Texts for Translation 2006
  Caroline Wyatt

A serious one first

(Cue: "I am going on a journey," Irene Nemirovsky told her two young daughters in July 1942, as she was arrested by the French police. By then, Nemirovsky, a celebrated Russian writer and a Jew, had no illusions about French collaboration with the Nazis. Five weeks later she died at Auschwitz, at the age of 39. All she left behind for her two orphaned children was a suitcase - containing what they thought was a diary. More than sixty years later, her daughter Denise Epstein finished deciphering her mother's notes - and realised it was her final novel - a chronicle of collaboration in an occupied village of Vichy France. Our Paris correspondent Caroline Wyatt has been tracing the book's remarkable journey.)

As I passed a bookshop on my way to work, a face on the front cover of a book caught my eye. It was a solemn sepia photograph of a woman in her early thirties. A woman with haunting brown eyes which seemed to follow me as I walked past. Curious, I stopped to take a closer look. The novel was called 'Suite Francaise', by a writer I'd never heard of - Irene Nemirovsky.

Leafing through it, the introduction told a remarkable story - the story behind the book and how it came to be published more than sixty years after the words themselves were written. It was thanks to the courage of Irene Nemirovsky's daughter, Denise, that her mother's voice is once again being heard after it was silenced at Auschwitz.

Today, Denise lives in a small flat in Toulouse - a far cry from the wealth she was born in to, as the eldest daughter of a well-know writer and a Russian banker. She's a slim and elegant 75 year old, with the energy of someone half her age. Bookshelves line the small room - bearing dozens of novels bound in soft calfskin leather, with her mother's name stamped in gold. Editions of Irene Nemirovsky's 13 works that brought her fame and fortune in the Paris of the 1930s, after a turbulent childhood in which her family was forced to flee the Russian revolution, taking refuge in France.

"My mother had a wonderful time in the 1920s," smiles Denise. "Our apartment on the Left Bank was always full of writers, talking late into the night." Denise's green eyes light up as she tells me how her parents met, at a ball; her father Michel was a fellow Russian Jewish émigré.

The children didn't understand why, in 1939, their mother suddenly had them baptised into the Catholic Church, before sending Denise and her younger sister to the Burgundy countryside to live with their nurse and nanny. But the Germans were advancing on Paris and anti-Jewish feeling was on the rise in France too.
The baptism was in vain. By the time Denise's parents joined them in a village called Issy L'Eveque, the whole family was made to wear the yellow star of David, marking them out as Jews.

"And yet," Denise remembers, "they were the happiest years of my life. We lived together as a family, and my mother took long walks in the woods during which she wrote and wrote - and in the evenings, we had our parents to ourselves." Irene never shared her fears with her young daughters - instead scribbling ever more urgently into her leather-bound notebook, knowing there was little time left. She refused to leave France; she'd already lost one home in Russia.
Denise's face suddenly crumples and looks as vulnerable as a child's as she remembers the morning in July 1942 when a French gendarme knocked on the door.
"My mother told me she was going on a journey, and went upstairs to collect her suitcase. It was a solemn farewell but we didn't know it would be the last."
Aged 13, Denise never saw her mother again. She didn't know that just 5 weeks later, her mother died at Auschwitz; a few months afterwards, her father too. The girls were forced into hiding but as they left the house, Denise picked up a small suitcase that had belonged to her mother - containing photographs and what she thought was Irene's diary. For two long years she carried it with her from hiding place to hiding place. And after the war, it stayed closed, containing memories too painful to open up.
But as the decades passed, Denise tells me, she finally found the courage to look. Slowly, she began to read and then transcribe her mother's tiny hand-writing, in azure ink on frail onion-skin paper. And discovered it was not a diary but a novel: her mother's last, unsentimental account of a French village under occupation. A village not unlike Issy, in which the French bourgeoisie collaborate with the Nazis, to save themselves, their houses, their precious dishes and cutlery.

Why didn't Denise publish it sooner? "I wanted to leave the manuscript to my children, as a legacy to them," she explains. It was only a chance meeting with a friend that made her send the manuscript to a publisher last year - and he read it with growing amazement and signed a contract the very next day.

