The Nightingale

Isabelle is the younger of the two Rossignol sisters. She was only 4 when her mother died, and she never knew her father Julien as he was before WWI and his wife’s death. Hannah implies that being effectively orphaned at such a young age had a lasting impact on Isabelle’s personality. Vianne remembers Isabelle as “cloying” and “needy” (8) as a young child, but being a teenager herself, Vianne was unable to cope with her sister’s attention-seeking behavior. Isabelle therefore grew up feeling rejected by all those around her. Though self-assured and outspoken, Isabelle’s confidence verges on recklessness and often stems from a desperate hunger for affection. For example, she repeatedly gets herself expelled from boarding school in an attempt to return to her father and gain his love and approval.

Isabelle is not quite 19 when Germany invades, and she matures significantly over the course of the war as a result of her work with the resistance. While still living in Carriveau, Isabelle often loses her temper and all but openly criticizes Nazi rule in front of Captain Beck. After moving to Paris, however, she learns to be more cautious and feign good will when she needs to; she becomes particularly adept at leveraging her good looks and young age to her advantage. Under the codename “Nightingale,” she eventually becomes a key member of the French resistance, devising an escape route through the Pyrenees for downed Allied airmen.

Isabelle leads a total of 117 men to safety in this way before being captured in 1944 and sent to Ravensbrück. Although she survives long enough to see the camp liberated and to return home to Carriveau, both her physical and mental health are permanently damaged. She is unable to imagine leading a normal life after what she’s been through; nevertheless, she tells Vianne that she doesn’t regret her actions and feels she has lived a full life. Her relationship with fellow resistance fighter Gaëtan finally provides her with the unconditional love and acceptance she craves: “It didn’t matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him” (551).

Julien Rossignol is Vianne and Isabelle’s estranged father. A “quiet, intellectual” (488) man and amateur poet, Julien is permanently traumatized by his service in WWI. After returning home, he continues to run his bookstore but begins “drinking and keeping to himself and ignoring his family” (15). When his wife dies a few years later, he relinquishes care of his two daughters to a strict housekeeper and, in Isabelle’s case, a string of boarding schools. Although Isabelle constantly seeks his affection, he continually rebuffs his daughters’ attempts at a relationship into their adulthood.

Despite his coldness, Julien loves his children deeply. In fact, he feels enormous guilt over his inability to act as a father to them: “[H]e had agonized over what his fighting had done to his family. He knew how changed he’d been on his return, and instead of pain drawing him closer to his children and wife, it had separated them” (472). Furthermore, his reluctance to allow Isabelle to stay with him in Paris has more to do with love than irresponsibility. As she eventually discovers, he is only working for the German high command to facilitate his role forging documents for the French Resistance, and he doesn’t want Isabelle to expose herself to danger. His final act—claiming to be the “Nightingale” and being executed in Isabelle’s place—is a testament to his underlying courage as well as an attempt to atone for past mistakes. As he puts it in his final letter: “What I do now, I do without misgiving. My regret is not for my death, but for my life” (548).

Gaëtan is a young man with “black hair and a sharp face” (79) whom Isabelle encounters in the woods while fleeing Paris. Although disdainful of Isabelle’s youth and privilege—Gaëtan is a communist imprisoned for theft and set free only when France falls to the Nazis—he offers her food and invites her to accompany him to the war front. Isabelle falls in love with him as they travel to Carriveau, but when she confesses her feelings, Gaëtan leaves her at her sister’s house. He later explains that he did this to shield her from heartbreak.

Isabelle and Gaëtan reconnect in Paris, where Isabelle learns that he alerted the resistance in Carriveau to her existence; he now works with a resistance network in Paris, eventually joining a more militant group to fight with “bombs” and “guns” (431). He continues to deny his feelings for Isabelle until she is shot hiding a downed airman in Vianne’s barn. The two become lovers while Isabelle is recovering, but the relationship is shadowed from the start by the knowledge of how unlikely it is they will both survive the war. In fact, both Isabelle and Gaëtan are eventually arrested and reunited only briefly after the war before Isabelle succumbs to pneumonia. Gaëtan survives and reveals to Vianne at the end of the novel that he named his daughter after Isabelle.

