them aged between 33 and 42. Convoy 6 went to Auschwitz with 809 men and 118 other women. There were 22 adolescents, the youngest being Marie-Louise Warenbron, aged 12, and Rachel Nowodworski, 13. Also on the train was Gerald Souweine, aged 15. Born in London, he was arrested while trying to cross the demarcation line to get to his mother in England. In his last letter to his father, dated July 16, Gerald wrote: "I think that this one is the last, with good reason . . . now everyone is being sent off, women, children, men, sometimes old people, some sick people . . . I'll be going to the east, that is sure." His first line says it all, as does Nemirovsky's last letter from the same camp, written a day later: "I think we are leaving today . . . May God help us all." Convoy 6 arrived at Auschwitz on July 19, whereupon the 809 men were allotted serial numbers 48880 to 49688, and the 119 women numbers 9550 to 9668. Nemirovsky's was tattooed on her forearm. Documents and camp registration cards recording the arrival of Jews to the death camps were totally destroyed at the end of the war, but we know that, in 1945, only 45 had survived, none of them a woman. Nemirovsky was an asthma sufferer. She was ill on arrival and was put into the infirmary. When Heinrich Himmler came to visit Auschwitz on July 1 1942, to witness a gassing at first hand, there was an epidemic of typhoid fever. The SS were forbidden to enter the camp. Nemirovsky, according to official papers, died of typhus, but it has since been discovered that she was gassed to death. She was 39 on the day she died, August 17 1942. Suite Francaise and David Golder are published in paperback by Vintage next month. To order copies for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-Nemirovsky27.1 The story behind [Irene Nemirovsky]'s work is as affecting as Suite Francaise itself. The author was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy banker. After the Russian revolution, the family fled St Petersburg for France, by way of Moscow, Finland and Sweden. In Paris the Nemirovskys made a new life, and the 16-year- old Irene took to her new country with joy - she already spoke many languages fluently and her French was perfect. This she demonstrated with her first novel, published when she was 23, but most of all with her second, David Golder . In 1929, when it was first published, she was only 26, and she became a celebrated writer overnight. David Golder was translated into English, filmed and turned into a play. Nemirovsky poured out novels, stories, plays and novellas throughout the decade that followed. In all ways, Irene Nemirovsky seemed a fortunate woman. Nemirovsky challenged most conceptions of Jewish identity, nowhere more so than in David Golder . She was cosmopolitan. She wanted to be a French, not Jewish, writer, so she by no means confined her literary world to writing about Jewish characters and moeurs . Worse, she published her work in the weeklies Gringoire and Candide (as did Colette) - both were notoriously anti-Semitic French journals - and in David Golder she delivers a remarkable portrait of the ruthless, demonic, wandering Jew, the Jew as stereotyped by the anti-Semitic imagination. For this, the politically correct will take umbrage, but they will be missing her irony, so much a part of the Nemirovsky oeuvre. She was surrounded by a French haute bourgeoisie rigid with chauvinism and anti-Semitism. In David Golder she sets out to show these fools that the vilified Jew could have a heart larger than the petty organs of a Christian elite. In January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Central Security Office, mapped out Hitler's plans for the Final Solution throughout Europe, and on May 5 1942 he came to Paris to present the Vichy government with the numbers of Jews it had to supply for deportation. Thus the summer of 1942 was devastating, as the mass arrests began in a sequence of round-ups by French police. Nemirovsky was arrested three days before the largest, the round-up called the Vel' d'Hiv', named after the cycling stadium in Paris (the Velodrome d'Hiver) into which Jews were herded on July 16 1942. Before that, on June 7, all Jews in Occupied France were required to wear a yellow star. Nemirovsky, therefore, would have worn one for less than six weeks. - Carmen Callil.
Kirkus Review
