The Nightingale

“If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete.”

Vianne is a devoted mother, and her inability to protect Sophie from the horrors of war is a constant source of pain to her throughout the German occupation. It is not surprising, then, that she chooses to raise her younger child, Julien, in almost total ignorance of his family’s past to preserve his innocence. The trade-off, however, is that Julien never truly outgrows his childhood perception of her as a generic mother figure rather than as a complete human being. This is something Vianne regrets as she grows older, and it contributes to her ultimate decision to share more of her past with her son.

“The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving hm, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other […] She sent her father Christmas and birthday cards, but she’d never received one in return, and they rarely spoke. What was there left to say? Unlike Isabelle, who seemed incapable of letting go, Vianne understood—and accepted—that when Maman had died, their family had been irreparably broken. He was a man who simply refused to be a father to his children.” 

Vianne’s reflections in this passage reveal a great deal—not only about herself but also about her father and sister. It explains Julien Rossignol’s treatment of his daughters, tying his neglect to the aftereffects of trauma; WWI fundamentally changes Julien’s personality, causing him to become bitter, withdrawn, and an alcoholic. Meanwhile, the girls’ reactions to their father’s neglect speak to basic differences in their own temperaments. Where the obedient and unassuming Vianne resigns herself to the situation, Isabelle stubbornly and loudly rebels against it, trying everything she can think of to win their father’s affection.

“‘I could have you in my bed right now if that’s what I wanted.’

‘Not willingly,’ she said, swallowing hard, unable to look away.

‘Willingly,’ he said in a way that made her skin prickle and made breathing difficult. ‘But that’s not what I meant. Or what I said. I asked you to come with me to fight.’” 

This conversation takes place the night Isabelle and Gaëtan first meet. It is a pivotal moment in both his characterization and his developing relationship with Isabelle. Gaëtan told her that he was in prison and that she “should be scared” (51). Characteristically, Isabelle is not, but she does take his words as a threat of rape, only to be corrected. Gaëtan’s remark that Isabelle would be “willing" suggests that he’s self-assured to the point of arrogance, but it also implies that he follows some kind of moral code. Even more importantly, he reiterates that he sees Isabelle as a potential ally rather than simply a woman he would like to sleep with. This deeply impresses Isabelle, who is used to being dismissed on account of her gender and looks, and it explains why she falls in love with Gaëtan so quickly and so totally.

“The young mother made a moaning sound and tightened her hold on the baby, who was so quiet—and his tiny first so blue—that Vianne gasped.

The baby was dead.” 

The presence of a young woman and a dead child among the first few refugees who arrive at Le Jardin sets the tone for much of the rest of the novel. It underscores the fact that even children are not safe in wartime and foreshadows all the brutality the novel’s children will endure, from Sarah being shot to Ari being left an orphan. It also illustrates the impossible position the war places parents in, undercutting perhaps their most basic responsibility: protecting their children. This moment serves as a wake-up call for Vianne, who until this point had done her best to ignore the reality of what was happening in France.

“‘We are planning to call him Wilhelm, although I will not be there when he is born, and of course, such decisions must inevitably be his mother’s.’

It was such a…human thing to say. She found herself turning slightly to look at him. He was her height, almost exactly, and it unnerved her; looking directly into his eyes made her feel vulnerable.” 

This is one of many moments where Vianne finds herself rattled by the way Beck talks about himself and his family. In part, her response is an early indication of the attraction that develops between them and the guilt Vianne feels as a result. On a more fundamental level, what disturbs Vianne is her sense of shared humanity with Beck, who, like herself, is a young and devoted parent. This complicates any attempt to view Beck simply as the enemy and hints at one of the uncomfortable truths Vianne learns over the course of the war: that even basically good people are capable of doing immoral things under the right (or wrong) conditions.

“But it was ridiculous—the Germans threatening death for handing out a few pieces of paper. She could talk her way out of it if she were caught; she was sure of it. Not that she would get caught. How many times had she sneaked out of a locked school or boarded a train without a ticket or talked her way out of trouble? Her beauty had always made it easy for her to break rules without reprisal.” 