Wolfgang Beck is a captain in the Wehrmacht who is billeted at Vianne’s home in Carriveau. He is a young, good-looking man with a wife and child at home, and Vianne is drawn to him out of a sense of shared loneliness. Beck treats Vianne and her family respectfully and even kindly, sharing food with them during winter shortages and eventually helping Vianne secure false documentation to pass off Ari as her adopted son.

Over time, Vianne and Beck develop romantic feelings for one another, though they never act on them; beyond the fact that both she and Beck are married, Vianne feels conflicted about even accepting help from an enemy soldier, much less entering into an affair with one. The complexity of their relationship reflects Beck’s own moral ambiguity as a character. By his own admittance, Beck viewed his decision to join the military as an “honorable” one when he made it, but as the German occupation of France intensifies—and as Beck receives orders to deport Carriveau’s Jewish population—he worries about the morality of his actions. Nevertheless, he continues to support his superiors, “[herding] women and children onto a cattle car” (348) while brandishing a whip and complaining that resistance to Nazi rule is a form of ingratitude. Vianne is eventually forced to kill Beck when he discovers Isabelle and a downed pilot hiding in the family barn. This decision haunts Vianne for the rest of her life, and she tells Isabelle at one point that they “killed a good man” (379).

Rachel is Vianne’s neighbor, fellow schoolteacher, and best friend since girlhood, when the two bonded over their shared status as outsiders: “They’d been a pair back then: Vianne, slight and pale and nervous, and Rachel, as tall as the boys, with eyebrows that grew faster than a life and a voice like a foghorn” (17). Although Rachel was traditionally the stronger, steadier, and braver of the two friends, the occupation of France places her in a uniquely vulnerable position: Rachel is Jewish and was born in Romania. The increasing persecution she faces as the years go on eventually begins to wear at her.

Because she is foreign-born, Rachel is in the first group of French Jews slated for deportation. Vianne tries to help Rachel and her two children—Sarah and Ari—escape into the Free Zone, but Sarah is shot and killed in an incident at the checkpoint. Rachel is caught the following day and asks Vianne to take care of Ari for her. When the war ends, Vianne learns that Rachel died only a month after arriving at the concentration camp.

Von Richter is an SS officer who eventually takes control of the German armed forces in Carriveau and oversees the deportation of the town’s Jews. In the days following Beck’s supposed disappearance, he questions Vianne about the officer’s whereabouts, taking obvious (and sexual) interest in her fear. Von Richter begins billeting in Vianne’s house, where he quickly proves to be as cruel as his early appearances suggested:

He was a man who had stumbled into a little bit of power and seized it with both hands. She’d known that within the first few hours of his arrival, when he’d chosen the best room and fathered up the warmest blankets for his bed, when he’d taken all of the pillows left in the house and all of the candles (406).

Nevertheless, the full depth of Von Richter’s sadism only becomes clear when he forces Vianne to become his mistress, raping and abusing her repeatedly in exchange for his silence about Ari’s true parentage. Vianne becomes pregnant shortly before the war ends, but because her husband returns home only a month later, she raises the child—Julien—as Antoine’s son and never reveals the truth.

Sophie is the daughter of Vianne and Antoine Mauriac. She is only eight when her father leaves for war, and in the years that follow, she is forced to grow up too quickly. Her father’s imprisonment, the constant threat of starvation, the death of her best friend Sarah de Champlain, and other hardships cause Sophie to become a “sharper, more cynical version of herself” (496). This pains Vianne, who wishes she could shield her daughter from the “ugliness in the world” (496). Nevertheless, Sophie retains a soft spot for her loved ones—particularly Ari, whom she cares for as though he truly were her brother—and “[grows] into a solemn, thoughtful woman” who “[knows] how to love” (558-59). She dies from cancer roughly 15 years before the novel begins.

