The original French title of All Our Worldly Goods was Les Biens de ce monde. First published in 1946, the story of Pierre and Agnès cannot be read outside the shadow of Némirovsky's own life story.
Neither of them could remember a time when they were not in love, nor could they recall when they first understood that they must keep it a secret. "He loved her just as she was, willing and pure. Especially pure, as refreshing as a cool stream. He closed his eyes and thought, 'She quenches my thirst.'"
But Pierre's grandfather ruled his family with an iron hand, everything was about the factory he'd founded in Saint-Elme. Julien Hardelot intended Pierre to marry the plump rosy-cheeked girl whose family would refinance his business; Pierre's parents were complicit. Agnès's mother was equally set on a proper beneficial match for Agnès.
When Pierre and Agnès finally eloped together from Saint-Elme to Paris, it was 1913. After war broke out the following year, Pierre endured four years of hell on earth. He refused to disguise the truth in his letters to Agnès. They endured it together. By the time it was over, all they wanted was to live their lives in peace.
"On 14 July of that year of victory, the day dawned cold and unsettled . . . 'Peace. My god, just leave us in peace. . . thought the soldiers. We've been heroes long enough.'"
While we're cheering for Pierre and Agnès, we cannot help but know that WWII is just twenty years away. But they don't know that. After Pierre and Agnès, with their infant son Guy, enjoy an afternoon picnic, "They brushed aside the day, relegating it to the past, to obscurity, without a single regret. It had been one of the sweetest and most peaceful days of their lives. But they had no way of knowing that."
In 1936, when Guy recovers from his self-inflicted wounds, a victim of naïve love, Pierre and Agnès rejoice. "They felt they had gone through the worst trial of their lives, that finally it was over, that all they had to do now was to make their way along life's straight and easy path, two old horses, harnessed together, bearing the same burden, until they died."
Knowing what awaits them, we are like the people Némirovsky describes at the advent of WWII: "Everyone waited for the war to start the way people wait for death: knowing it is inevitable, asking only for a little more time."
"They hosted grand dinners where black-suited Jeremiahs carved pheasant, sliced the truffled foie gras and imagined future wars as if they were in the middle of them. . . .The women shook their heads and murmured, 'Awful, just awful' . . . while thinking, 'I should have worn my pink dress.'"
After the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, Pierre tries to save the town of Saint-Elme while Agnès fights her way there, having waited in Paris for word of Guy's regiment.
When they finally reunite, working together to seclude villagers from the Nazi invasion, Agnès reclaims her faith in the indestructible love she and Pierre have enjoyed.
"She had gathered in all the good things of this world, and all the bitterness, all the sweetness of the earth had born fruit. They would live out the rest of their days together." She is saying this in 1941.
Némirovsky could not have forecast beyond that date. She could not have seen the horrors that WWII were about to inflict. Irène Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of thirty-nine.
Thankfully, Némirovsky's family saved the manuscript of Les Biens de ce monde that she'd completed at the beginning of the war. All Our Worldly Goods was published in France in 1946. Beyond its value as historical fiction and its literary qualities, it tells us that even though she lived a short life and died a horrible death, Irène knew love.
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