The Nightingale

Isabelle and Gaëtan spend a week of “almost unbearable bliss” (411) together in Brantôme, though the knowledge that they must part soon (and potentially forever) hangs over them.

In November, Vianne takes Ari into town to spread the false story of his origins around; she notices several barricaded streets and an unusual number of soldiers and policemen. When she reaches the square, she sees a crowd of Jewish women and children being gathered for deportation. One woman asks Vianne to take her 3-year-old son before being forced away, and she does. Vianne and the boys hurry home, where she tells her terrified daughter that they “have to try to save him or [they] are as bad as [the Nazis] are” (418). Von Richter emerges from the house, and Vianne—knowing his fear of disease—claims the boy is the son of a friend who died of tuberculosis. Von Richter orders her to take him to the orphanage before announcing that he will leave the next day: “We are occupying the rest of France tomorrow. No more Free Zone. It’s about damn time. Letting you French govern yourselves was a joke” (419).

Vianne takes the boy to the convent and asks Marie-Therese to hide him in the orphanage.