Ignoring the dangers, Isabelle volunteers to lead the group herself. She also proposes using the Pyrenees as an escape route, explaining that a family friend comes from a family of goat herds who cross the mountains routinely. Knowing that the resistance is working on a plan to help downed Allied airmen escape the country, she brings the pilot to a meeting. As she returns home one day, she comes across a British pilot who has been shot down. Isabelle agrees, and her father-who is now working for the German high command-grudgingly allows her to stay in his apartment. In the spring of 1941, the group asks Isabelle to deliver a letter to a contact in Paris and then stay there as a courier. The people who catch her, however, are members of a resistance movement, and they put her to work distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. Isabelle, on the other hand, resents the occupation and is eventually caught defacing a Nazi poster.
When Beck asks, she even provides him with a list of the communist and Jewish teachers at the school where she works, leading to the firing of her neighbor and best friend, Rachel. Vianne largely tolerates the German presence, fearing for the safety of Sophie and feeling overwhelmed without Antoine, whom she now learns is in a POW camp. The Germans soon occupy Carriveau, with one officer-Captain Wolfgang Beck-billeting in Vianne’s house. Isabelle eagerly accepts, but when she confesses her love for him, he leaves her near her sister’s house, telling her she is “not ready” (79). On her way, Isabelle meets a young communist named Gaëtan, who tells her he plans on joining the fight against the Nazis and invites Isabelle to come with him. Shortly after she arrives, however, they receive word that the German army is approaching Paris, and Julien instructs his daughter to go to Vianne in Carriveau. She gets expelled in the summer of 1940 and travels to Paris to rejoin her father, Julien. Meanwhile, Vianne’s rebellious 18-year-old sister Isabelle is away at finishing school. However, when her husband Antoine is conscripted, Vianne is left alone with their 8-year-old daughter Sophie.
As a result, Vianne clings tightly to the family and peaceful existence she has established in the countryside town of Carriveau. Vianne was effectively orphaned at age 14 when her mother died and her father-still traumatized by his experiences in World War I-sent her and her younger sister to live with hired help. Vianne’s story begins in August 1939, just before France declared war on Germany. The novel tells the story of two sisters, Isabelle Rossignol and Vianne Mauriac, as they struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of France.
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