Suite Française

by Irene Nemirovsky

  She closed the window, threw herself down on the bed and continued reading. She persevered until dinner time, but she was half asleep over her book, tired from the heat and bright light. When she entered the dining room her mother-in-law was already at her usual place opposite the empty chair where Gaston always sat. She was so pale and rigid, her eyes so raw from crying, that Lucile was frightened.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “I wonder . . .” replied Madame Angellier, clasping her hands together so tightly that Lucile could see her nails turning white, “I wonder why you ever married Gaston?”

  There is nothing more consistent in people than their way of expressing anger. Madame Angellier’s way was normally as devious and subtle as the hissing of a serpent; Lucile had never endured such an abrupt, harsh attack. She was less indignant than upset; suddenly she realised how much her mother-in-law must be suffering. She remembered their melancholy, affectionate and deceitful black cat who would purr, then slyly lash out with her claws. Once she even went for the cook’s eyes, nearly blinding her. That was the day her litter of kittens had been drowned. After that she’d disappeared.

  “What have I done?” Lucile asked quietly.

  “How could you, here, in his house, outside his windows, with him gone, a prisoner, ill perhaps, abused by these brutes, how could you smile at a German, speak with such familiarity to a German? It’s inconceivable!”

  “He asked my permission to go into the garden to pick some strawberries. I couldn’t exactly refuse. You’re forgetting he’s in charge here now, unfortunately . . . He’s being polite, but he could take whatever he wants, go wherever he pleases and even throw us out into the street. He wears kid gloves to claim his rights as a conqueror. I can’t hold that against him. I think he’s right. We’re not on a battlefield. We can keep all our feelings deep inside. Superficially at least, why not be polite and considerate? There’s something inhuman about our situation. Why make it worse? It isn’t . . . it isn’t reasonable, Mother.” Lucile spoke so passionately that she surprised even herself.

  “Reasonable!” exclaimed Madame Angellier. “But my poor girl, that word alone proves you don’t love your husband, that you’ve never loved him and you don’t even miss him. Do you think that I try to be reasonable? I can’t bear the sight of that officer. I want to rip his eyes out. I want to see him dead. It may not be fair, or humane, or Christian, but I am a mother. Being without my son is torture. I hate the people who have taken him away from me, and if you were a real wife, you wouldn’t have been able to bear that German being near you. You wouldn’t have been afraid of appearing uncouth, rude, or ridiculous. You would have simply got up and, with or without an excuse, walked away. My God! That uniform, those boots, that blond hair, that voice, and that look of good health and contentment, while my poor son . . .”

  She stopped and began to cry.

  “Come on now, Mother . . .”

  But Madame Angellier became even more enraged. “I wonder why you ever married him!” she exclaimed again. “For his money, for his land no doubt, honestly . . .”

  “That’s not true. You know very well it’s not true. I got married because I was a little goose, because Papa said, ‘He’s a good man. He’ll make you happy.’ I never imagined he’d start being unfaithful to me with a hatmaker from Dijon as soon as we got married!”

  “What? . . . What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about my marriage,” Lucile said bitterly. “At this very moment a woman in Dijon is knitting Gaston a sweater, making him sweetmeats, sending him packages and probably writing ‘My poor sweetheart, I’m so lonely without you tonight, in our great big bed.’ ”

  “A woman who loves him,” muttered Madame Angellier, her lips becoming as thin and sharp as a razor, and turning the colour of faded hydrangea.

  “At this very moment,” Lucile thought to herself, “she would cheerfully kick me out and have the hatmaker here instead,” and with the treachery present in even the best of women, she insinuated, “It’s true he loves her . . . a lot . . . You should see his chequebook. I found it in his desk when he left.”

  “He’s spending money on her?” cried Madame Angellier, horrified.

  “Yes; and I couldn’t care less.”