Having witnessed the bombing of civilians firsthand, Isabelle grasps the dangers Nazi rule poses better than her sister does. Looked at from another angle, however, it is Isabelle who is dangerously naïve. While it is true that Isabelle’s looks work to her advantage, she has no experience charming her way out of a situation where the stakes are so high, and she does not seem to seriously consider the threat of death. By the end of the war, Isabelle will realize just how innocent and even ignorant she was in these early days, although she affirms that she would make the same decisions again if given the choice.

“‘I don’t know what to do anymore. Antoine always took care of everything. The Wehrmacht and the Gestapo are more than I can handle.’

'Don’t think about who they are. Think about who you are and what sacrifices you can live with and what will break you.’” 

After Rachel is fired, Vianne goes to Mother Marie-Therese to confess the role she played in her friend’s misfortune and to seek advice. Vianne feels incapable of navigating her current predicament because she had led a relatively sheltered life—largely under some form of male protection—and she was used to focusing exclusively on her roles as a wife and mother. Over the course of the novel, she learns to be more self-reliant, partially thanks to this conversation. By advising Vianne to consider her own character, Marie-Therese underscores a major ethical question Vianne’s situation (and the novel itself) poses: to what extent a person can compromise their sense of morality to survive without entirely destroying who they are as a person.

“‘And if you get caught,’ Anouk said, ‘it will be as a woman. You understand? They have special…unpleasantries for us.’” 

When Isabelle insists that she wants to join the resistance network in Paris, Anouk cryptically warns that female prisoners are vulnerable to sexual abuse. While Isabelle herself is never raped, the threat of sexual violence is a constant reality for women in the novel—particularly for Vianne, who is repeatedly raped by Von Richter. The passage is therefore another reminder of the unique ways women experience warfare, as well as the way sexual violence is often used to assert power.

“‘You believed I collaborated with the enemy. I can hardly blame you.’

In him, suddenly, she saw someone foreign, a broken man where a cruel, careless man had always stood.”

When Isabelle’s father reveals he knows about her involvement in the resistance (and that he is involved himself), the entire relationship between them shifts. After a childhood spent feeling rejected by her father, Isabelle easily believed that her father betrayed his country by working for the Nazis. The revelation that he is actually a resistance member—and that he kept it a secret to protect her—leads Isabelle to see him as someone whose actions stem not from “cruelty” but from trauma. It underscores the novel’s broader interest in the way parent-child relationships change as children grow and learn to see their parents in more human terms. The passage also reveals a new side of Julien to the reader; his apparent self-disgust implies he is aware of how badly he treated his children, while also suggesting that he views his shell-shocked response to WWI as one of cowardice.

“‘You’ve seen the posters in town, how they show us Jews as vermin to be swept away and money grubbers who want to own everything? I can handle it, but…what about Sarah? She’ll feel so ashamed…’” 

The Nazi persecution and eventual genocide of European Jews is a major subplot in The Nightingale. Rather than focusing on the scope of the Holocaust, however, Hannah largely depicts its personal impact on a single family: Rachel de Champlain and her children. Here, Rachel worries about the effects that being forced to wear a yellow star will have on her daughter, fearing she may eventually internalize the bigotry she is surrounded by. The passage is yet another reminder of the helplessness of parents in Nazi France: despite her best efforts, Rachel is unable to ensure either Sarah’s mental or (eventually) physical safety.

“The feeding and clothing of airmen in hiding was no small undertaking, and since every man, woman, and child (mostly women) who maintained the escape route did so at the risk of their lives, the network strived to make it not ruinous financially, too.” 

This is one of several instances where Hannah accentuates the centrality of women to the French resistance. The fact that France’s male population was so depleted when the occupation began undoubtedly played a role, but The Nightingale suggests women were often uniquely positioned to aid in the resistance. For instance, the maintenance of safe houses comes as a kind of natural extension of women’s traditional domestic work. More broadly, longstanding stereotypes surrounding womanhood (in particular, the idea that women are not as brave as men) made women less likely to fall under the suspicion of the Nazis.

“Vianne didn’t hesitate. She knew now that no one could be neutral—not anymore—and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie’s life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil.” 

