But by 1937 Irène was tired. She had written a novel a year since 1928, as well as dozens of short stories; her request for French citizenship had been pending since 1935; her inheritance was being eaten up by her extravagant and neurotic mother, forcing her to publish relentlessly in order to maintain her prominent position in the literary world, and to choose magazines with a large circulation, regardless of their political allegiance. Némirovsky's husband, who worked in a bank, earned a third of what she did; they had two daughters to support: Denise, who was eight, and little Elisabeth, born on 20 March 1937.
She sometimes lost heart. Then she would stop writing: “Anxiety, sadness, a mad desire to be reassured. Yes, that's what I seek, but in vain. Only in Paradise will I find reassurance. I think of Renan's words: 'You find peace in God 's heart.' To be confident and reassured, sheltering in God 's heart! And yet, I love life” (5 June 1937).
For a thirty-four-year-old, youth is over. Irène knew this and the adolescent notebook she had unearthed filled her with melancholy. On 6 December 1937 she wrote a list of possible new subjects for stories, carefully numbered from 1 to 27. Several were meditations on the various stages of life, and the passing of time, in which youth and age are at odds with each other. One of them was Fire in the Blood, although that was not yet its title:
New subjects and a novel. I thought about The
Young and the Old for a novel (a play would be
better). Austerity, purity of parents who were
guilty when they were young. The impossibility
of understanding that “fire in the blood.” A good
idea. Disadvantage: no clear characters.
The book grew in her mind when, during the summer of 1938, she reread Proust's À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Within a Budding Grove). Here she found Proust 's “marvellous words,” which seemed to express to perfection the subject that preoccupied her:
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it
for ourselves, after a journey through the wilder-
ness which no one else can make for us, which no
one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of
view from which we come at last to regard the
world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes
that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a
paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung
from very different beginnings, having been
influenced by everything evil or commonplace
that prevailed round about them. They represent
a struggle and a victory.*
However, it was Némirovsky's visit to a village in Burgundy, at the end of 1937, that provided the missing setting for her novel. She had gone there to interview a nanny for baby Elisabeth. She would return to find peace from the troubles of Paris.
The first mention of Issy-l'Évêque in her notebooks occurs on 25 April 1938: “Returned from Issy l'Évêque. 4 days full of happiness. What more could I ask? Thank God for that and for hope.” Here, in this rural Arcadia, were the characters she had been seeking for her novel, those taciturn people that only the French countryside can produce. “Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn't give a thought to the rest of the world,” says Sylvestre, the narrator of Fire in the Blood. “This region has something restrained yet wild about it, something affluent and yet distrustful that is reminiscent of another time, long past.”
When Sylvestre describes entering the café in the village 's Hôtel des Voyageurs, it is impossible not to think that we are hearing Irène Némirovsky herself, describing her own visit to the hotel of the same name in Issy-l'Évêque:
I push open the door, making a little bell ring, and
find myself in the dark, smoky café. A wood-
burning stove glows like a red eye; mirrors reflect
the marble tabletops, the billiard table, the torn
leather settee and the calendar from 1919 with its
picture of an Alsatian woman in white stockings
standing between two soldiers […] In front of me
is a mirror that frames my wrinkled face, a face so
mysteriously changed over the past few years that
I scarcely recognise myself.
The face in the mirror seems like an omen, yet how could Némirovsky have known that she would spend the early weeks of the Occupation in this very hotel, and begin here her final book, Suite Française?
From the dazzling success of her first novel, David Golder, to her arrest in 1942, Irène Némirovsky never appeared to be surprised by her fate. It was as if, after the Russian Revolution, nothing human, or indeed inhuman, seemed strange to her. “Of course,” stressed the writer Henri de Régnier in a 1929 review of David Golder, “the human subject matter that Mme Némirovsky deals with is rather repugnant, but she has observed it with passionate curiosity, and she manages to communicate this curiosity to us, so we may share it. Interest is stronger than disgust.” Yet Irène Némirovsky's curiosity was to prove dangerous: it drew her to things from which she should have kept her distance.
Constructed around a gradually revealed secret, Fire in the Blood describes, as a naturalist might describe, a predatory community of extreme cunning. Behind the pretty rural scenery, beasts lurk in the shadows, ready to pounce, and as the reader's eye becomes accustomed to the dark, we can't miss them. This “malicious intent” at the heart of village life will become the subject of Dolce, the second part of Suite Française, which describes life under the Occupation in a small rural community. The village in Dolce bears a very close resemblance to that in Fire in the Blood and is undoubtedly also based on Issy-l'Évêque.
“Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think about the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew? How can I explain it … Imagine a field being sowed, and all the promise that's contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests … Well, it's exactly the same in life.” When Némirovsky puts these words into the mouth of Hélène in Fire in the Blood, she is transposing a Ukrainian proverb she was fond of quoting into a Burgundy setting: “All a man needs in life is one tiny grain of luck; without it, he is nothing.” She could have been talking about her own life. Without the unique circumstances of her upbringing, could she have become the author of the best-selling David Golder ? Without the all-conquering pride that consumed her, would she have been able to escape the influence of her arrogant mother, who was obsessed by money and the desire to remain eternally youthful? Without the “passionate curiosity” that Henri de Régnier immediately recognised in her, would she have been able to portray so vividly the world of the paysans, to evoke their work and their daily lives from so close up?
In Fire in the Blood the name of the village hotel and the mill remain exactly as they are in life. The real Moulin-Neuf is close to a pond, about one kilometre from Issy-l'Évêque if you take the road from the Montjeu farm. Would Némirovsky have changed the names of places and people if the novel had been published during her lifetime? Begun in 1938, Fire in the Blood was probably reworked during the summer of 1941 in Issy-l'Évêque itself. Némirovsky had moved there with her two daughters at the end of May 1940, shortly before the German invasion, and was staying at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. She had plenty of time to observe her characters in the flesh. On two occasions she drew a parallel in her notebook between Fire in the Blood and Captivity, the projected third section of Suite Française, for which a few notes have survived. It is therefore highly likely that she was still working on Fire in the Blood in 1942.
In Issy-l'Évêque Irène Némirovsky had discovered a French Arcadia. It was her love of its natural beauty that gives Fire in the Blood the incomparable scent of water and earth that Némirovsky savoured right up until those final moments she spent in the woods and fields of Burgundy: “a fresh, bitter smell that makes me feel so happy.” However— and it is this theme th
at underlies the novel—even in Arcadia one can never be certain of the harvest. For, “who would bother sowing his fields, if he knew in advance what the harvest would bring?”
OLIVIER PHILIPPONNAT
PATRICK LIENHARDT
* Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 513.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. After attending the Sorbonne in Paris from 1921 to 1924, she began to write and swiftly achieved success with an early novel, David Golder, which was followed by more than fifteen other books, among them The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair, and Dogs and Wolves. Throughout her lifetime she published widely in French newspapers and literary journals. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. More than sixty years later, Suite Française was published posthumously, for the first time, in 2006.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Translation Copyright © 2007 By Sandra Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Némirovsky, Irène, 1903–1942.
[Chaleur du sang. English]
Fire in the blood / by Irène Némirovsky; translated by
Sandra Smith.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49545-7
I. Smith, Sandra, 1949– II. Title.
pq2627.e4c4313 2007
843'.912—dc22 2007028730
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Némirovsky, Irène, 1903–1942.
Fire in the blood / Irène Némirovsky; translated by
Sandra Smith.
Translation of: La chaleur du sang.
I. Smith, Sandra II. Title.
pq2627.e53c4313 2007 843'.912 c2007-902462-9
v3.0
Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood
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