Today, Irene Nemirovsky's face once again gazes out from every bookshop in Paris - forcing the French to confront their wartime history. Little could she have imagined, as she wrote alone in the woods, that one day her voice would again be heard by hundreds of thousands of readers. But she must have hoped.
Denise smiles. "For me the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It's an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis didn't truly succeed in killing her. It's not vengeance - but it is a victory."

A Franco-British tale next...

(Cue: This week, Britain and France have again been at each others' throats over French farming subsidies and the British budget rebate at a bad-tempered EU summit in Brussels. It's prompted headlines in France referring to Waterloo and Agincourt and summoned up past conflicts between La Belle France and perfidious Albion, as Britain is once again being not-so affectionately called across the Channel. So what lies behind this centuries-old hostility between these two nations? Our Paris correspondent Caroline Wyatt went in search of answers this week.)

Paris is the most beautiful city in the world on a summer's evening, when a golden light seems to glow from the rooftops. This week I walked by the River Seine, and watched the Eiffel Tower begin its hourly night-time sparkle - an extravaganza of light, a spectacle that never fails to inspire in me a childish delight. All the more so because the illumination serves no practical purpose at all. It's done quite simply because it's beautiful.
That evening I arrived for dinner with friends, rhapsodising about my walk there, apologising profusely for being late. It was 10pm and I'd been held up at work. Etienne, a lawyer, was understanding about the lateness, though not about my hymn of praise to Paris.

"Paris? Yes, it's beautiful," he agreed. "but it's a museum, or maybe a mausoleum. It's dead. It hasn't changed in years. I prefer London. It's dynamic and it's vibrant." The next day I discovered two friends were leaving Paris. Neither could find a job, so, like many young French, they decided to try London instead. "You can make your own luck there," they told me.

That plaintive cry - about the lack of dynamism in France, the red tape, and high unemployment is one I heard often as the debate about the EU Constitution split the nation - dividing Paris from the provinces, and the elite from the working class.

This week I found myself in the fishing village of Etaples, asking why three quarters of the people there voted no in the referendum. It was the sort of village to delight an English heart. A picturesque main square, where town-hall employees were diligently perfecting the blossoming flowerbeds. Not a youth in a hoodie in sight. Nor the anonymous chainstores of most English high streets. Instead, the shops in an orderly row - the baker, the grocer, the fishmonger, a few bars and for the very last order of all, the under-taker. All family-run businesses, each handed down the generations.

Yet the Socialist mayor of the village, Marcel Guerville, told me despairingly of his failed campaign to persuade his village to vote yes for Europe's future. "They were afraid," he said. "Afraid of your Anglo-Saxon working hours being brought here, and of French values being lost. We look at your privatised railways, and we don't want that happening here." He told me that behind the beautiful façade, 17 per cent of people in Etaples were out of work - the young abandoning the village to seek their fortune elsewhere, giving up the fishing boats that had sustained families for centuries.

Some blame Europe for their plight. Jean-Francois Wacogne chose to run the fishermens' co-operative restaurant, les Pecheurs d'Etaples, rather than follow his father and grand-father to sea. Not much of a future, he told me, with the EU busy banning fishing. Yet he voted yes in the referendum - and said that in his heart of hearts, he knew France had to change. To become a little more dynamic, a little less reliant on the state.
As we chatted, the crustaceans I'd seen swimming happily in their tank were being piled high on silver platters, their shells expertly bisected in the hot kitchen before being delivered with a flourish to the table. Yet all the lunchtime customers cracking open their lobsters and crabs seemed to be English - there to enjoy what we see as the gloriously French way of life. Visiting idyllic seaside villages that remind us of Britain in the 1950s, where everyone knows their neighbour and everything stops for lunch, a post-prandial lull settling on the deserted sunlit streets.

It's a way of life we envy and sometimes hanker after. And it struck me that the cross-channel rivalry revived by this week's bitter political insults is all about envy - niggling away beneath the surface on both sides.
The French want what we have - a dynamic economy, vibrant cities, and unemployment so low it barely registers. A society where those who want to can succeed, and work as hard as they like in the job they choose. But what the French don't want is to pay the price: less security, self-reliance rather than a state that provides.

And we want what they have. A society that values family and friends above work. A society in which people choose to spend time with their friends and their children, rather than at the office or travelling to work. A society in which crime is low, hospitals can cope, and trains actually work.
Yet as they look across the channel, the French are torn between envy and fear. What they fear is losing the state that takes such good care of them - even if it can no longer afford it. And what France must now decide now is whether to follow in perfidious Albion's wake - or risk becoming a museum. A very beautiful museum, but still a place that foreigners visit to remember times past, and admire the facades of the sleepy villages bathed in the glow of the dying sun.

