After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's Suite française

Chapter 7. Private Lives and Public Stories

196 Chapter 7 Private Lives and Public Stories A Little Night Music After the sound and fury of Tempête en juin, the second installment of Némirovsky’s war narrative portrays a relative return to normal . Suggesting a “soft” or “sweet” musical interlude, the title Dolce functions as a metaphor for the whole series of plot developments. The term also serves as a metonymy of the part for the whole, since it points to the thematic and compositional centrality of the relationship between Némirovsky’s most prominent feminine protagonist and the German officer Bruno von Falk, who so uncannily resembles Vercors’s von Ébrennac.1 The paradigmatic quality of this musical trope resonates on both the biographical and the textual levels. Lucile initiates her romantic, although unconsummated, idyll with Bruno by inviting him to play the piano: “Mettez-vous au piano et jouez. Nous oublierons le mauvais temps, l’absence, tous nos malheurs”2 (“Sit down at the piano and play. We’ll forget the bad weather, the absence of our loved ones, all of our misery and misfortunes”). Lyrical1 I am not suggesting that Némirovsky was in any way “influenced” by Vercors’s Le Silence de la mer. The latter was only distributed in late 1942 to a select few. She would therefore not have had access to it before her arrest in July 1942. 2 Némirovsky, Suite française, 406. Private Lives and Public Stories   197 ly interpreting one of his own compositions, Bruno fulfills his lady’s wish to find momentary respite from the surrounding anxieties. In explaining his music’s symbolism, the German officer describes the all-encompassing conflict between the individual and the community , and then characterizes the privileged moment shared with Lucile as the calm at the eye of a cyclone. Némirovsky’s indirect free style then reveals that Lucile indeed experiences such a fleeting haven from the dismal circumstances of the war and her own virtual emprisonment in her bourgeois marriage : Ce qui était plus délicieux que tout, c’était cet isolement au sein de la maison hostile, et cette étrange sécurité: personne ne viendrait; il n’y aurait ni lettres, ni visites, ni téléphone. . . . Bienheureux oubli. . . . Jusqu’au soir, rien, des heures lentes, une présence humaine, un vin léger et parfumé, de la musique, de longs silences, le bonheur.3 Most delightful of all was this isolation within this hostile home, and this strange security: no one would come; there would be neither letters, nor visits, nor phone calls. . . . Blissful oblivion . . . Until the evening, nothing, the slow passing of the hours, a human presence, a light, fruity wine, music, long moments of silence, happiness. Némirovsky herself poignantly expressed a similar yearning for an escape from the stranglehold of history in notes dating during the early months of 1942.4 Increasingly isolated in the provincial town of Issy-l’Évêque, highly restricted in her movements, cut off from friends and associates, and prohibited from publishing, Némirovsky understandably seems to share Lucile’s desire to flee far from the madding crowd of all those who “s’entendent tous sur un point: il faut vivre, penser, aimer avec les autres, en fonction d’un État, d’un pays, d’un parti”5 (all agree on one point: you have to live, think, and love with all the rest, based on a certain regime, a certain country, 3 Némirovsky, Suite française, 412–13. 4 Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 408–12. 5 Némirovsky, Suite française, 457. 198   Private Lives and Public Stories or a certain party). Alienated from the nation and society whose language and culture she had ardently espoused, she paints the main protagonists of Dolce as private individuals longing for companionship and happiness made impossible by the war, and not, as is the case in Le Silence de la mer, as humble citizens seeking to escape the monotony of provincial life through courageous adhesion to a national cause that transcends personal inclination. Here again, in order to best appreciate her historical narrative, we must first of all analyze the work in relation to its historical and political context. While Némirovsky’s apparent—but misleading—reluctance to become engaged on the ideological theater of the momentous confrontation with Nazi Germany that would ultimately claim her life seems incongruous from...