Vianne’s initial attempts to remain neutral in the face of the German occupation largely stem from fear for her daughter’s safety. Her reluctance to resist is not only understandable but arguably moral. As Vianne reflects when Rachel considers crossing into the Free Zone, risking one’s own life isn’t the same as risking the lives of one’s children—particularly when those children are too young to make informed decisions for themselves. Ultimately, the moral consequences of inaction become impossible for Vianne to ignore, partially because of the implications for her daughter. In this passage, Vianne decides that physical survival is meaningless if it involves compromising one’s character and it is therefore more important for Sophie to grow up with an intact sense of morality than it is for her to simply grow up.

“Ari must become Daniel immediately. Completely. And you must be extremely careful. The Gestapo and the SS are…brutes. The Allied victories in Africa are hitting us hard. And this final solution for the Jews…it is an evil impossible to comprehend.” 

Beck is one of the novel’s more morally ambiguous characters. Although his early kindnesses to Vianne might have stemmed from a desire to seduce her, he eventually puts his career (and probably life) on the line to help her obtain false papers, which suggests that his affection for Vianne and misgivings about the Nazis’ actions are genuine. Nevertheless, his willingness to defy his orders has limits, as both his participation in the round-up of Carriveau’s Jews and his later search for the missing American pilot demonstrate. Beck thus offers another instance of the way war reveals a person’s priorities: whether out of cowardice, concern for his family’s welfare, or a sense of loyalty to his superiors, Beck ultimately violates his own sense of morality.

“Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don’t they? Love that leaves or doesn’t last or never existed in the first place.”

This passage takes place after Isabelle is shot, when she is lying feverish in the safe house in Brantôme. Whether she truly hears a nightingale singing or simply imagines it, her association of the bird with tragic love is key to understanding the significance of both her last name and her code name. Isabelle’s story is one of impossible love because the war keeps her and Gaëtan apart except for brief moments. This passage, which is shortly followed by Isabelle and Gaëtan sleeping together for the first time, thus foreshadows that the affair will not end happily.

“She longed to do penance for this sin, but what could she do? She had killed a man—a decent man, in spite of it all. It didn’t matter to her that he was the enemy or even that she’d done it to save her sister. She knew she had made the right choice. It wasn’t right or wrong that haunted her. It was the act itself. Murder.”

For Vianne, the role she plays in Beck’s death is as traumatic as her rape. Given Beck’s kindness to Vianne and her attraction to him, this is not surprising. That makes it even more noteworthy that Vianne has no doubts that she “made the right choice.” What plagues her is knowing she is capable of killing—a somewhat ruthless facet of herself that she would prefer to have never discovered. It also reflects the realization that, as she puts it a few chapters earlier, “Bad choices [were] all there were anymore” (330). Given the choice between Beck’s life and the safety of her sister and children, Vianne is certain she made the better decision, but the novel suggests that all available actions may be morally compromising.

“Beside him, the apple tree was barren of leaves; bits of fabric fluttered from the empty branches. Red. Pink. White. A new one for Beck—in black.” 

When Vianne first ties a scrap of yarn on the apple tree in her yard, it is a reminder of Antoine, who is imprisoned but still alive. As time goes on, however, Vianne begins to add scraps to commemorate those who have died, including the man whose death she herself had a hand in. The tree thus comes to symbolize not only Vianne’s lost loved ones but also the loss of her innocence. 

“Yes, she missed her sister, but she had missed Vianne for years, for all of her life.” 

Like many of the relationships in the novel—Isabelle and her father, Isabelle and Gaëtan, etc.—the one between Isabelle and Vianne exists mostly in terms of loss. It is not that the two sisters do not love each other—rather that the trauma of their childhoods and the different ways they respond to it constantly impedes their efforts to understand one another. Isabelle’s involvement in the resistance only exacerbates this divide, as confiding in or even visiting Vianne could put her sister at greater risk. This passage underscores the fact that The Nightingale’s characters often experience love largely as the pain of missed opportunities.