Antoine is a postman in Carriveau, as well as Vianne’s husband and Sophie’s father. He and Vianne were childhood sweethearts and married when Vianne was just 17, shortly after she became pregnant. The relationship survived Vianne’s miscarriage, as well as the loss of a second pregnancy and a newborn son. Antoine is a caring and protective husband, and Vianne relies heavily on him for emotional support, crediting him with saving her in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s neglect. His capture and imprisonment therefore hit Vianne hard, leaving her frightened and uncertain of how to protect herself and her daughter.

Antoine survives the war, though neither he nor his marriage escape unscathed. Vianne never tells her husband about her rape by Von Richter or the feelings she developed for Beck, but the experiences create a newfound distance between her and Antoine. Nevertheless, the two remain committed to one another and Antoine goes on to act as a father to Julien—though it is implied that Antoine knows Julien is actually another man’s son. 

Paul Lévy—a “pencil-thin old man with a waxed gray moustache” (220)—is a friend of Julien Rossignol and a patron of his bookshop. He is also a prominent member of the resistance network Isabelle becomes involved with and often cautions her about the dangers of impulsiveness and immaturity. Lévy, who is not only a political dissident but also Jewish, is ultimately arrested and presumably killed.

Anouk is the first member of the resistance Isabelle meets after traveling to Paris. She is a striking woman with a “regal” (235) demeanor and “bold, Eastern European features” (209). Although Anouk can be stern, she praises Isabelle’s “steadiness” in her first assignment and helps her gain acceptance in the network. Over time, the women develop a kind of friendship, although their contact is necessarily limited as a result of the work they do. Their paths cross again as the war draws to a close, when Isabelle is transferred to the camp where Anouk is imprisoned. Anouk survives into old age, and both she and Vianne attend the ceremony at the end of the novel.

Ari is the infant son of Rachel and Marc de Champlain. His father is taken prisoner in 1940 when the Nazis invade France, and his mother is sent to a concentration camp in 1942, leaving Ari in Vianne’s care. With the help of Captain Beck, Vianne passes Ari off as the orphaned son of a cousin, training the toddler to think of her as his mother and respond only to the name Daniel. Vianne comes to think of Ari as her own son and is devastated when she must give him up after the war ends; Ari is sent to America to be raised by Rachel’s cousin “to be who he is, and to be with his people” (533). Ari never forgets the family that raised him for the first few years of his life and finally succeeds in finding and thanking Vianne when she returns to Paris in 1995.

Henri is the son of the innkeeper in Carriveau who later takes over his father’s business. He is also a communist and the leader of the local resistance. Henri is young, charismatic, and handsome, leading Vianne to believe that Isabelle’s relationship with him is romantic. Isabelle encourages this idea, although in reality the pair kiss just once. Henri is drawn to Isabelle but recognizes that she is in love with someone else and steps aside. When Vianne approaches him for helping hiding Carriveau’s Jewish children, he provides blank papers for forgery. He eventually attracts the attention of the authorities and is arrested and executed some time during the final year of the war.

Madame Babineau is a Basque woman and an old friend of Julien and Madeleine Rossignol; she has “hair […] the color of iron shavings” (266) and habitually wears men’s clothing. Her family are goatherds living in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, which gives Isabelle the idea to smuggle downed airmen out of France by way of the mountains. Micheline lost both her husband (in WWI) and her two sons (in WWII) and is eager to combat German rule, so her home becomes a regular stopping point on Isabelle’s route. Over time, she takes on a motherly role towards Isabelle. Although elderly, Micheline is strong-willed and survives life in the camps, often encouraging Isabelle not to give up as the latter grows sicker.

Julien is Vianne’s only surviving child by the time the novel ends in 1995. He grew up in Oregon (where he works as a surgeon), and Vianne considers him very American in his practicality and optimism. She prides herself on this, since she worked hard to shelter him from the horrors she herself experienced. Her reluctance to discuss her past, however, creates a distance between them despite Julien’s obvious love for and devotion to his mother. As the novel ends, Vianne allows him a window into her life by bringing him to France to attend the event commemorating her sister. Nevertheless, she resolves to maintain her secrecy on one key point: that Julien is Von Richter’s biological son.