Suite Francaise

In Némirovsky’s Suite, areas of abundant, irregular plant growth and concealed terrain appear whenever any clandestine action is taking place. On a metatextual level, Némirovsky handwrote the Suite in the woods near her home in exile, in Issy-l’Évêque, when she was escaping the duties of mother and wife and giving herself over to her vocation. At a time when the Nazi occupation was transforming civilian life and eating away at her freedoms, Némirovsky was able to exist in her own time and temporarily escape the horrors that were taking place.

Within the Suite, the woods are symbolic, but in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, the woods are where Langelet’s transformation from dandy to predatory animal occurs, when he steals petrol from a couple and experiences a malicious glee in the process. On the other hand, they are a refuge for lovers, whether those from whom Langelet steals or the romantic Lucile and Bruno, for whom the woods are the site for an Edenic connection. That each of them grew up near the woods furthers their connection, but as they talk about their mutual experience, Némirovsky subtly undercuts the association of the woods with an Edenic refuge. Thus, when Lucile recalls her childhood home where “the trees grow so close to the sitting room that in summer their shadows bathe everything in a green light, just like an aquarium” (240), Bruno turns this image of cool respite into something unpleasant when he imagines the home and adds that “the sitting-room windows are dark green and cloudy, like water” (240). If the woods are like an aquarium, they are more holding pen than refuge, disagreeably murky, rather than shady and cool.

Moreover, although the woods may be where characters seek refuge, Némirovsky makes clear that the woods are no escape from the war. Indeed, in the description of the woods when Langelet enters them, she sensorially amplifies the ubiquity of the war: “Beneath the thick trees, the translucent shadows of a June night were transformed into black shade interspersed with silver glades, drenched in moonlight. Every sound echoed, distinct and sinister: the planes flying across the sky, the night birds, the distant explosions—either gunfire or tires bursting, you couldn’t be sure” (110). Here, the black and silver night abstracts the details of the day, rendering the woods “sinister,” bringing all the uncontrollable, unidentifiable flying and exploding objects closer and dramatizing the realization Lucile comes to about war as “universal evil” (302), everywhere all the time.