Suite Francaise

Father Philippe Péricand is the Péricands’ eldest son and a priest who lives apart from the family in his Auvergne parish. His task in Storm in June is to lead the boys from the orphanage of the Penitent Children. Although Philippe knows that he should love the children and believe they are worthy of redemption, he, like his mother, looks down on them and conceives of them as damned sinners. This internal conflict is evident when, at the same time that he is preaching the Gospel, he is noticing what he considers to be the physical markers of their inferior birth, such as their low brows and resemblance to criminals. This view harks backs to the 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology, which held that physical characteristics of a person were indicative of their character, and is connected with the developments of eugenics and Nazi race theory. Through the priest, Némirovsky shows the conflict between the universal love preached by Christianity and the social conditioning of a bourgeois French family. Indeed, this is the clearest example of Violence in the Civilian Sphere in the Suite and supports Némirovsky’s thesis that the worst of the divisions during wartime were among the French people.

The Péricands’ second son, Hubert, is a chubby-cheeked 17-year-old who imagines himself risking himself for his country. One year too young to be officially conscripted, he runs away to join the army, which is also his way of escaping his mother’s apron strings. The irony that boredom and the fear of never seeing his mother again sends him back into her arms is redoubled by the irony that the mother who has forbidden her son to join the army is secretly pleased by his doing so. That he turns up perfectly unharmed and as chubby as ever while she imagines him a dead war hero brings this comedy to a climax. Yes, he has changed, but only on account of the pleasure of his first sexual encounter while away, not on account of the horrors of war.

Madame Péricand’s father-in-law, the elderly Monsieur Péricand, was once an eminent man but now has dementia. Feeling that he must be safeguarded so that he remembers the family favorably in his will, the Péricands hire a nanny to care for him. After he delays their departure from Paris through the need to relieve himself at the last minute, the Péricands show their true colors when a fire erupts and they forget about him in their escape. He leaves everything to the orphanage whose boys murdered his grandson. That he also directs this fund to be used to make a bust upon his death that will be placed in the orphanage in his honor reinforces both the grandiosity of the family and the irrelevance of their concerns in the face of the exigencies of war.

Acclaimed writer and Académie Française member Gabriel Corte is too old to fight in the war and views it as an inconvenience to his creative life. Gabriel’s chief pleasure is writing. For him, the tiredness that comes after doing a day’s good writing is “better than the tiredness that comes after making love” (16). He straddles the bourgeois and bohemian spheres, valuing money and material possessions and yet having an artist’s habits and a mistress, Florence.

Given his rarefied milieu, Gabriel’s biggest horror in fleeing Paris is coming into contact with working-class refugees. Their presence, particularly in the act of eating, produces a disgust in him that is visceral, so much so that he refuses to eat. Hunger, however, brings him “down” to the same level, and he eats the cabbage soup that Florence has obtained from a soldier.

Gabriel’s mistress, Florence, has blue eyes that give Gabriel “the same feeling of coolness as his glass bowl” (16). Florence soothes him, feeds him the fruit he loves, provides him with sex, and manages their escape from Paris.

On the road, however, Florence completely changes her view of Gabriel, seeing him as a “pig” (78) instead of the man who formerly attracted her, and she marks her disapproval with hitting, scratching, and spitting. Here, Némirovsky shows the impact of desperate circumstances and bodily privation on the most cultivated of kept women, even as these same circumstances reveal the animal nature of the keeper.

Madame Jeanne Michaud, secretary to the bank manager, Monsieur Corbin, who also employs her husband, and mother to Jean-Marie, who is fighting at the front, is a second-class citizen by virtue of both her socioeconomic circumstances and her being a women, wife, and mother. Named after the nanny who helped Némirovsky’s family out of Paris, Cécile Michaud, she is also one of the few kind and capable characters in the Suite.

Compared with her, Monsieur Michaud is the weaker link. Although both are part of the populace who suffer most in wartime, it is he who shows dependence on Corbin in asking for a ride out of Paris and she who shows strength and independence when the promise of the ride is broken and they must leave Paris on foot. Although she aches for her son and suffers over the uncertainty of his fate, she organizes a system for reuniting lost children with their parents—which is to say that unlike most of the self-absorbed characters in the Suite, she, for one, is capable and thoughtful, rather than self-absorbed.

