Free The Fires of Autumn by Irène Némirovsky Page A

sand of Flanders; when she was eating, she imagined him going hungry; when she rested, that he was tired. When she read the list of the dead, she told herself: ‘Tomorrow it could be him.’ When the son of one of her friends was killed, she cried because she could see her own son’s face beneath the features of the young victim. But whenever she heard that a soldier had been saved, found shelter, was safe, she bitterly reproached God that her own son was still in danger – and for how much longer?
    Bernard was fighting in the Aisne region.
    Raymond Détang had married Mademoiselle Humbert, and had managed to organise things so that he remained in Paris.
    The Bruns had nothing to live on apart from Thérèse’s money, ‘but I’m not worried about the Russian stocks,’ Monsieur Brun said, ever the optimist. ‘The Russians will pay up in the end. They are true friends and even though I miss the Tsar, who was a good man, in spite of everything, I’m not angry that the people are now a Republic: their system of government was behind the times. So I’m not worried at all: they will pay their debts. But in the meantime, in the meantime, it’s difficult …’
    And it was difficult; they lived as they had before, but they looked like people who had set out on a journey one beautiful fine day in a gentle breeze, with parasols and straw hats and who suddenly see the weather change, a storm brewing and the rain drenching the ruffles on their muslin skirts.
    Everything seemed strange, distorted, out of joint. This war no longer resembled the one that began in 1914: with its tanks, planes and armoured vehicles, with its soldiers in gas masks, this was nothing more than war on an industrial scale, an enormous company that traded in serial massacres, death on a production line. This Paris where all the languages in the world could be heard, these cafés where the French no longer felt at home, this echo that reached the scandalised but curious Frenchmen, the echo of ever increasing numbers: ‘He made a million on war supplies, a million … Two, ten, twenty million … There are people making millions while our sons … They aren’t decent Frenchmen … They aren’t patriots, but … money …’ What they didn’t say was: ‘Pleasure …’ They would not have dared. And besides, that word would have sounded almost offensive to the lower middle classes. They didn’t take to pleasure easily, they didn’t enjoy themselves in ‘good’ society, among ‘the right kind’ of people. No! No one would have dared speak of pleasure and yet, whispered rumours spread from one person to another that in Paris itself, even while it was being bombed, in certain areas, in clubs open only to members, soldiers on leave, women, foreignersdanced the tango and other dances as well, frenzied, obscene dances that had daring names; every night, drunken Americans smashed the windows at Café Weber; pilots, the war’s ‘flying aces’, behind the wheels of cars, speeding along at a hundred miles an hour, swerved on to the pavement and killed women. These rumours were strange, almost incomprehensible, sinister in a way, or so thought Adolphe Brun. There was something about all this that frightened him: he no longer recognised the French. Its people spoke a new language that was no longer the light-hearted slang of 1900; it was teeming with Anglo-Saxon expressions. There were new customs and, most importantly, certain words no longer elicited the same reaction from him as in the past. The most sacred words – ‘Frugality … Marital fidelity … Virginity …’ – had gradually become old-fashioned, almost laughable. There was a painful contrast between what you read in the newspapers and what you heard in the street, on the metro, in the shops, it was like a nightmare where you see a great crowd of men in top hats who are otherwise stark naked; you wonder: ‘Can they see what they look like? Who do they think they are