9781405945172

The Little French Village of Book Lovers

Nina George is an award-winning novelist and the author of the million-copy bestseller The Little Paris Bookshop, translated into English by Simon Pare and also published in thirty-five other languages – as well as numerous other novels that have been published and loved around the world. She lives with her husband, the writer Jens J. Kramer, in Berlin, Germany, and in Brittany, France. Together they also write mystery novels and children’s books.

BY NINA GEORGE

The Little French Village of Book Lovers

The

Book of Dreams

The Little French Bistro

The Little Paris Bookshop

The Little French Village of Book Lovers

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First published in Germany as Südlichter by Knaur Verlag, an imprint of Verlagsgruppe Droemer Knaur 2019

First published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of penguin Random House LLC 2023

First published in Great Britain by Penguin Michael Joseph 2023

Published in Penguin Books 2024 001

Copyright © Knaur Verlag, 2019

Translation copyright © Simon Pare, 2023

Olive branch art: veri13 / stock.adobe.com

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Set in 11.75/15pt Bembo Book MT Pro Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN : 978–1–405–94517–2 www.greenpenguin.co.uk

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To Jens

The Little French Village of Book Lovers

WA Prologue from H

hat do you do when you can’t go on, Monsieur Perdu?” Jordan asked wearily. “Me? Nothing.”

Next to nothing.

I take night walks through Paris until I’m tired. I clean Lulu’s engine, the hull and the windows, and I keep the boat ready to go, right down to the last screw, even though it hasn’t gone anywhere in two decades.

I read books—twenty at a time. Everywhere: on the toilet, in the kitchen, in cafés, on the metro. I do jigsaw puzzles that take up the whole floor, destroy them when I’ve finished and then start all over again. I feed stray cats. I arrange my groceries in alphabetical order. I sometimes take sleeping tablets. I take a dose of Rilke to wake up. I don’t read any books in which women like——crop up. I gradually turn to stone. I carry on. The same every day. That’s the only way I can survive. But other than that, no, I do nothing.

Perdu made a conscious effort. The boy had asked for help; he didn’t want to know how Perdu was. So give it.

The bookseller fetched his treasure out of the small, old-fashioned safe behind the counter.

Sanary’s Southern Lights.

The only book Sanary had written—under that name, at any rate. “Sanary”—after the erstwhile town of refuge for exiled writers, Sanary-sur-Mer on the south coast of Provence—was an impenetrable pseudonym.

His—or her—publisher, Duprés, was in an old people’s home out on Île-de-France enduring Alzheimer’s with good cheer. During Perdu’s visits, the elderly Duprés had served him up a couple dozen versions of who Sanary was and how the manuscript had come into his possession.

So Monsieur Perdu kept on searching.

For two decades he had been analyzing the rhythms of the language, the choice of words, and the cadence of the sentences, comparing the style and the subject matter with other authors’. Perdu had narrowed it down to eleven possible names: seven women and four men.

He would have loved to thank one of them, for Sanary’s Southern Lights was the only thing that pierced him without hurting. Reading Southern Lights was a homeopathic dose of happiness. It was the only balm that could ease Perdu’s pain—a gentle, cold stream over the scorched earth of his soul.

It was not a novel in the conventional sense, but a short story about the various kinds of love, full of wonderful invented words and infused with enormous humanity. The melancholy with which it described an inability to live each day to the full, to take every day for what it really was,

namely unique, unrepeatable, and precious; how that dolefulness resonated with him.

He handed Jordan his last copy.

“Read this. Three pages every morning before breakfast, lying down. It has to be the first thing you take in.”

Everything is connected, says Love. I know, says Death.

That’s terribly illogical, says Logic.

The olive tree has its own thoughts on the matter.

1

Love and the Maiden

Marie-Jeanne’s cradle stood under a broad-canopied olive tree some people claimed was over eight hundred years old, something the tree would neither confirm nor deny (at its age, one did not comment on how old one was).

She was giggling at the silvery rustling of the leaves, which were smiling in the gentle Pontias breeze. The wind was a local phenomenon, a last taste of magic in a century seemingly shorn of it. It was the steady breath of the four mountains— Essaillon, Garde Grosse, Saint Jaume, and Vaux—that shielded the town of Nyons like sentinels. The mountains breathed out in the morning, filling the valley of the river Eygues with the scent of herbs and the cool air of upland nights, always at the same time of day for precisely half an hour, and inhaled again after sundown every evening. This cool stream of air seemed to rise in the calanques and salty bays of the distant sea. It brought with it fragrances of lavender and mint and drove the searing heat from the day.

From the large kitchen—the main living space in every

mazet in the Drôme Provençale, a place for cooking, chatting, staying silent, being born, and waiting for the end to come—Aimée was able to keep an eye on her granddaughter’s cradle as she shuttled back and forth between the wood-fired stove and the table.

