A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction

Némirovsky, too, was prone to "violent and summary" pictures when wounded, even though at some level she must have recognized them as lacking. In Suite Française, her target is no longer her mother or wealthy Jewish circles, but the French middle class. Writing on the situation in France in June 1941, Némirovsky turns from despair to resolve.

My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters. Whether you look at it from a mystical or a personal point of view, it's just the same. Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait.

The French had been her people-until now. This was not an identity she was trying on. She did not bother to be naturalized before 1938, but probably because, in her idealization of France as a bastion of rights and civility, it had never occurred to her that it would be necessary. Her heart did indeed harden against those who had seemed to offer an alternative to soulless materialism but proved as driven by self-interest and fear as any others.

A few days after Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia, Némirovsky observed the German soldiers packing up to leave Issyl'Évêque for the Eastern front with genuine sorrow. Even with the proliferating decrees that humiliated them and endangered their lives, she and her husband grew close to some soldiers living near them. In her working notes for Suite Française, she wrote:

I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors. I feel sorry for these poor children [the soldiers]. But I cannot forgive certain individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly abandon us, those who are prepared to stab you in the back.

Despite this resolution, the French bourgeoisie-those she felt had betrayed her-remained at the mercy of her pen.

For Suite Française, Némirovsky had planned a five-part novel, based loosely on a musical structure, and managed to complete the first two sections. The prelude, "Storm in June," is a bitterly satiric portrait of French middle-class refugees jockeying for survival and advantage in the mass exodus out of Paris before the German army's advance in June 1940. Némirovsky interweaves the stories of several of the 8 million French citizens who fled the first bombing raids that spring. They are, for the most part, the happy few with chauffeurs and petrol. There is the wealthy Péricand family, part of that class for whom their children's education is more important than bread. Yet they also know when charity becomes a luxury they can no longer afford and hoard their supplies accordingly. Also in flight is the solitary aesthete Charles Langelet, who prizes his collection of porcelain far above his fellow refugees. The prominent writer Gabriel Corte is appalled to find his credit no longer suffices. He uses all his influence and cash to bribe a restauranteur for a meal, only to have it snatched, unopened, from his hands. Despairing of France's lost greatness, he is soon calculating what might help him win favor with the new government. The banker Corbin, forced to decide whether or not to allow his mistress a seat in his car with his wife, takes out his frustration on two employees, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud. When the Michauds are unable to join him in Tours because the railways have been bombed, he fires them. They, in turn, can think of little besides the fate of their son Jean-Marie who has been missing in action. "Storm in June" ends in a state of deceptive calm and muted hope. The bombs have stopped falling, and survivors are slowly making their way back to Paris, or on to safer lands.