Acclaimed in France and the U.K., here are two sections of a hugely ambitious novel about World War II France, plus authorial notes and correspondence; the remaining three sections were never written, for the already established Russo-French-Jewish author died at Auschwitz in 1942. These sections should be seen as movements in the symphony Nmirovsky envisaged. Part one, Storm in June, follows various civilians fleeing a panicky Paris and a victorious German army in June 1940. Here are the Pricands, middle-class Catholics, secure in their car; Madame offers charity to refugees on foot, but strictly for show. There is Gabriel Corte, famous writer and "privileged creature" (so he thinks); Charles Langelet, the ice-cold aesthete who steals gasoline from innocents; Corbin, the obnoxious bank director who forces his employees, the Michauds, out of his car. They can handle that; they're an admirable couple, sustained by their humility and mutual devotion. What interests Nmirovsky is individual behavior in the harsh glare of national crisis; keeping the Germans in the background, she skewers the hypocrisy, pretension and self-involvement of the affluent Parisians. There is no chaos or cross-cutting between multiple characters in part two, Dolce. Here the focus is on one middle-class household in a village in the occupied zone in 1941. Madame Angellier agonizes over her son Gaston, a POW; her daughter-in-law Lucile, who never loved him (he kept a mistress), is less concerned; the women co-exist uncomfortably. Tensions rise when a young German lieutenant, Bruno, is billeted with them; he and Lucile are drawn to each other, though they do not become lovers. Then another complication: Lucile agrees to shelter a peasant who has shot a German officer. An honest soul, Lucile is forced into duplicity with Bruno; Nmirovsky relishes these crisis-induced contradictions. Her nuanced account is as much concerned with class divisions among the villagers as the indignities of occupation; when the soldiers leave for the Russian front, the moment is surprisingly tender. A valuable window into the past, and the human psyche. This is important work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
N?mirovsky (1903-42), a Sorbonne-educated Jewish ?migr? born into a wealthy Russian family, had planned to write a five-part novel documenting the turmoil of Nazi-occupied France. Instead, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. Her daughters hid their mother's notebook in a valise, and it remained unread for over 60 years. This Knopf edition includes the first two books of the projected quintet, as well as appendixes with the author's notes and correspondence, and the preface to the French edition. The latter includes biographical information that tells the remarkable story of the book's provenance. Part 1, "Storm in June," describes the panic and confusion accompanying several Parisian families' exodus to the countryside as the Germans enter Paris. The pettiness of an arriviste banker and his mistress contrasts sharply with his employees' acts of courage the kind of heroism of ordinary people that history generally does not record. Part 2, "Dolce," relates the complicated relationships between the occupying Wehrmacht army and French peasants, village merchants, and ruling class aristocracy. Some resisted, some cooperated as necessary, while others welcomed the conqueror into their arms. "Dolce" illuminates wartime economies of scarcity, the brutality of martial law (anyone caught with a radio risked immediate execution), and cultural hegemony (church bells were reset to German time). Throughout the narrative, the uncertain plight of two million French prisoners of war and painful memories of previous invasions haunt the characters. In a notebook excerpt, N?mirovsky reminds herself to "simplify" the language and the narrative. The result is a world-class "you-are-there" proto-epic that is essential for all fiction and European history collections. Mark Andr? Singer, Mechanics' Inst. Lib., San Francisco (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 War Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep--the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?" The women, more anxious, more alert, were already up, although some of them, after closing the windows and shutters, went back to bed. The night before--Monday, 3 June--bombs had fallen on Paris for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced. "We don't understand what's happening," people said. They had to dress their children by torchlight. Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: "Come on, don't be afraid, don't cry." An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multifaceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves. From above, it could be seen flowing along, as white as a river of milk. It guided the enemy planes, some people thought. Others said that couldn't be so. In truth, no one really knew anything. "I'm staying in bed," sleepy voices murmured, "I'm not scared." "All the same, it just takes one . . ." the more sensible replied. Through the windows that ran along the service stairs in new apartment blocks, little flashes of light could be seen descending: the people living on the sixth floor were fleeing the upper storeys; they