The Michauds’ son, Jean-Marie, figures as a live character in Storm and as a potent memory in Dolce. Whereas his origins are lower middle class, rural Madeleine thinks of him as a gentleman, given his desire to become a writer and his smooth white hands. Their flirtation signals a strong engagement in seizing the moment—one that cannot last, though, given Benoît’s release and return from the war. While Jean-Marie departs at the end of Storm in June, Dolce finds Madeleine constantly thinking about him and her love for him. When a gentlemanly German officer is billeted in the house, she intuits that his resemblance to Jean-Marie annoys Benoît more than anything else. Here, again, Némirovsky underscores the class warfare that exists alongside the actual war.

Monsieur Corbin, the bank manager, is a petty, privileged man with a penchant for dancer mistresses. He is so secure of his superior position that he conducts his affair with Arlette openly. Despite his pretensions to power, though, he proves to be ruled by his mistress, who persuades him to give her a place in the car that had been promised to the Michauds as they all flee Paris and then later outsmarts him by making off with his car. He is also outwitted in his scheme to withhold the money he owes to the Michauds when his business partner provides it to them. In effect, the man who cannot be trusted gets his comeuppance.

Introduced into the narrative as Corbin’s mistress, Arlette undergoes several iterations throughout Storm. Her dyed hair and American makeup are symbols of her artificial, shape-shifting quality, while her knowledge that her legs are her chief asset indicates her bodily confidence and her willingness to use her sexuality to win favors, in defiance of bourgeois society’s morals. She is the consummate Woman as Outsider. She also takes looking out for oneself to new highs—or lows—whether this takes the form of her indiscriminate flings with Germans and Frenchmen, stealing Corbin’s car, or killing Charles Langelet with it, running him over and then blithely departing, confident that her wiles and ability to ingratiate herself with powerful men will get her out of trouble.

Charles Langelet is an aging dandy who resembles Gabriel Corte both in his annoyance at the war’s interruption of his routine and his disdain for the working-class refugees who are also leaving Paris. While they are fleeing to save their lives, the “miserly and cautious” Langelet is preoccupied with saving his precious trinkets (35).

His nature becomes clear, however, when he thrills at tricking a naive young couple out of their petrol. While this enables him to return to Paris and his former life, he stumbles in the dark and is run over by a car. Langelet’s annihilation by a driver who cares about others as little as he does shows his fate coming full circle.

Madeleine Sabarie is a foster child and embodies the theme of Woman as Outsider, even as she is stuck living with her dour mother-in-law, while her husband, Benoît, is imprisoned by the Germans. Described as being “delicate, a blonde with bright cheeks, smooth as satin and pink as apple blossom” (123), she flirts with Jean-Marie in Storm and with the German Kurt Bonnet in Dolce. Although she is not sexually intimate with either man, her relations with them are a betrayal of her husband, Benoît. In the case of Jean-Marie, this might be mitigated by the fact that Benoît is unfaithful to her, but in the case of the German officer, her behavior amounts to Collaboration with the Enemy. Ultimately, though, she redeems herself, helping her husband escape when he becomes the target of the enemy.

Largely absent from Storm in June owing to having been taken prisoner of war, Benoît Sabarie plays a significant role in opposing the enemy when he returns to Bussy. This enemy takes two forms—the Germans and members of the privileged classes in France. Some of his fellow soldiers and friends were Communist sympathizers even as they were fighting to free France from the Germans; like them, Benoît will then want to free the French from the oppression of the upper classes. The situation is further complicated by the fact that both enemies turn up in his own home in the figures of the “gentlemanly” seeming Jean-Marie and Kurt Bonnet.