  There was a long silence. They could hear the familiar sounds of evening: the neighbour’s radio sending out a series of piercing, plaintive, droning notes, like Arab music or the screeching of crickets (it was the BBC of London distorted by interference), the mysterious murmuring of some stream hidden in the countryside, the insistent croak of a thirsty frog praying for rain. In the room, the copper lamp that hung from the ceiling—rubbed and polished by so many generations that it had lost its pink glow and was now the pale, yellow colour of a crescent moon—shone down on the two women sitting at the table. Lucile felt sad and remorseful.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she thought. “I should have just let her criticise me and said nothing. Now she’ll get even more upset. She’ll want to make excuses for her son, patch things up between us. God, how tedious!”

  Madame Angellier didn’t say a word for the rest of the meal. After dinner they went into the sitting room, where the cook announced the Viscountess de Montmort. This lady, naturally, did not associate with the middle-class people of the village; she wouldn’t invite them into her home any more than she would her farmworkers. When she needed a favour, however, she would come to their homes to make the request with the simplicity, ingenuousness and innocent superiority of the “well-bred.” The villagers didn’t realise that when she dropped by, dressed like a chambermaid, wearing a little red felt hat with a pheasant feather that had seen better days, she was demonstrating the profound scorn she felt towards them even more clearly than if she had stood on ceremony: after all, they didn’t get dressed up to go to a neighbouring farm to ask for a glass of milk. Her deception worked. “She’s not stuck-up,” they all thought when they met her. Nevertheless, they treated her with extraordinary condescension—and they were just as unaware of it as the Viscountess was of her feigned humility.

  Madame de Montfort strode into the Angelliers’ sitting room; she greeted them cordially; she didn’t apologise for coming so late; she picked up Lucile’s book and read the title out loud: Connaissance de l’Est by Claudel.

  “Very good indeed,” she said to Lucile with an encouraging smile, as if she were congratulating one of the schoolgirls for reading the History of France without being forced to. “You like reading serious books, very good indeed.”

  She knelt down to pick up the ball of wool the elder Madame Angellier had just dropped.

  “You see,” the Viscountess seemed to say, “I’ve been brought up to respect my elders; their background, their education, their wealth mean nothing to me; I see only their white hair.”

  Meanwhile, Madame Angellier, with an icy nod of the head, barely moving her lips, invited the Viscountess to sit down. Everything inside her seemed silently to scream, “If you think I’m going to be flattered by your visit you’re mistaken. My great-great-grandfather might have been one of the Viscount de Montmort’s farmers, but that’s ancient history and no one even knows about it, whereas everyone knows the exact number of hectares of land your dead father-in-law sold to my late husband when he needed money; what’s more, your husband managed to come back from the war, while my son is a prisoner. I am a suffering mother and you should be showing respect to me.” To the Viscountess’s questions she replied quietly that she was in good health and had recently heard from her son.

  “You have no hope?” asked the Viscountess, meaning “hope that he’ll soon come back home.”

  Madame Angellier shook her head and raised her eyes to heaven.

  “It’s so sad,” said the Viscountess and added, “We’re going through such hard times.”

  She said “we” out of that sense of propriety which makes us pretend we share other people’s misfortunes when we’re with them (although egotism
invariably distorts our best intentions so that in all innocence we say to someone dying of tuberculosis, “I do feel for you, I do understand, I’ve had a cold I can’t shake off for three weeks now”).

  “Very hard times, Madame,” murmured Madame Angellier coldly. “We have a guest, as you know,” she added, indicating the next room and smiling bitterly. “One of these gentlemen . . . You’re putting someone up as well, no doubt?” she asked, even though she and everyone else knew that thanks to the Viscount’s personal contacts there were no Germans at the château.

  The Viscountess did not reply to this question, but said indignantly, “You will never guess what they have had the nerve to request . . . Access to the lake for fishing and swimming! And I, who love the water so much, will be forced to stay away all summer.”

  “Are they forbidding you to use the lake? Well, that’s a bit much,” exclaimed Madame Angellier, vaguely comforted by the humiliation inflicted upon the Viscountess.

