Plot summary

The crushing 1940 defeat of France (an event the author lived through) is the subject of this novel. Marshall implies that France lost its soul and was itself more responsible for its defeat than Germany.

We meet Bigou, the protagonist, in 1934. He is an honest, hard-working, but irreligious and immoral accountant

Accountant

An accountant is a practitioner of accountancy or accounting , which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and others make decisions about allocating resources.The Big Four auditors are the largest...

, employed by a successful industrial firm in Paris. He is mildly troubled that his firm expends considerable effort conniving to avoid paying its legitimate taxes. Conversations with accountants and employees of other companies lead Bigou to realize that most of the business enterprises of the time in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 are behaving similarly,

The novel gives us a picture of Bigou’s life. The reader is introduced to his family, sulky, plucky daughter Odette and sickly wife Marie, friends, his coworkers and other people he meets in his business life. The author endeavors to show that money and pleasure were the main goals sought with any sincerity. Even religion, when it did exist, wasn’t much more than an outward display. Bigou does come to believe that the local priest is one of the few people he knows who exhibits integrity.

The “petit bourgeois” in the novel are shabby and bewildered as they assist helplessly at their nation’s funeral, but they stand in brilliant contrast to the insatiable greed and craftiness of the wealthy.

Marshall clearly believes that France lost its virtue, especially among its elites. He even implies that the leaders of the Church were more interested in status and materialism than spirituality. The novel indicates that the common people, deprived of the just rewards of their labor, and without worthy spiritual direction, became trapped in immorality, and were spiritually and physically impoverished.

Yellow Tapers for Paris & Suite Française

Some readers have noticed similarities between Marshall's 1943 novel Yellow Tapers for Paris and Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky was a French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz, Nazi Germany occupied Poland. She was killed by the Nazis for being classified as a Jew under the racial laws, which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism.-Biography:Irène Némirovsky was born in...

's Suite Française

Suite française (Irène Némirovsky)

Suite française is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she allegedly...

which was written at about the same time, but not discovered until 1998.

There is no suggestion of plagiarism

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

 -- Némirovsky had been murdered before Marshall's novel was published and no one saw Némirovsky's work before its 1998 discovery.

The stories cover the leadup to the Nazi Invasion

Battle of France

In the Second World War, the Battle of France was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, beginning on 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb , German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off and...

 and its immediate aftermath, but the events of the respective stories are much different. Marshall's ends before the occupation

Military occupation

Military occupation occurs when the control and authority over a territory passes to a hostile army. The territory then becomes occupied territory.-Military occupation and the laws of war:...

, while Némirovsky's has significant portions devoted to it. Both works have major characters who work in the financial field—Marshall's protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

 is a financial accountant

Accountant

An accountant is a practitioner of accountancy or accounting , which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and others make decisions about allocating resources.The Big Four auditors are the largest...

 while Némirovsky's work has major characters who work for a bank

Bank

A bank is a financial institution that serves as a financial intermediary. The term "bank" may refer to one of several related types of entities:...

.

Both books were written during and/or immediately after the actual period itself, but show considerable reflection—they aren't just "diary

Diary

A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...

" entries. Even more remarkable considering the activities of the authors at the time—Némirovsky struggling to evade the Nazis and protect her two daughters and Marshall working for the British Army

British Army

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

.

There are also remarkable parallels in the two writers' lives.

They were close in age, Marshall was born in 1899 and Némirovsky in 1903.

Both were converts to Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

.

Both authors were parents of similar aged daughters—the birthdate of Marshall's daughter, Sheila, is not available, but her husband was born in 1927. One would assume that she was close to the same age as Némirovsky's oldest daughter, Denise, who was born in 1929.

Both writers were expatriates living in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 at the same time (sometime in the early 1920s until the Nazi invasion

Invasion

An invasion is a military offensive consisting of all, or large parts of the armed forces of one geopolitical entity aggressively entering territory controlled by another such entity, generally with the objective of either conquering, liberating or re-establishing control or authority over a...

). Both were successful writers, and lived in a place, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, during a time when writers were greatly celebrated -- "The Lost Generation

Lost Generation

The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...

." It's not hard to imagine that one or both of them could have crossed paths with some of the literary notables living there during that period (Henry Miller

Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

, Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

, Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey

Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...

, Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic.-Background:Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping...

, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.- Early life and marriage:...

, Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

, etc.). However, there is no evidence that Némirovsky and Marshall ever met.

Marshall worked for a financial accounting firm while Némirovsky's family was in banking.

Both were well-established and prolific novelists at the time of the invasion—Némirovsky's first novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 was published in 1927, and she had published about 14 novels by 1940. Marshall's first was in 1924 and he had published about 15 novels by 1940.

Both fled the Nazi invasion

Battle of France

In the Second World War, the Battle of France was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, beginning on 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb , German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off and...

and wrote novels partly based on those experiences.