Suite Francaise

“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 to 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.”

Through novelist Gabriel Corte’s lecture to his mistress, Némirovsky hints at her own writing philosophy in Storm in June. She too will feature numerous minor characters who illuminate the actions of their protagonists. By referencing modernist master Proust, she implies that such attention to detail is the method of the best writers.

“There was more humility in bragging atheists, in hardened blasphemers, than in the eyes and words of these children. Their superficial obedience was terrifying. Despite being baptized, despite the holy sacraments of Communion and penance, no divine light illuminated them […] they didn’t feel it; they didn’t want it; they didn’t miss it.”

Philippe Péricand’s feelings about the children are in part a projection of his own. Despite all that it takes to become a priest, despite the duties the priest takes on, he has spiritually written them off.

“Not a single light shone through the windows. The stars were coming out, springtime stars with a silvery glow. Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darkness the danger seemed to grow.”

Here, Némirovsky not only juxtaposes opposites—the eerie beauty of blacked-out Paris and a threatening darkness, floral scents and petrol smells, dust and spice—but uses synesthesia to blend them, bringing the whole contradictory, shifting experience from out there—the stars in the night sky—to in here—the dust under one’s teeth.

“Gabriel covered his ears with his long hands so he couldn’t hear the crunching noises the servants made as they bit into the bread.”

In the middle of a wartime evacuation, what disturbs Gabriel Corte the most is being brought into close contact with the working-class people he looks down upon. His sensory revulsion to the servant notwithstanding, he is no different from them in needing to eat. The bread will crunch no matter who bites it.

“Now and again the woman’s adopted daughter would stand close to him […] One day she brought him a bunch of cherries and put them next to him on the pillow. He was not allowed to eat them, but he pressed them against his burning cheeks and felt content and almost happy.”

Here, Jean-Marie’s host’s adopted daughter, Madeleine, is likened to the cherries she brings. Just as she stands close to Jean-Marie without touching him, the cherries are to be touched but not eaten. The fact that their coolness brings relief to his feverish cheeks indicates that he gets some satisfaction from this proximity, if not complete fulfilment. As a wounded soldier in a stranger’s house, this is the half measure of relief that he can realistically expect.

“Suddenly his young and innocent mind […] was overtaken by the passions and torment of a grown man: patriotic anguish, a burning feeling of shame, pain, anger and the desire to make a sacrifice. Finally, and for the first time in his life, he thought, he felt linked to a truly serious cause. […] ‘Oh, I want to go,’ he murmured, ‘I want to go!’”

Although Hubert Péricand seems to grow from childhood to adulthood in his thoughts of war, his notions of patriotism are both melodramatic and self-centered—thus not patriotic at all—and the murmur of wanting to go sounds more like an expression of childish desire than adult resolve.

“These wars, revolutions, great historic upheavals might be exciting to men, but to women … Women felt nothing but boredom. She was positive that every woman would agree with her: they were tired of crying, bored to death by all these noble words and noble feelings!”

Although Arlette presumes to think for all her sex when she laments the ennui of war, she in fact has no common cause with the women who are grieving. Thus her assumption of solidarity reveals little more than her own lack of feeling.

“‘The most precious things have been saved!’ Madame Péricand said to herself over and over again, ‘Thank you God!’ Her jewelry and money were sewn into a suede pouch pinned inside her blouse and she could feel it against her chest as she ran. She’d had the presence of mind to grab her fur coat and the small overnight case full of the family silver which she’d kept beside her bed.”

Mrs. Péricand’s thoughts about saving “the most precious things” are ludicrous given that she has forgotten about the father-in-law she spent so much energy trying to preserve. Although she prides herself in being a good Catholic woman, this passage reveals her materialism and her desire to hold on to the high-class status she had before the war. This is especially apparent in the image of the jewel-filled suede patch thrumming against her chest as she runs to save herself. The rhythm of the patch against her chest is like a second heartbeat and shows where her true intentions lie. Her added self-congratulation on remembering to save a valuable fur coat and family silver further confirm this impression.

“A cat who sleeps on velvet cushions and is fed on chicken breasts and suddenly finds himself in the middle of the countryside, on the dry branch of tree wet with dew, sinking his teeth into a trembling, bleeding bird, must feel the same terror, the same cruel joy, he thought, for he was too intelligent not to understand what was happening to him.”

