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Summary
Chapters 31-34
Chapter 31
When the narrative switches back to 1995, the older woman is chatting with a young girl at the airport when her son, Julien, appears. After receiving her voicemail and being alarmed by the spontaneity of his mother’s choice, he booked a seat on the same flight. On the plane, he accuses her of keeping secrets from him and she promises to tell him about her past when they are in Paris.
Chapter 32
In May of 1944, Julien passes some blank identity cards to Isabelle at a cafe. Later, she is reunited with Gaëtan, whom she has not seen in 8 months, in a forest. Gaëtan has been fighting alongside the Partisans, blowing up trains and hampering Nazi operations. She passes on a coded message from the allied forces, and Gaëtan gets ready to leave for his next mission immediately.
In Carriveau, Vianne teaches a class at the orphanage. She has hidden 13 more children in the past 18 months, giving them new names and identities. Her class is interrupted by Von Richter, who angrily accuses her of conspiring with Henri, who has been arrested. When he threatens to drag her and the children to prison, she begs him to leave the children alone. Later, he interrogates her in a windowless room in the town hall, but she continues to insist that she does not know Henri very well. He releases her, but only after delivering a series of thinly veiled threats.
Meanwhile, Isabelle takes her usual precautions when leading a group of airmen to the home of Madame Babineau, from which they plan to begin their voyage across the Pyrenees. After she chats with the men and with Madame Babineau, they hear a car pull up to the house. Suddenly, they are swarmed with SS agents, and Isabelle is knocked unconscious after being hit in the head with a rifle butt.
Chapter 33
When Isabelle regains consciousness, she is tied to a chair in an interrogation room. Rittmeister Schmidt, Commander of the Gestapo in Amboise, demands that she reveal the identity of The Nightingale, beating her savagely as he questions her. As she desperately hopes that she can hold out for two days, giving her comrades time to protect themselves, she loses consciousness because of the savage beating. Later, she wakes up and realizes that she has been tied up, naked, in a refrigerator, and is at risk of freezing to death.
In Carriveau, ten men are publicly hanged by the Nazis in the town square. Across the town, people discuss the various brutal acts of retaliation by the Germans across France. Suddenly, Vianne is pulled into an alleyway by a man. To her surprise, she realizes that the man is her father, whom she has not seen in many years. They arrange to meet later in an empty house. There, he informs her that Isabelle has been captured and asks Vianne to take care of her younger sister when she returns to Carriveau someday. She realizes that her father intends to do something drastic in order to save his younger daughter. Before they part, he hands her a letter which he asks her to read alongside Isabelle someday. When she returns home, Von Richter confronts her about Jean George’s background, and she insists that he is the son of a deceased sibling of Antoine. He asks her what she would do to protect the boy, and she responds that she would do anything. Von Richter proceeds to brutally rape her.
Chapter 34
After an indeterminate period of torture, Isabelle is handed a dress and told that she will her interrogation is over, as someone has confessed to being The Nightingale. Her father walks in and she understands the sacrifice that he has made. Though she tries in vain to confess that she is The Nightingale, she watches helplessly as the SS officers execute her father.
The day after her assault by Von Richter, Vianne takes the train to Girot, hoping to help her sister and father in whatever way she can. When she reaches the town square, she sees the dead, bullet-ridden body of her father strapped to a fountain and rushes to Isabelle as she is being escorted by the SS to a train for deportation to a concentration camp. Isabelle urges Vianne to leave and not end up like their father. On the crowded and dirty train, Isabelle spots Madame Babineau. When they arrive at the all-female camp, they are violently stripped and their hair is shaved.
Analysis
As the Nazis begin to lose control of the war across Europe, they become increasingly dangerous. These chapters emphasize the raw and brutal violence of the war, a violence experienced even by those civilians who live far from the battlefields. By degrees the Nazis give up any pretense of peaceful coexistence with those living in the occupied zone, making shows of brute strength in order to intimidate the battered population. They hang up dead bodies like scarecrows in the town center, creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear. The Nightingale underscores the profound and far-reaching effects of war, which seeps into every aspect of the characters’ lives, leaving no one untouched.
World War I leaves Julien broken, unable to reciprocate his daughters’ love. In his farewell to Vianne, he tells her that her generation will have to learn how to live again despite all of the pain and trauma they have experienced, just as his generation did before. Though he makes the ultimate sacrifice to save Isabelle from execution by the Gestapo, the war takes from him any possibility of making up for lost time with his daughters. As Vianne and Isabelle confront the harsh reality of his death, both realize that they had always hoped for a future reconciliation that now will never come. Theirs is one of the many dreams cut short by the violence that scarred that era.
Having spent years of her youth working with the Resistance, Isabelle also mourns the possibilities that she has lost to the war. Before her arrest, she spends her days in a state of restless vigilance, never staying in one apartment for more than a few days and never letting her guard down. Though she treasures the brief moments she has with Gaëtan, war prevents them from experiencing the peace and stability of a true relationship, and they can only speculate as to what they have missed out on. Where Vianne can find comfort in her memories of earlier and happier times, Isabelle has come into adulthood through the war and has never known the comforts of love in a time of peace.
In the midst of the chaos of the war, men like Von Richter take advantage of their positions of authority. He serves as a stark contrast to Beck, who, through the early years of the war, treated Vianne and Sophie with relative courtesy and even, occasionally, kindness. The occasional suggestion of coercion and bribery that marked Beck’s relationship to Vianne is grotesquely realized in Von Richter’s sexual assault of Vianne. He makes no pretense of courtesy or legality, instead reveling in the power he holds over her. A true sadist, he enjoys Vianne’s pain and humiliation. Throughout the novel, to love another person is to be vulnerable. Von Richter correctly identifies Vianne’s love for the children as her weak spot, taking advantage of her desire to protect them in order to force her acquiescence. Nevertheless, she continues to fight to protect the children, though heroism does not come as naturally to her as it does to her sister. Unable to overcome her fear, she instead pushes through it in order to save as many children as she can.