held their torches in front of them, in spite of the regulations. "Do you think I want to fall on my face on the stairs! Are you coming, Emile?" Everyone instinctively lowered their voices as if the enemy's eyes and ears were everywhere. One after another, doors slammed shut. In the poorer neighbourhoods there was always a crowd in the Métro, or the foul-smelling shelters. The wealthy simply went to sit with the concierge, straining to hear the shells bursting and the explosions that meant bombs were falling, their bodies as tense as frightened animals in dark woods as the hunter gets closer. Though the poor were just as afraid as the rich, and valued their lives just as much, they were more sheeplike: they needed one another, needed to link arms, to groan or laugh together. Day was breaking. A silvery blue light slid over the cobblestones, over the parapets along the quayside, over the towers of Notre-Dame. Bags of sand were piled halfway up all the important monuments, encircling Carpeaux's dancers on the façade of the Opera House, silencing the Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe. Still at some distance, great guns were firing; they drew nearer, and every window shuddered in reply. In hot rooms with blacked-out windows, children were born, and their cries made the women forget the sound of sirens and war. To the dying, the barrage of gunfire seemed far away, without any meaning whatsoever, just one more element in that vague, menacing whisper that washes over those on the brink of death. Children slept peacefully, held tight against their mothers' sides, their lips making sucking noises, like little lambs. Street sellers' carts lay abandoned, full of fresh flowers. The sun came up, fiery red, in a cloudless sky. A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose into the sky. Great black birds, rarely seen at other times, stretched out their pink-tinged wings. Beautiful fat pigeons cooed; swallows wheeled; sparrows hopped peacefully in the deserted streets. Along the Seine each poplar tree held a cluster of little brown birds who sang as loudly as they could. From deep beneath the ground came the muffled noise everyone had been waiting for, a sort of three-tone fanfare. The air raid was over. 2 In the Péricand household they listened in shocked silence to the evening news on the radio, but no one passed comment on the latest developments. The Péricands were a cultivated family: their traditions, their way of thinking, their middle-class, Catholic background, their ties with the Church (their eldest son, Philippe Péricand, was a priest), all these things made them mistrustful of the government of France. On the other hand, Monsieur Péricand's position as curator of one of the country's national museums bound them to an administration that showered its faithful with honours and financial rewards. A cat held a little piece of bony fish tentatively between its sharp teeth. He was afraid to swallow it, but he couldn't bring himself to spit it out either. Madame Péricand finally decided that only a male mind could explain with clarity such strange, serious events. Neither her husband nor her eldest son was at home: her husband was dining with friends, her son was not in Paris. Charlotte Péricand, who ruled the family's daily life with an iron hand (whether it was managing the household, her children's education or her husband's career), was not in the habit of seeking anyone's opinion. But this was of a different order. She needed a voice of authority to tell her what to believe. Once pointed in the right direction, there would be no stopping her. Even if given absolute proof she was mistaken, she would reply with a cold, condescending smile, "My father said so . . . My husband is very well-informed." And she would make a dismissive little gesture with her gloved hand. She took pride in her husband's position (she herself would have preferred a more domestic lifestyle, but following the example of our Dear Saviour, each of us has his cross to bear). She had come home between appointments to oversee her children's studies, the baby's bottles and the servants' work, but she didn't have time to take off her hat and coat. For as long as the Péricand children could remember, their mother was always ready to go out, armed with hat and white gloves. (Since she was thrifty, her mended gloves had the faint smell of stain remover, a reminder of their passage through the dry-cleaners.) As soon as she had come in this evening, she had gone to stand in front of the radio in the drawing room. Her clothes were black, her hat a divine little creation in fashion that season, decorated with three flowers and topped with a silk pom-pom. Beneath it, her face was pale and anguished, emphasising the marks of age and fatigue. She was forty-seven years old and had