This passage, in which Charles Langelet reflects on his betrayal of a young couple, also shows his understanding of his own reversion to cruel instinct. The contrast between the velvet cushion and the tree branch and between the prepared chicken breast and the freshly bleeding bird is actually a continuity—he’s both the pampered cat and ruthless hunter.

“Finally he raised both arms, put them in front of his face, and the boys saw him sink straight down, in his black cassock. He hadn’t drowned: he’d got trapped in the mud. And that was how he died, in water up to his waist, head thrown back, one eye gouged out by a stone.”

Philippe Péricand’s dying posture with his arms up is one of surrender and helplessness, as he crosses from being an authority figure to one who is entirely at the mercy of his charges. The detail of the priest’s black cassock shows the boys glimpsing the literal diminishment of authority, while that of being suffocated by mud instead of water is an image of debasement. Némirovsky’s emphatic statement of “that was how he died” before describing the gruesome image of the priest’s eye being gouged out by a stone highlights that not all wartime deaths are heroic or at the hands of the official enemy.

“But why are we always the ones who have to suffer? […] Us and people like us? Ordinary people, the lower middle classes. If war is declared or the franc devalues, if there’s unemployment or a revolution, or any sort of crisis, the others manage to get through all right. We’re always the ones who are trampled. Why? What did we do? We’re paying for everybody else’s mistakes.”

Jeanne Michaud’s complaint that lower-middle-class people like her bear the brunt of misfortune is both similar to and different from the socialistic views of characters such as Benoît—similar in that she recognizes class injustice, different in that she only complains.

“It will pass, he’ll come home and the war will be over!’ people would say. No. She didn’t believe it any more. No. It would go on and on and on. … Even spring didn’t seem to want to come. … Had there ever been such terrible weather in March?”

This passage reflects a woman’s despair at ever having the war be over and her husband return to her. Némirovsky juxtaposes the platitude mouthed by others with the woman’s despairing conviction that the war will go “on and on and on” and that she will have to live in the nightmarish present forever. She also uses a pathetic fallacy in which the woman’s feeling that the war will last an eternity is projected onto the weather and the persistence of winter into spring.

“In the Angellier household they were locking away all the important papers along with the family silver and the books: the Germans were coming to Bussy. For the third time since the defeat of France, the village was to be occupied.”

This opening passage reminds us that the Germans have invaded France repeatedly, in the war of 1870, in the First World War, and now in the Second. This frames the occupation in the sphere of rare but possible things, rather than otherworldly impossible ones. The Angelliers’ practice of locking away the family valuables indicates the initial phase of being invaded, which is defense and resistance.

“‘Our masters,’ said the women who looked at the enemy with a mixture of desire and hatred. (The enemy? Of course. But they were also men, and young …).”

Némirovsky gives a stark portrayal of the conflicting feelings of hatred and desire that the Bussy’s women have for the Germans. That their desire is expressed in a parenthetical conveys their awareness that the while the hatred is socially sanctioned, the desire is illicit, but emerges anyway. Here, the women’s softening toward the Germans also prefigures their collaboration with them.

“An enemy soldier never seemed to be alone—one human being like any other—but followed, crushed from all directions by innumerable ghosts, the missing and the dead. Speaking to him wasn’t like speaking to a solitary man but to an invisible multitude; nothing that was said was either spoken or heard with simplicity: there was always that strange sensation of being no more than lips that spoke for so many others, others who had been silenced.”

Lucile experiences the strange sensation that both she and Bruno are not merely themselves but representatives of a multitude. At the beginning, she cannot think of him without imagining all the destruction in his wake and the French lives he has taken. Similarly, her reduction to a pair of lips that speak for others convey her own depersonalization and the sense that she cannot be her true self around him, but rather must do her patriotic duty and speak for those who have been damaged by his kind. This is a counterpoint to a later phase in the novel, when they will become intimate and individual to each other.

“Despite herself she was attracted by a certain resemblance to Jean-Marie. […] as a member of a higher social class, a gentleman. Both were carefully shaven, well brought-up, with pale hands and delicate skin. She realized the presence of this German in the house would be doubly painful for Benoît: because he was the enemy but also because he wasn’t a peasant like him—because he hated whatever aroused Madeleine’s interest in and curiosity about the upper classes.”