Described as having “a broad, brown face and daring eyes,” Benoît is not ashamed of his status as “a farmer, a country bumpkin” devoid of “fancy manners,” but Madeleine’s preference for the interlopers does make him feel insecure (187; 216; 216). Benoît does not hide his disappointment that Madeleine’s dowry falls short of his expectations, and he has a mistress, so he does not exactly follow his own political or moral principles. He nevertheless becomes the primary opponent of Collaboration with the Enemy, when he uses his poorly hidden shotgun to kill Kurt Bonnet, the man who threatens his liberty and has been flirting with his wife, and, with the help of Madeleine, later instigates resistance to the German Occupation.

Although she belongs to the rural middle classes and lives in a fine house, Madame Angellier is in many ways the female counterpart to Benoît’s effort against Collaboration with the Enemy. Mother to Gaston, a prisoner of war who has not escaped, Madame Angellier is a pale, shadowy presence who is never seen outside her own home, where she effectively imprisons herself, as well as her daughter-in-law, Lucile. Furious about the German Occupation, she experiences it firsthand when the German officer Bruno von Falk is billeted in her home and starts to assume a significant place in Lucile’s affections.

While she already despises Lucile for her apparent indifference to her beloved Gaston, Madame Angellier finds new fodder for her loathing in witnessing her daughter-in-law’s passion for Bruno. This further imprisons and weakens her, and retreats into fantasies of Gaston’s return and his taking charge of Lucile and the household. The turning point in Madame Angellier’s character arises when Benoît seeks refuge in their home. Keeping him in her own rooms, Madame Angellier treats him as a replacement son. She is rejuvenated by his presence and moves from dreaming to action when she asks Lucile to procure transportation for him to Paris. Ironically, given the state of others’ collaboration with the Germans, Madame Angellier plays the role of Woman as Outsider in her resistance to them.

Young, “beautiful, blonde, with dark eyes, but a quiet, modest demeanor and ‘a faraway expression’”(197), Lucile is a romantic figure in Dolce, forced to live with her dour stepmother, enchanted by an officer from the new German regiment. Like Madeleine, she occupies the status of Woman as Outsider, as she is left out of the love shared by mother and son in the Angellier household and further demeaned by their disappointment over her smaller-than-expected dowry and Gaston’s affair. She is also in the position of Collaboration with the Enemy in her infatuation with the officer, Bruno von Falk, with whom she finds sweetness and tenderness—the “dolce” of the novel’s title. While their relationship stands in stark contrast to the war around them, and while Lucile herself, with her “faraway expression,” seems particularly remote, when Benoît sequesters himself in her house and Bruno attempts to make love to her, she realizes that she cannot fully yield to the latter and serve her country’s cause. In effect, she awakens from a romance and engages in the real world of the novel.

Bruno von Falk is a 24-year-old lieutenant who has the youth, blond hair, and gentlemanly manners of a stereotypical German officer. However, although he wears the same “almond-green” uniform and heavy belt with the motto “Gott mit uns,” or “God is with us,” as his fellow officers (280), he remains detached from his work as a soldier and the Nazi mission, and although he is married, he attaches himself to Lucile through their shared love for nature, music, and literature.

Even as Némirovsky effectively absolves him of his Nazism and his infidelity to his wife—they married at too young an age—she does not treat his idealism with an uncritical eye. He may imagine an Eden in which he and Lucile can pretend there is no war or opposing sides, but the realities of war make such fantasies false—as false as the promises of other Germans who tell their French sweethearts they will return for them.

Kurt Bonnet is the 19-year-old German officer who is stationed at the Sabaries’ house and immediately takes a liking to Madeleine. Although he is depicted as stereotypically Germanic, with a “strangely harsh and resonant voice,” “steel-grey eyes,” and an “unusual shade of […] pale-blond hair, which was smooth and bright as a helmet” (215), Madeleine cannot help being struck by his gentlemanly aspect and resemblance in this respect to Jean-Marie, whom she is attracted to above her husband (215). On his side, Kurt regards Madeleine as a work of art, but also bothers her for more salacious purposes. He is, in every way, far less sympathetic than Bruno. Benoît’s killing him prefigures the end of the collaboration of the French with the German occupiers of Bussy and the beginning of the resistance.