The Nightingale

In November, Isabelle and Gaëtan travel to Saint-Jean-de-Luz and learn at a border checkpoint that the Free Zone is being abolished. As they walk along the beach together, Gaëtan tells Isabelle that this will make her work even riskier.

The couple arrives at Madame Babineau’s, where there are four men waiting to cross to Spain. Micheline gives Isabelle a note telling her Vianne is safe and advises her to “say good-bye to [her] young man well” (430) before she and Gaëtan part the following day. That night, Gaëtan tells Isabelle what he planned to say at the meeting in Carriveau: he is joining a group of guerrillas to fight the occupation directly.

Around the same time, Vianne visits Henri Navarre and tells him she needs identity papers for a Jewish child. Henri promises to secure blank papers but tells Vianne that she will have to forge the documents. Vianne also asks that Henri not tell Isabelle about this, for her own protection; he agrees but says that Isabelle “would be proud” (434).

A few days later, Henri approaches Vianne in the street and hands her a baguette with the papers hidden inside, instructing her to come to him again if she needs more “bread.” As she walks home, she runs into Von Richter, who asks to carry her shopping basket and escort her home. Vianne has no choice but to agree and is nearly caught, only managing to distract Von Richter by pretending to be sick. Later, she practices forging signatures and creates a false birth certificate for the boy she left at the convent. She also begins compiling three lists: one with the children she is hiding, one with their false names, and one with their locations. She hides each of these lists in a different spot so that the children can be identified and reunited with family when the war ends. 

At the airport, the elderly woman chats with a young woman who has “hair the color of cotton candy and more tattoos than a Hell’s Angel biker,” explaining that she’s “going home after years of running away” (440). Julien arrives just as the plane is boarding and asks his mother why she is returning to Paris. He then announces he is going with her.

Once they’re settled into their seats, Julien brings up the topic of the invitation, insisting that he “know[s] there’s something [she] wants to tell [him]” and advising her to “[j]ust start at the beginning” (444). The woman promises to tell him later but privately wonders how she’ll manage it:

He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that (444).

The German occupation grows more brutal as the Nazis suffer a string of military defeats. When Isabelle meets her father at a Paris cafe, he provides her with more false papers for airmen and warns her that the SS are working hard to find the Nightingale; he suggests allowing someone else to take her place. Isabelle rejects this idea: “Women were integral to the Resistance. Why couldn’t men see that?” (449). She notices that Julien’s hands are shaking, which he attributes to withdrawal: “I quit drinking. It seemed like a bad time to be a drunk” (450).

After months apart, Isabelle and Gaëtan meet secretly in the woods where he and other Maquis (resistance fighters) hide out:

They bombed trains and blew up munitions dumps and flooded canals and did whatever else they could to disrupt the flow of goods and men […] Their lives were always at risk; when found by the enemy, reprisals were swift and often brutal. Burning, cattle prods, blinding. Each Maquis carried a cyanide pill in his pocket (451-52).

Isabelle passes a coded message to Gaëtan, and he says he must leave immediately. He promises to visit her in Paris sometime to pass an ordinary day or two “like lovers” (453).

By June 1944, Vianne has hidden 13 children and teaches at the convent school part-time to explain her frequent presence there. One day, Von Richter comes to her classroom and asks about her relationship with Henri, who has been arrested. Vianne claims to only know him casually, but Von Richter threatens to interrogate both her and her children. She begs him not to hurt her children, thus revealing her weakness. During a more formal interrogation later that day, Vianne reiterates that Henri is simply an acquaintance, and Von Richter lets her go with a threat: “His fingertips caressed her mouth, forcing her lips to part slightly. ‘If I find out that you are lying to me, I will hurt you, Madame. And I will enjoy it’” (458).

Meanwhile, Isabelle makes her way to Madame Babineau’s, followed closely by three airmen. As Isabelle talks to Micheline, the SS break down the door, knock Isabelle to the floor, and arrest everyone inside.

Isabelle regains consciousness and finds herself tied to a chair. The Gestapo interrogate her about who she is and her relationship to the Nightingale, hitting her whenever she refuses to comply. She eventually blacks out, only to wake up panicking in a cold, dark, enclosed area that she guesses is a refrigerator: “She would freeze to death. Or be asphyxiated. […] She started to cry and her tears froze, turning to icicles on her cheeks” (466).

Back in Carriveau, the Germans have started leaving the bodies of the executed hanging in the town square. Vianne drags an old woman whose son was killed away from the scene, then stops at the butcher’s shop, where she hears rumors about the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre—the murder of an entire town in retaliation for the kidnapping of an SS officer.

As Vianne leaves the shop, she is grabbed by a man who turns out to be her father. Later, they meet secretly in Rachel’s abandoned house. Looking exhausted and sick, Julien admits he was a “terrible father” and laments that it’s “too late now to fix all that” (471). He shares with Vianne the news of Isabelle’s arrest and tells her she must “stay here in Carriveau and stay out of trouble” (471) so Isabelle will have a home to return to when the war is over. Alarmed, Vianne says it sounds as though her father is saying good-bye and guesses that he is going to do something to try to save his daughter. Julien refuses to tell Vianne his plans, simply handing her a letter to read with Isabelle later. Vianne accidentally tears off a bit of his cuff when he goes, and she ties the fabric around the branch of the apple tree, which has grown “as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it” (474).

When Vianne returns home, Von Richter is waiting for her. He tells her that he knows Ari is not Vianne and Antoine’s biological son and demands to know who he is. Vianne responds with the story about a dead cousin, and Von Richter makes it clear that he expects her to pay for his silence with sex before dragging her into the bedroom and raping her.

When Isabelle is let out of the refrigerator, she tries to determine if she has been in captivity for two full days—the amount of time she needed to withstand the torture so her contacts could disappear. The Gestapo, however, say they are finished with her and lead her father into the room. Julien claims to be the Nightingale, which Isabelle realizes is his way of making amends. As she watches in horror, Julien is led outside and shot.

The morning after Von Richter’s assault, Vianne boards a train to the town where Isabelle is imprisoned. When she reaches the square, she sees her father’s body “lashed to the fountain” (483), surrounded by bloody water. Meanwhile, Isabelle sits in her cell, expecting to be executed. Instead, she is led outside, where she sees Vianne. Isabelle warns her to stay away before being herded onto a truck and taken to a railway station. Here, she boards a cattle car full of women and children. Madame Babineau is among them and helps Isabelle drink, warning her that the worst is likely still to come. Isabelle apologizes for involving Madame Babineau in her work and reveals her real name, but Micheline brushes this aside—she wanted to help, and she had already guessed who Isabelle’s parents were. When Isabelle says her father died in her place, Micheline is not surprised, saying, “the man he became [after WWI] was not the man he was” (488). As the train travels towards its destination, Isabelle thinks about how naive she was when the war began but concludes that she would still choose the course that she did.

Eventually, the train comes to a stop at Ravensbrück, where Isabelle sees “hundreds—thousands—of women who looked like ghosts moving through a surreal landscape of gray, their bodies emaciated, their eyes sunken and dead looking in gray faces, their hair shorn” (490). Isabelle and the others are stripped of their valuables and shaved before being herded into the shower, where Isabelle expects to be gassed. Instead, the prisoners are doused in cold water, dressed in prison clothes, and led to a barracks where Isabelle lies down, telling herself to “[s]tay alive” (492).