Class manifests as a key theme here, where Madeleine is attracted to both the French soldier and the German officer because of their gentlemanly appearance. As she realizes, this attraction to the German in particular offends her husband, Benoît, on many levels, since he is not only the enemy but also a reminder of Benoît's inferior class status—an inferiority reinforced by Madeleine’s attraction to the upper classes and her thinking of him as a “peasant.”

“We look forward to our leave so much. We count the days. We hope. And then we get there and we realize we don’t speak the same language any more.”

Bruno tells Lucile that while he looks forward to the military leave that allows him to see his wife and family, he finds that he is too changed to ever feel at home in his town of origin. The metaphor of no longer speaking the same language as his wife indicates that he is too transformed by his experiences to be the same person. This is part of Némirovsky’s humanization of Bruno, who speaks a universal truth about war.

“I am a soldier. Soldiers don’t think. I’m told to go somewhere and I go. Told to fight, I fight. Told to get myself killed, I die. Thinking would make fighting more difficult and death more terrible.”

Bruno confesses that as a military man, he is always acting on orders rather than thinking for himself. For him, not thinking is self-preservation, but it is also what enables him to keep fighting and killing, without troubling about it.

“One evening I’ll ring the doorbell. You’ll open it and you won’t recognize me in my civilian clothes. Then I’ll say: but it’s me … the German officer… do you remember? There’s peace now, freedom, happiness. I’m taking you away from here. Come let’s go away together. […] I’ll be a famous composer, of course, and you’ll be as beautiful as you are at this very moment.”

Bruno spins a fantasy of what life will be like after the war is over and fades from memory enough for the enmity of Germany and France to be irrelevant. His words have an incantatory, spell-like quality, appropriate to the romantic narrative of wish-fulfilment, but not reality.

“In the darkness and the silence, she could relive the past; she resurrected moments she herself had thought were lost forever. […] It was no longer her imagination but reality itself, rediscovered through her enduring memories, for nothing could change the fact that these things had actually happened.”

Némirovsky shows how Madame Angellier plunges herself into the dark where no stimuli from contemporary life can penetrate and successfully manages to restage the past where her son was young and with her. Her emphasis that nothing, especially not a German invader, can take away the past, or a reality she was more comfortable with, gives her a sense of power. Meanwhile, the resurrection of memories that she thought she had forgotten indicates that she is in a dynamic rather than static relationship with the past.

“No matter what people said, the Germans had good qualities. They were a disciplined race, docile, thought Madame de Montmort as she listened, almost with pleasure, to the rhythmical footsteps fading away, the harsh voices shouting Achtung in the distance.”

Madame de Montmort begins to find the Germans’ presence comforting, even though they are officially her country’s enemy. Némirovsky conveys this in the viscountess’ enjoyment of the lulling, predictable rhythm of the army’s boots, which signal the sound of their domination. The idea of the Germans as disciplined and docile contrasts with her fear of the volatile lower classes, who are unpredictable and threaten her interests more. Here Némirovsky paints a picture of political collaboration, as she shows how French people are not equally disadvantaged in the face of the enemy.

“Sometimes she even frightened and surprised herself at feeling such rebellion in her heart—against her husband, her mother-in-law, public opinion, this ‘spirit of the hive’ Bruno talked about. That evil, grumbling swarm serving some unknown end. She hated it.”

Lucile feels persecuted by the tendency of people to think alike and make generalizations, which Bruno has described as the “spirit of the hive.” The idea that this hive has some “unknown end” gives her sense of lacking control over her feelings and life, especially as she has decided that the friendship between her and Bruno feels right to her personally. Set up as an outsider in her mother-in-law’s house, Lucile has always been at odds with the “hive.”

“The villagers were no longer bored since the Germans arrived. Finally they had someone to talk to. God, even her own daughter-in-law. […] Bitterly, Madame Angellier made a mental inventory of all the important people in town. All of them had yielded, all of them had let themselves be seduced.”

Madame Angellier feels that she stands alone in her righteousness when she resists the Germans. She links the feeling of idleness and boredom to lust. The idea of yielding has sexual connotations, and Madame Angellier feels that many people, from her daughter-in-law nearby to the important people in town, have betrayed their values in letting themselves be seduced by the novelty of these comely young men.