  “No, no,” she insisted, “on the contrary, they behaved quite correctly. ‘Please tell us when we may use the lake so we will not disturb you,’ they said. But can you imagine me running into one of those men in my bathing suit? You know they even eat half naked? They take their meals in the courtyard of the school with bare chests and legs, and wearing a kind of jockstrap! The older girls’ classroom looks out over the courtyard so they have to keep the shutters closed so the children don’t see . . . what they shouldn’t see. And you can imagine how pleasant that must be in this heat!”

  She sighed: she was in a very difficult position. At the beginning of the war she had been passionately patriotic and anti-German, not that she particularly hated the Germans (she felt the same aversion, defiance and scorn towards all foreigners), but there was something wonderfully dramatic about patriotism and hatred of the Germans, as there was in anti-Semitism or, later, devotion to Maréchal Pétain, that sent chills down her spine. In 1939 she had organised a series of easy-to-follow lectures at the school on Hitler’s psychology, which she had delivered to an audience of nuns, village gentlewomen and rich farmers’ wives, and in which she had depicted all Germans, without exception, as madmen, sadists and criminals. Immediately after the defeat of France she had maintained this stance, mainly because it would have taken the kind of flexibility and sharpness of mind she clearly lacked to change camp so quickly. At the time, she herself had typed and distributed several dozen copies of the famous prophecies of Sainte Odile, who predicted the extermination of the Germans at the end of 1941.

  But time had passed; the year had ended; the Germans were still here and, what’s more, the Viscount had been appointed town Mayor, thus becoming a public official, forced to embrace the government’s views. And so, with each day that passed, the Viscount leaned more and more towards what was called the policy of collaboration. As a result, Madame de Montfort found herself forced to water down her comments on current events. Now, once more, she remembered she mustn’t show any ill will towards the conqueror and so said with tolerance (and anyway, Jesus wanted us to love our enemies, didn’t he?), “I do understand they have to wear light clothing after their tiring exercises. After all, they’re just like any other men.”

  But Madame Angellier refused to accept this argument. “They are dreadful creatures who hate us. They’ve said they won’t be happy until they see all Frenchmen on their knees.”

  “It’s abominable,” said the Viscountess, sincerely indignant.

  After all, the policy of collaboration had only been in existence for a few months, while hatred of the Germans was nearly a century old. Madame de Montmort instinctively reverted to speaking as she had in the past.

  “Our poor country . . . laid bare, oppressed, ruined . . . And so many tragedies! Just look at the blacksmith’s family: three sons, one killed, one a prisoner, the third missing at Mers-el-Kébir . . . And the Bérards from La Montagne,” she said, adding the family’s name to that of the farm where they lived, as was the custom in that part of the world, “since her husband was taken prisoner, the poor woman has gone mad from exhaustion and all her problems. The only people left to keep the farm going are her grandfather and a little thirteen-year-old girl. And as for the Cléments . . . the mother has died from overwork; her four children have been taken in by neighbours. Countless tragedies . . . poor France!”

  Madame Angellier, her pale lips tightly closed, nodded her head in agreement and continued knitting. However, she and the Viscountess soon stopped talking about other people’s disasters in order to discuss their own problems. There was a marked difference in the lively, passionate manner in which they now spoke, compared with the slow, exaggerated, polite way they had recalled their neighbours’ misfortunes: it was the way a bored schoolboy would recite the death of Hippolytus seriously and respectfully, since it meant nothing at all to him, yet make his voice miraculously persuasive and impassioned when he stopped to complain to the teacher that someone had stolen his marbles.

  “It’s shameful, shameful,” said Madame Angellier. “I pay twenty-seven francs for a pound of butter. Everything is sold through the black market. The townspeople have to get by, of course, but still . . .”

  “Oh, don’t remind me! I wonder how much food costs in Paris . . . It’s fine for anyone with money, but,” the Viscountess virtuously pointed out, “there are so many poor people, after all,” and she enjoyed feeling she was a good person, demonstrating she hadn’t forgotten the destitute; her pleasure was increased by knowing that thanks to her enormous fortune, she herself would never be in a position to be pitied. “People don’t think about the poor enough,” she said.

