Mistraclass="underline" Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914), French novelist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904.
Bichelonne: Jean Bichelonne (1904–44), French businessman and civil servant, later head of the Office central de repartition des produits industriels in the Vichy government.
Hérold-Paquis: Jean Auguste Hérold aka Jean Hérold-Paquis (1912–45), a French journalist who fought for Franco during the Spanish Civil War and was later appointed Delegate for Propaganda to the Hautes-Alpes region by the Vichy Government. Executed for treason in 1945.
admirals Esteva, Darlan and Platón: three admirals who served in the Vichy regime.
Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821): Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre, philosopher and writer who famously defended the monarchy after the French Revolution.
Maurice Barrès (1861–1923): French symbolist writer, politician who popularised the notion of ethnic nationalism in France. An influential anti-Semite, he broke with the left wing to become a leading anti-Dreyfusard, writing: ‘That Dreyfus is guilty, I deduce not from the facts themselves, but from his race’.
Charles Martel (68?–741): Frankish military leader who defeated Abdul Rahman’s son, halting the advance of the Islamic caliphate circa 736.
fleurs-de-lis on a field Azure: the heraldic arms of ‘France Ancienne’.
I was secretary to Joanovici: Joseph Joanovici (1905–65), a French Jewish iron supplier, who supplied both Nazi Germany and the French Resistance. After the war, he was found guilty of collaboration and sentenced to prison. In 1958 he escaped from France to Israel but was refused the right to request to naturalize and returned to France. He was released in 1962.
Frison-Roche: Roger Frison-Roche (1906–99) French mountaineer, explorer and novelist
Bordeaux: Henry Bordeaux (1870–1963), French lawyer, essayist and writer. His novels reflect the values of traditional provincial Catholic communities.
Capitaine Danrit: penname of Émile Driant, (1855–1916), French writer, politician, and a decorated army officer. He died at the Battle of Verdun during the First World War.
Édouard Drumont (1844–1917): French journalist and writer who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. He later founded and edited the French anti-Semitic political newspaper La Libre Parole.
Each man in his darkness goes towards his Light: a quotation from Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo.
a new ‘Curé d’Ars’: a reference to Saint John Vianney, a French parish priest, known as the Curé d’Ars.
My heart, smile towards the future now …: from the poem ‘La dure épreuve va finir’ by Paul Verlaine
The fireside, the lamplight’s slender beam: from the poem ‘Le foyer, la lueur étroite de la lampe’ by Paul Verlaine.
furia francese: the ‘French fury’ — attributed to the French by the Italians at the Battle of Fornovo.
Giraudoux’s girls love to traveclass="underline" Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright.
Charles d’Orléans (1691–1744): eighteenth-century French man of letters.
Maurice Scève (c. 1501–64): French Renaissance poet much obsessed with spiritual love.
Rémy Belleau (1528–77): sixteenth-century French poet known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things.
even a thousand Jews … Body of Our Lord: an oblique reference to the line in Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah: ‘A strange Jew who boiled the Host’.
They strolled together … spring waters: alluding to a Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where the narrator dreams that Mme de Guermantes will show him the grounds of her house.
‘The energy and charm … eyes of rabbits’: paraphrasing a passage from Proust’s The Guermantes Way.
The Embarkation of Eleanor of Aquitaine for the Orient: an allusion to Claude Lorrain’s 1648 painting The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.
The Fougeire-Jusquiames Way: alluding to Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. The passage that Modiano follows offers a variation on the Proustian bedtime scenes of Combray.
the Princesse des Ursins: Marie Anne de La Trémoille, a lady at the Spanish Court during the reign of Philip V.
Mlle de la Vallière: Louise de La Vallière (1644–1710), mistress of Louis XIV.
Mme Soubise: Anne de Rohan-Chabot, a mistress of Louis XIV.
La Belle aux cheveux d’or: a story by Countess d’Aulnoy usually translated as The Story of Pretty Goldilocks or The Beauty with Golden Hair.
‘It was, this “Fougeire-Jusquiames,” … with heraldic details’: paraphrasing The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust.
Arno Breker (1900–91): German sculptor, whose public works in Nazi Germany were praised as expressions of the ‘mighty momentum and will power’ (‘Wucht und Willenhaftigkeit’).
The still pale moonlight, sad and fair: from the poem ‘Clair de Lune’ by Paul Verlaine.
Perhaps too, in these last days … anti-Semitic propaganda had revived: a quote from Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust.
The Jew is the substance of God … only a mare: a parody of the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic text Der Talmud Jüde, by August Rohling, a professor at the German University of Prague.
‘Hitlerleute’: ‘Hitler’s people’ — a fascist song using the same tunes as the official hymn of the Italian National Fascist Party.
Baldur von Schirach (1907–74): Nazi youth leader later convicted of crimes against humanity.
Marizibilclass="underline" title of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire about a prostitute in Cologne and her Jewish pimp.
Zarah Leander (1907–81): Swedish singer and actress whose greatest success was in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.
Skorzeny: Otto Skorzeny (1908–75), served as SS-Standartenführer in the German Waffen-SS during the Second World War.
the phosphorus of Hamburg: the allied bombs dropped on Hamburg during the Second World War contained phosphorus
‘Einheitsfrontlied’: ‘The United Front Song’, (by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler), one of the best-known songs of the German workers’ movement.
the anthem of the Thälmann-Kolonne: the anti-fascist song, ‘Die Thälmann-Kolonne’, also known as ‘Spaniens Himmel’ (‘Spanish skies’), was a communist anthem.
Julius Streicher (1885–1946): a prominent Nazi, the founder and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer. In 1946 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed.
the traitorous Prince Lavaclass="underline" Pierre Laval (1883–1945), prime minister of France during the Third Republic, later a member of the Vichy government. After the liberation he was convicted of high treason and executed.