They reach the city but in the course of the journey, Charlotte Péricand's senile father-in-law is left behind (forgotten) while her second son, Hubert, runs away to join the army and shares in its collapse. The Péricands are making for Nîmes, where they have property. As transport and distribution collapse under German bombardment, all have to change their plans and nearly all lose the veneer of civilization. All are impelled to flee from Paris in advance of the German entry into the city. The narrative follows several groups of characters who encounter one another rarely if at all. To quote Némirovsky's notes, they are 'in limbo, and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens'.

Nothing can be said about the plots of Batailles and La Paix. The fourth and fifth novels would perhaps have been called Batailles ( Battles) and La Paix ( Peace) but these exist only as titles in Némirovsky's notebook, against which she had placed question marks. The third novel, Captivité ( Captivity), for which Némirovsky left a plot outline, would have shown the coalescing of a resistance, with some characters introduced in Tempête en juin and Dolce having been arrested and put under threat of death, in Paris. The links between them are rather tenuous as Némirovsky observes in her notebook, it is the history and not the characters, that unite them. These first two novels seem able to exist independently from each other on first reading. The second, Dolce ( Sweet), shows life in a small French country town, Bussy (in the suburbs just east of Paris), in the first, strangely peaceful, months of the German occupation. The first novel, Tempête en juin ( Storm in June) depicts the flight of citizens from Paris in the hours preceding the German advance and in the days following it. The sequence was to portray life in France in the period following June 1940, the month in which the German army rapidly defeated the French and fought the British Paris and northern France came under German occupation on 14 June. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite française in 2004. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998.

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 was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust. Suite française ( French pronunciation: 'French Suite') is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin.

Suite française irène némirovsky