five children. You would have thought, to look at her, that God had intended her to be a redhead. Her skin was extremely delicate, lined by the passing years. Freckles were dotted over her strong, majestic nose. The expression in her green eyes was as sharp as a cat's. At the last minute, however, it seemed that Providence had wavered, or decided that a shock of red hair would not be appropriate, neither to Madame Péricand's irreproachable morals nor to her social status, so she had been given mousy brown hair, which she was losing by the handful since she'd had her last child. Monsieur Péricand was a man of great discipline: his religious scruples prohibited a number of pleasures and his concern for his reputation kept him away from places of ill repute. The youngest Péricand child was only two, and between Father Philippe and the baby, there were three other children, not counting the ones Madame Péricand discreetly referred to as the "three accidents": babies she had carried almost to term before losing them, so that three times their mother had been on the verge of death. The drawing room, where the radio was now playing, was enormous and well-proportioned, with four windows overlooking the Boulevard Delessert. It was furnished in traditional style, with large armchairs and settees upholstered in golden yellow. Next to the balcony, the elder Monsieur Péricand sat in his wheelchair. He was an invalid whose advancing age meant that he sometimes lapsed back into childhood and only truly returned to his right mind when discussing his fortune, which was considerable (he was a Péricand-Maltête, heir of the Maltête family of Lyon). But the war, with its trials and tribulations, no longer affected him. He listened, indifferent, steadily nodding his beautiful silvery beard. The children stood in a semi-circle behind their mother, the youngest in his nanny's arms. Nanny had three sons of her own at the front. She had brought the little boy downstairs to say goodnight to his family and took advantage of her brief entry into the drawing room to listen anxiously to what they were saying on the radio. The door was slightly ajar and Madame Péricand could sense the presence of the other servants outside. Madeleine, the maid, was so beside herself with worry that she came right up to the doorway. To Madame Péricand, such a breach of the normal rules seemed a frightening indication of things to come. It was in just this manner that the different social classes all ended up on the top deck during a shipwreck. But working-class people were highly strung. "How they do get carried away," Madame Péricand thought reproachfully. She was one of those middle-class women who generally trust the lower classes. "They're not so bad if you know how to deal with them," she would say in the same condescending and slightly sad tone she used to talk of a caged animal. She was proud that she kept her servants for a long time. She insisted on looking after them when they were ill. When Madeleine had had a sore throat, Madame Péricand herself had prepared her gargle. Since she had no time to administer it during the day, she had waited until she got back from the theatre in the evening. Madeleine had woken up with a start and had only expressed her gratitude afterwards, and even then, rather coldly in Madame Péricand's opinion. Well, that's the lower classes for you, never satisfied, and the more you go out of your way to help them, the more ungrateful and moody they are. But Madame Péricand expected no reward except from God. She turned towards the shadowy figures in the hallway and said with great kindness, "You may come and listen to the news if you like." "Thank you, Madame," the servants murmured respectfully and slipped into the room on tiptoe. They all came in: Madeleine; Marie; Auguste, the valet and finally Maria, the cook, embarrassed because her hands smelled of fish. But the news was over. Now came the commentaries on the situation: "Serious, of course, but not alarming," the speaker assured everyone. He spoke in a voice so full, so calm, so effortless, and used such a resonant tone each time he said the words "France," "Homeland" and "Army," that he instilled hope in the hearts of his listeners. He had a particular way of reading such communiqués as "The enemy is continuing relentless attacks on our positions but is encountering the most valiant resistance from our troops." He said the first part of the sentence in a soft, ironic, scornful tone of voice, as if to imply, "At least that's what they'd like us to think." But in the second part he stressed each syllable, hammering home the adjective "valiant" and the words "our troops" with such confidence that people couldn't help thinking, "Surely there's no reason to worry so much!" Madame Péricand saw the questioning, hopeful stares