“It was all Vianne could do not to say, I’m different now, Papa. I am helping to hide Jewish children. She wanted to see herself reflected in his gaze, wanted just once to make him proud of her […] How could she? He looked so old sitting there, old and broken and lost. There was only the barest hint of the man he’d been. He didn’t need to know that Vianne was risking her life, too, couldn’t worry that he would lose both his daughters. Let him think she was as safe as one could be. A coward.” 

Although it takes place on a smaller scale than the sacrifices she makes for her children, Vianne’s decision not to tell her father about her efforts to thwart the Nazi occupation is significant. It illustrates how much Vianne has matured and how this affects the way she sees her father. Vianne’s desire to make her father proud is understandable and presumably all the stronger given how callously he treated her in the past. Nevertheless, she recognizes that this “old and broken and lost” man simply could not handle the additional fear the truth would incite, and telling him about her activities would therefore be selfish.

“‘Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.’” 

Madame Babineau says this the context of Julien and Madeleine Rossignol, but it is true of the novel as a whole. Although The Nightingale depicts love (whether romantic, platonic, or familial) as the most meaningful experience in life, it constantly reiterates the vulnerability love carries. This is why Gaëtan resists becoming involved with Isabelle in the first place; knowing the unlikelihood of their both surviving the war, he doesn’t want to risk the additional pain that losing a lover would entail. In some cases, this kind of pain is the only form love ever takes. The clearest example of this is the relationship between Julien Rossignol and his daughters, which is so broken that he can only express his love for them with his death.

“‘How can you just…go to him? I see the bruises.’

‘That’s my war,’ Vianne said quietly, ashamed almost more than she could stand.” 

Vianne’s description of the abuse she suffers at Von Richter’s hands is noteworthy for several reasons. For one, it stresses a central idea in the novel: war has always been as traumatic for women as it is for men, but women’s pain was often invisible because it took place in private. However, using the word “war” is especially striking because it implies resistance or struggle rather than surrender. Sophie clearly sees her mother’s compliance with Von Richter as the latter, and Vianne herself feels ashamed of the situation. Looked at from a different angle, however, Vianne is not so much surrendering to Von Richter as she is sacrificing her body so she can save the lives of Ari and other Jewish children. In this sense, her actions are no different from those of soldiers who put their bodies on the line in battle.

“In the camp, she fought back the only way she knew how—by caring for her fellow prisoners and helping them to stray strong. All they had in this hell was each other. In the evenings, they crouched in their dark bunks, whispering among themselves, singing softly, trying to keep alive some memory of who they’d been.” 

The Nightingale attempts to show the female side of war by reconsidering what it means to resist. Except for the moment when she shoots Beck in self-defense, Isabelle’s work for the Resistance consists of saving lives rather than taking them. When she is imprisoned, she resists by retaining a sense of her own humanity and that of those around her. This not only echoes the novel’s ideas about the importance of love but perhaps suggests that love is a form of rebellion because caring for someone defies both parties’ dehumanization.

“Two hours later, the train rumbled into Carriveau.

I made it. So, why didn’t she feel anything?” 

Isabelle’s trip back to Carriveau shows the difficulty of returning to ordinary life after major trauma. While in Ravensbrück, Isabelle was focused on surviving only to the moment of liberation; her will to live was an extension of her resistance to the Nazi occupation. As a result, she finds herself struggling with purposelessness and apathy once her goal of seeing France freed is fulfilled. Metaphorically speaking, this is perhaps one reason why Isabelle’s story ends with her death; the irreversible physical damage caused by her imprisonment mirrors the kind of psychological damage that would make a “normal” life after the war impossible.

“[Love] was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between. It didn’t matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him. All her life she had waited—longed for—people to love her, but now she saw what really mattered. She had known love, been blessed by it.” 

Isabelle’s final thoughts before her death are the novel’s most explicit statement on the significance of love. Isabelle grew up feeling unloved by her father and sister, a pattern that reappeared in her relationship with Gaëtan. Isabelle only came to realize her father’s love in the moments before his execution, and though she mends her relationship with her sister, it comes in the final weeks of her own life. While she and Gaëtan admit their true feelings, the war and their roles in it largely kept them apart. Nevertheless, Isabelle ultimately realizes not that these relationships constituted the most meaningful part of her life and, even at their most troubled, were filled with love.