  But all this was mere banter; it was time to come to the real point of her visit: she needed to get some grain for her chickens. Her poultry were famous in the region. In 1941 all wheat was requisitioned; it was, in theory, forbidden to give any to chickens. But “forbidden” didn’t necessarily mean “impossible to get around,” just “difficult to do”; it was simply a question of discretion, opportunity and money. The Viscountess had written a little article for the local newspaper, a right-thinking publication to which the local priest was a contributor. The article was called “Anything for the Maréchal!.” This is how it started: “Let everyone remember! Let everyone continue to remind each other—gathered round your cottage hearths through the long evenings—any Frenchman worthy of the name will no longer give a single grain of wheat to his hens, not a single potato to his pigs; he will save his oats and rye, his barley and his rapeseed, and having gathered together all his riches, the fruits of his labour, watered with his own sweat, he will make a wreath of them, tie them up in a red, white and blue ribbon, a symbol of his patriotism, and lay them at the feet of the Venerable Elder who has restored our hope!” But of all the poultry yards where, according to the Viscountess, not a single grain of wheat should remain, her own was, naturally, the exception: it was her pride and joy, the object of her most attentive devotion; she raised rare breeds, prize-winners in the biggest agricultural competitions, both in France and abroad. The Viscountess’s land was the very best in the region, but she wouldn’t dream of going to her tenant farmers about such a sensitive transaction: it was unthinkable to give the working classes anything they could use against you; they would make you pay dearly for any such collusion. Madame Angellier, on the other hand . . . well, that was different. They could always come to some arrangement.

  Madame Angellier sighed deeply. “I could perhaps . . . one or two bags . . . And you, Madame, perhaps you could arrange through the Mayor to get us a bit of coal? In theory, we shouldn’t, but . . .”

  Lucile left them and walked over to the window. The shutters were still open. The sitting room looked out on to the square. There was a bench opposite the War Memorial, in shadow. Everything seemed to be asleep. It was a wonderful spring night; silvery stars filled the sky. In the fading light you could just make out the rooftops of the neighbouring houses: the blacksmith’s, where an old man was mourning his three lost sons; the s
mall home of the shoemaker who had been killed in the war, and whose poor wife and sixteen-year-old son did their best to carry on. If you listened closely, thought Lucile, you might hear each of these low, dark, quiet houses moaning. But . . . what was that sound? From out of the darkness came laughter, the rustling of skirts. Then a man’s voice, a foreign voice asked, “How you say that, in French? Kiss? Yes? Oh, it’s nice . . .”

  Further away, shadowy figures wandered past. You could just about make out a pale bodice, a ribbon in flowing hair, a shiny boot or belt buckle. The guard was still marching up and down in front of the Lokal, which it was forbidden to approach upon pain of death, but his comrades were enjoying their free time and the beautiful night. Two soldiers were singing amid a group of young women—

  Trink’mal noch ein Tröpfchen!

  Ach! Suzanna . . .

  —and the young women softly hummed along.

  During a moment of silence, Madame Angellier and the Viscountess heard the final notes of the song.

  “Who could be singing at this hour?”

  “They’re women with German soldiers.”

  “How revolting!” the Viscountess exclaimed. She made a gesture of horror and disgust. “I’d really like to know who those shameless girls are. I’d make sure the priest knew their names.” She leaned forward and eagerly peered out into the night.

  “I can’t make them out. They wouldn’t dare in broad daylight. Oh, ladies, this is worse than everything! Now they’re corrupting Frenchwomen! Just think of it, their brothers and husbands are prisoners and they’re out having a good time with the Germans! What’s come over these women?” the Viscountess cried, indignant for many reasons: wounded patriotism, a sense of propriety, doubts about her influence in society (she gave lectures every Saturday night on “How to be a true Christian woman”; she had founded a local library and she sometimes even invited the local young people to her home to watch informative, edifying films such as A Day at Solesmes Abbey, or From Caterpillar to Butterfly. And for what? So that everyone would have a horrible, debased idea of Frenchwomen?). Finally, she was angry because she had a passionate nature that was troubled by certain stirring images. Yet she knew there was no hope of the Viscount satisfying her, since he had little interest in women in general and her in particular.