directed towards her. "It doesn't seem absolutely awful to me!" she said confidently. Not that she believed it; she just felt it was her duty to keep up morale. Maria and Madeleine let out a sigh. "You think so, Madame?" Hubert, the second-eldest son, a boy of seventeen with chubby pink cheeks, seemed the only one struck with despair and amazement. He dabbed nervously at his neck with a crumpled-up handkerchief and shouted in a voice that was so piercing it made him hoarse, "It isn't possible! It isn't possible that it's come to this! But, Mummy, what has to happen before they call everyone up? Right away--every man between sixteen and sixty! That's what they should do, don't you think so, Mummy?" He ran into the study and came back with a large map, which he spread out on the table, frantically measuring the distances. "We're finished, I'm telling you, finished, unless . . ." Hope was restored. " I see what they're going to do," he finally announced, with a big happy smile that revealed his white teeth. "I can see it very well. We'll let them advance, advance, and then we'll be waiting for them there and there, look, see, Mummy! Or even . . ." "Yes, yes," said his mother. "Go and wash your hands now, and push back that bit of hair that keeps falling into your eyes. Just look at you." Fury in his heart, Hubert folded up his map. Only Philippe took him seriously, only Philippe spoke to him as an equal. "How I hate this family," he said to himself and kicked violently at his little brother's toys as he left the drawing room. Bernard began to cry. "That'll teach him about life," Hubert thought. The nanny hurried to take Bernard and Jacqueline out of the room; the baby, Emmanuel, was already asleep over her shoulder. Holding Bernard's hand, she strode through the door, crying for her three sons whom she imagined already dead, all of them. "Misery and misfortune, misery and misfortune!" she said quietly, over and over again, shaking her grey head. She continued muttering as she started running the bath and warmed the children's pyjamas: "Misery and misfortune." To her, those words embodied not only the political situation but, more particularly, her own life: working on the farm in her youth, her widowhood, her unpleasant daughters-in-law, living in other people's houses since she was sixteen. Auguste, the valet, shuffled back into the kitchen. On his solemn face was an expression of great contempt that was aimed at many things. The energetic Madame Péricand went to her rooms and used the available fifteen minutes between the children's bath time and dinner to listen to Jacqueline and Bernard recite their school lessons. Bright little voices rose up: "The earth is a sphere which sits on absolutely nothing." Only the elder Monsieur Péricand and Albert the cat remained in the drawing room. It had been a lovely day. The evening light softly illuminated the thick chestnut trees; Albert, a small grey tomcat who belonged to the children, seemed ecstatic. He rolled around on his back on the carpet. He jumped up on to the mantelpiece, nibbled at the edge of a peony in a large midnight-blue vase, delicately pawed at a snapdragon etched into the bronze corner-mount of a console table, then in one leap perched on the old man's wheelchair and miaowed in his ear. The elder Monsieur Péricand stretched a hand towards him; his hand was always freezing cold, purple and shaking. The cat was afraid and ran off. Dinner was about to be served. Auguste appeared and pushed the invalid into the dining room. They were just sitting down at the table when the mistress of the house stopped suddenly, Jacqueline's spoon of tonic suspended in mid-air. "It's your father, children," she said as the key turned in the lock. It was indeed Monsieur Péricand, a short, stocky man with a gentle and slightly awkward manner. His normally well-fed, relaxed and rosy-cheeked face looked, not frightened or worried, but extraordinarily shocked. He wore the expression found on people who have died in an accident, in a matter of seconds, without having had time to be afraid or suffer. They would be reading a book or looking out of a car window, thinking about things, or making their way along a train to the restaurant car when, all of a sudden, there they were in hell. Madame Péricand rose quietly from her chair. "Adrien?" she called out, her voice anguished. "It's nothing. Nothing," he muttered hastily, glancing furtively at the children, his father and the servants. Madame Péricand understood. She nodded at the servants to continue serving dinner. She forced herself to swallow her food, but each mouthful seemed as hard and bland as a stone and stuck in her throat. Nevertheless, she repeated the phrases that had become ritual at mealtimes for the past thirty years. "Don't drink before starting your soup," she told the