And a spoof one with serious purpose for the last!

She stood outside the church of St Sulpice, her heart pounding. It was dusk and if memory served her well, it was just 20 metres up the 200 steps into the darkened nave. That number had been precisely counted by the church's medieval architect to chime in with the ritual of the pagan goddess once worshipped on this site until the elders of the Christian Church claimed it as their own.

Her footsteps echoed on the cold flagstones. Inside, the elderly Frenchman who went by the name of Monsieur Michel Rouge would be waiting for her. She sensed it might be a difficult encounter. Perhaps he alone could unravel the secrets of the dark arts practised by the American author Dan Brown. The man whose quest to write a best-seller had so angered the French that even now, mysterious forces were gathering to denounce him.

She looked up at his face in the half shadow, illuminated only by the blue of Mary Magdalen's robe in the stained glass window looming above them. Then she took a deep breath and asked....'So what exactly is it about the Da Vinci code that's upset you so much in France?"

Michel Rouge was silent as he weighed his words carefully. But the English journalist could see what he was thinking. Perhaps it was because Dan Brown was American, perhaps it was because his best-seller mixed fact and fiction so successfully that the Da Vinci tourists flocking to France took every word as Gospel truth - their naïve gullibility irritating the rational, logical French.

In fact, Michel Rouge is a tour guide at the Church that's used as the site of one of the key secrets of the Da Vinci Code, and one of its most brutal killings by Silas, the albino Opus Dei monk and murderer. Except that Opus Dei, the Catholic organisation, doesn't have monks. Nor is it a sect. And St Sulpice does not hide the secret that Dan Brown describes.

Michel smiles as he explains that he doesn't actually mind as long as the grail-hunting tourists aren't abusive when he tells them the book is not true. Like seventeen million other people across the globe, he's read the Da Vinci code and enjoyed it. But what worries him is the introduction, which claims that all descriptions of artwork, architecture and secret rituals are accurate. Well, up to a point. St Sulpice undoubtedly exists. But it wasn't the site of a Roman temple. Nor, Michel Rouge says, does the obelisk there hide a secret cave. Nor indeed is the obelisk Egyptian.

So fed up is the church with tourists asking to see where the fictional nun was murdered that it's put up notices to make it clear that while the church is real, the events in the book are not. Some visitors, though, simply don't believe it - and keep stealing the notice.

They tell Michel Rouge that he's covering up for the Catholic Church but that now, thanks to Dan Brown, they know the truth. That Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had children whose descendents became French kings. Michel shrugs, and raises a sceptical eyebrow. Despite everything, he says, he's glad more visitors are being drawn to the church - whatever their motives.

The Gallic shrug approach is also taken by Opus Dei, described in the novel as a rich, powerful and violent Catholic Sect. I speak to their press secretary Arnaud Gency on the phone, so I can't tell whether he's an unusually large albino monk nor if he's wearing a spiked belt around his thigh to mortify his flesh. It doesn't sound like it, though, as he laughs while discussing the impact of a book in which his employer is one of the main villains. Arnaud read the Da Vinci code, but admits that to him, its popularity remains its greatest mystery.
He directs me to the Opus Dei website for their wonderfully understated riposte. "We hope that Da Vinci code readers interested in Christian history will be motivated to study the scholarship in the NON FICTION section of the library."

And yet, in this secular age, what is it about a novel based on religion that's captured so many imaginations? Arnaud Gency agrees that perhaps many readers are seeking a spiritual side to life, especially those who don't have - as he puts it - much historical knowledge or culture on which to base their beliefs. Americans, he means.
But how does he explain its popularity in France? "When you read the book," he says "you have the feeling that you're learning a lot, and the French love that. But when you realise that what Dan Brown writes is wrong, it's a bitter disappointment. At least in France."

It was dark outside as she left the church....and for a brief moment, she thought she heard voices. Dan Brown is publishing a sequel, they whispered. Oh no, she thought, and could almost hear the groans of French agony resonating through the ancient paving stones.

Caroline Wyatt, BBC Paris Correspondent

Back to Texts