children. "Darling, your knife . . ." She cut the elderly Monsieur Péricand's filet of sole into small strips. He was on a complicated diet that allowed him to eat only the lightest food and Madame Péricand always served him herself, pouring his water, buttering his bread, tying his napkin round his neck, for he always started drooling when he saw food he liked. "I don't think poor elderly invalids can bear to be touched by servants," she would say to her friends. "We must show grandfather how much we love him, my darlings," she instructed the children, looking at the old man with terrifying tenderness. In his later years, Monsieur Péricand had endowed various philanthropic projects, one of which was especially dear to his heart: the Penitent Children of the 16th Arrondissement, a venerable institution whose goal was to instil morals in delinquent minors. It had always been understood that the elder Monsieur Péricand would leave a certain sum of money to this organisation, but he had a rather irritating way of never revealing exactly how much. If he hadn't enjoyed his meal, or if the children made too much noise, he would suddenly emerge from his stupor and say in a weak but clear voice, "I'm going to leave them five million." A painful silence would follow. On the other hand, if he'd had a lovely meal and a good sleep in his chair by the window, in the sunshine, he would look up at his daughter-in-law with the pale, distant eyes of a small child, or a newborn puppy. Charlotte was very tactful. She never replied, as others might, "You're absolutely right, Father." Instead, she would say sweetly, "Good Lord, you have plenty of time to think about that!" The Péricand fortune was considerable, but it would be unjust to accuse them of coveting the elder Monsieur Péricand's inheritance. They didn't care about money, not at all, but money cared about them, so to speak! There were certain things that they deserved, including the Maltête-Lyonnais millions; they would never manage to spend it all but they would save it for their children's children. As for the Penitent Children of the 16th Arrondissement, they were so involved with this charity that, twice a year, Madame Péricand organised classical music concerts for the unfortunate children; she would play the harp and was gratified to notice that, at certain passages, sobbing could be heard in the darkened concert hall. Monsieur Péricand followed his daughter-in-law's hands attentively. She was so distracted and upset that she forgot his sauce. His white beard waved about alarmingly. Madame Péricand came back to reality and quickly poured the parsley butter over the ivory flesh of the fish, but it was only after she placed a slice of lemon at the side of his plate that the old man was calm again. Hubert leaned towards his brother and muttered, "It's not going well, is it?" "No," he replied with a gesture and a look. Hubert dropped his trembling hands on to his lap. He was lost in thought, vividly imagining scenes of battle and victory. He was a Boy Scout. He and his friends would form a group of volunteers, sharpshooters who would defend their country to the end. In a flash, his mind raced through time and space. He and his friends: a small group bound by honour and loyalty. They would fight, they would fight all night long; they would save their bombed-out, burning Paris. What an exciting, wonderful life! His heart leapt. And yet, war was such a savage and horrifying thing. He was intoxicated by his imaginings. He clutched his knife so tightly in his hand that the piece of roast beef he was cutting fell on to the floor. "Clumsy oaf," whispered Bernard. He and Jacqueline were eight and nine years old, respectively, and were both thin, blond and stuck-up. The two of them were sent to bed after dessert and the elder Monsieur Péricand fell asleep at his usual place by the open window. The tender June day persisted, refusing to die. Each pulse of light was fainter and more exquisite than the last, as if bidding farewell to the earth, full of love and regret. The cat sat on the window ledge and looked nostalgically towards an horizon that was the colour of green crystal. Monsieur Péricand paced up and down the room. "In a few days, maybe even tomorrow, the Germans will be on our doorstep. I've heard the High Command has decided to fight outside Paris, in Paris, beyond Paris. No one knows it yet, thank goodness, because after tomorrow there will be a stampede on the roads and at the train stations. You must leave for your mother's house in Burgundy as early as possible tomorrow morning, Charlotte. As for me," Monsieur Péricand said rather proudly, "I will share the fate of the treasures entrusted to my care." "I thought everything in the museum had been moved out in September," said Hubert. "Yes, but the temporary hiding place they chose in Brittany isn't suitable; it turns out it's as damp as a cellar. I just don't understand it. A Committee was organised to safeguard national treasures. It had three sections and seven subsections, each of which was supposed to appoint a panel of experts responsible for hiding works of art during the war, yet just last month an attendant in the provisional museum points out that suspicious stains are appearing on the canvases. Yes, a wonderful portrait of Mignard with his hands rotting away from a kind of green leprosy. They quickly sent the valuable packing cases back to Paris and now I'm waiting for an order to rush them off to somewhere even further away." "But what about us? How will we travel? By ourselves?" "You'll leave tomorrow morning, calmly, with the children and the two cars, and any furniture and luggage you can carry, of course. We can't pretend that, by the end of the week, Paris might not be destroyed, burned down and thoroughly pillaged." "You are amazing!" exclaimed Charlotte. "You talk about it so calmly!" Monsieur Péricand turned towards his wife, his face gradually returning to its normal pinkish colour--a matte pink, the colour of pigs who have been recently slaughtered. "That's because I can't really believe it," he explained quietly. "Here I am, speaking to you, listening to you; we've decided to flee, to leave our home, yet I cannot believe that it is all real . Do you understand? Now go and get everything ready, Charlotte. Everything must be ready by tomorrow morning; you could be at your mother's in time for dinner. I'll join you as soon as I can." Madame Péricand's face wore the same resigned, bitter look as when the children were ill and she was forced to put on an apron and nurse them; they all usually managed to be ill at the same time, though with different maladies. When this happened, Madame Péricand would come out of the children's rooms with a thermometer in her hand, as if she were brandishing the crown of martyrdom, and everything in her bearing seemed to cry out: "You will reward your servants on Judgement Day, kind Jesus!" "What about Philippe?" was all she asked. "Philippe cannot leave Paris." Madame Péricand left the room, head held high. She refused to bow beneath the burden. She would see to it that the entire household was ready to leave in the morning: the elderly invalid, four children, the servants, the cat, plus the silver, the most valuable pieces of china, the fur coats, food and medicine in case of emergencies. She shuddered. In the sitting room, Hubert was pleading with his father. "Please let me stay. I can stay here with Philippe. And . . . don't make fun of me! Can't you see that if I went and got my friends we could form a com- pany of volunteers; we're young, strong, ready for anything . . . We could . . ." Monsieur Péricand looked at him. "My poor boy!" was all he said. "It's all over? We've lost the war?" stammered Hubert. "Is . . . is it true?" And suddenly, to his horror, he felt himself burst into tears. He cried like a baby, like Bernard would have cried, his large mouth twisted, tears streaming down his face. Night was falling, soft and peaceful. A swallow flew by, lightly brushing against the balcony in the dark night air. The cat let out a frustrated little cry of desire. 3 The writer Gabriel Corte was working on his terrace, between the dark, swaying woods and the golden green setting sun fading over the Seine. How peaceful everything was around him! Beside him were his well-trained faithful friends, great white dogs who were awake yet motionless, their noses pressed against the cool paving stones, their eyes half closed. At his feet his mistress silently picked up the sheets of paper he dropped. His servants, the secretary, were all invisible behind the shimmering windows; they were hidden somewhere in the background of the house, in the wings of his life, a life he desired to be as brilliant, luxurious and disciplined as a ballet. He was fifty years old and had his favourite games. Depending on the day, he was either Lord of the Heavens or a miserable writer crushed by hard work and labouring in vain. On his desk he had had engraved, "To lift such a heavy weight, Sisyphus, you will need all your courage." His fellow writers were jealous of him because he was rich. He himself bitterly told the story of his first candidature to the Académie Française: one of the electors implored to vote for him had sarcastically replied, "He has three telephone lines!" He was handsome, with the cruel, languid movements of a cat, expressive soft hands and a slightly full Roman face. Only Florence, his official mistress, was allowed to remain in his bed until morning (the others never spent the night with him). Only she knew how many masks he could put on, this old flirt with dark circles under his eyes and thin arched eyebrows, too thin, like a woman's. That evening he was working as he normally did, half-naked. His house in Saint-Cloud had been specially built to be hidden away from prying eyes, right down to the vast, wonderful terrace, planted with blue cinerarias. Blue was Gabriel Corte's favourite colour. He could only write if he had a small glass bowl of deep lapis lazuli beside him. He would look at it now and again, and caress it like a mistress. What he liked best in Florence, as he often told her, were her clear blue eyes, which gave him the same feeling of coolness as his glass bowl. "Your eyes quench my thirst," he would murmur. She had a soft, slightly flabby chin, a contralto voice that was still beautiful and, Gabriel Corte confided to his friends, something cow-like in her expression. I like that. A woman should look like a heifer: sweet, trusting and generous, with a body as white as cream. You know, like those old actresses whose skin has been softened by massage, make-up and powder. He stretched his delicate fingers in the air and clicked them like castanets. Florence handed him a lemon, then an orange and some glacé strawberries; he consumed an enormous amount of fruit. She gazed at him, almost kneeling before him on a suede pouffe, in that attitude of adoration that pleased him so much (though he couldn't have imagined any other). He was tired, but it was that good tiredness which comes from doing enjoyable work. Sometimes he said it was better than the tiredness that comes after making love. He looked benevolently at his mistress. "Well, that's not gone too badly, I think. And you know, the midpoint." (He drew a triangle in the air indicating its top.) "I've got past it." She knew what he meant. Inspiration flagged in the middle of a novel. At those moments, Corte struggled like a horse trying in vain to pull a carriage out of the mud. She brought her hands together in a gracious gesture of admiration and surprise. "Already! I congratulate you, my dear. Now it will go smoothly, I'm sure." "God willing!" he murmured. "But Lucienne worries me." "Lucienne?" He looked at her scornfully, his eyes hard and cold. When he was in a good mood, Florence would say, "You still have that killer look in your eye . . ." and he would laugh, flattered. But he hated being teased when in the throes of creativity. She couldn't even remember who Lucienne was. "Of course," she lied. "I don't know what I was thinking!" "I don't know either," he said in a wounded voice. But she seemed so sad and humble that he took pity on her and softened. "I keep telling you, you don't pay enough attention to the minor characters. A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth. Look at writers like Proust. They knew how to use minor characters to humiliate, to belittle their protagonists. In a novel, there is nothing more valuable than teaching the lesson of humility to the heroes. Remember, in War and Peace , the little peasant girls who cross the road, laughing, in front of Prince Andrei's carriage? He speaks to them, directly, and the reader's imagination is at once lifted; now there is not just one face, not just one soul. He portrays the many faces of the crowd. Wait, I'll read you that passage, it's remarkable. Put the light on," he said, for night had fallen. "Planes," Florence replied, looking up at the sky. "Won't they leave me the hell alone?" he thundered. He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy. It was like a shrill, brutal trumpet shattering the fragile crystal walls he'd taken such pains to build in order to shut out the rest of the world. "God!" he sighed. "How upsetting, what a nightmare!" Brought back down to earth, he asked to see the newspapers. She gave them to him without a word. They came in from the terrace and he leafed through the papers, a dark look on his face. "All in all," he said, "nothing new." He didn't want to see anything new. He dismissed reality with the bored, startled gesture of a sleeping man awakened abruptly in the middle of a dream. He even shaded his eyes with his hand as if to block out a dazzling light. Florence walked towards the radio. He stopped her. "No, no, leave it alone." "But Gabriel . . ." He went white with anger. "Listen to me! I don't want to hear anything. Tomorrow, tomorrow will be soon enough. If I hear any bad news now (and it can only be bad with these c**** in government) my momen- tum will be lost, my inspiration blocked. Look, you'd better call Made- moiselle Sudre. I think I'll dictate a few pages!" She hurried to summon the secretary. As she was coming back to the drawing room, the telephone rang. "It's Monsieur Jules Blanc phoning from the Presidential Office, wishing to speak to Monsieur Corte," said the valet. Excerpted from Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.