Aimée placed sliced potatoes, black Tanche olives, eggplants, and fresh pink garlic in a well-worn fluted baking tin; drizzled the vegetables with silky, hay-green olive oil; and scooped chunks of the local fromagerie ’s fresh goat cheese from a clay dish. Last, she rubbed some sprigs of lime-scented wild thyme she’d picked the previous evening between her fingers.

A pan of milk was cooling on the windowsill. It would soon be time. Marie-Jeanne was quite capable of making her feelings known if her grandmother was too slow getting lunch ready.

Every time Aimée turned her face toward her granddaughter, her thousand sharp wrinkles softened into a far younger complexion.

The proud old olive tree went on singing its chanson to the little girl under its boughs. It hummed the secret song of the cicadas—your light makes me sing. It tickled her nose and cheeks with a dappling of shadows and delighted in the tiny fingers clutching at the breeze and in the waves of gurgling, heartfelt laughter issuing from her tummy.

Marie-Jeanne and Aimée. Each meant the world to the other.

It was love.

I watched Aimée Claudel, whom I had last touched many years ago, but she couldn’t see me. Everyone knows me, but none can see me. I’m that thing you call love.

I came to Marie- Jeanne’s grandmother early in her life. She was barely thirteen at the time. It was summertime then, too— the record- breaking summer of 1911. Life took place outdoors. For weeks on end, this bright land boiled under the sun. After laboring since before sunrise, people whiled away the evening hours in blissful idleness. That summer was sweet and redolent with the melodies and whisperings of the leaves of the olive trees. The grasshoppers chirped their silvery tunes. And oh, the soft fall of the figs at night! The whole summer was like a dazzling fever.

I placed my burden on so many people that summer. How heavily I was to weigh on them only a few years later.

Aimée fell in love with a boy who used to sing as he worked in her father’s milking parlor. First he became a soldier; in the Great War he became a man. He didn’t return for many years and when he did, his boyish nature had retreated deep inside him, along with all his songs and all his colorful cheer. The mountains were so silent, but the roaring inside him was so loud. As his wife, Aimée spent the rest of her life exhuming his buried soul. She sang soft lullabies to him in the night when he screamed, chased the dullness from his eyes with patience, and fed him hot onion soup in the evenings when he drank. In the quiet, endless winter nights she warmed her husband’s body with her bare skin to calm his incessant shivering. Her skin became softer and softer over the years, ever

thinner, even as it burst with emotions and energy and cares. With life itself.

Back in the summer of 1911 I touched Aimée’s skin, running my hands down her body from top to toe. She was naked and had just bathed in the Eygues’s shimmering turquoise waters as they flowed toward the calm and mighty Rhône. She was beautiful, her straight back a symbol of her personality and fortitude, and she had a stout, tightly coiled soul. I poured a great deal of myself into her, maybe too much. Maybe I was in love with her—lovers pay no heed to how much they give, which is usually more than is desired. This was partly why I returned to see her, on the day the events you are going to hear about took place.

Aimée spent her whole life rescuing the lost boy inside the man. Every single day. I’d given her such an enormous capacity for love, and this capacity stirred the defiance and kindness in her nature that made her the woman she was.

When the second war began to rage, it came to Nyons too. Yes, it hurts, the memory of boots ringing out on the cobbles and the voices of boys doing drills on the Place des Arcades, blinded by the southern light, bothered by the Mediterranean wind, dazed by hopeless, pointless exercises. What had these marching men done with what I’d bestowed on them? They too had been granted love. Where had I gone wrong?

Those were the years I doubted myself. Those were the

years when I almost lost hope. What were people doing to one another? It was all so unnecessary.

Aimée, her husband, and their daughter, Renée, fled to Dieulefit to join the Resistance. One thousand five hundred refugees found a safe haven in Dieulefit—Jewish children and adults, artists and writers, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, the German painter Wols. Not one of those refugees was ever betrayed by the inhabitants. Not a single one was deported. Every time their pursuers swept through the village, those in hiding would be spirited away through the night, on carts and wagons and along secret mountain paths and wild boar tracks, to other farms. Farther and farther they traveled, into the mountains and valleys, into the gorges of the Baronnies, into the perilous side valleys of the Eygues, along the twisting Angèle valley, into the depths of the Oules and the hidden folds of the Lance. With the help of council secretary Jeanne Barnier, Aimée faked over a thousand sets of identity papers. That strong backbone. In such circumstances, it takes an inner light to cope. Courage and resilience, honor and empathy, that stretched far back into her childhood.

The war passed, and Aimée returned to her valley near Nyons at the foot of Mont Vaux. Then one day, after twenty years spent between the four mountains, summer meadows and winter fires, vines and streams, olive trees and lavender fields, apricot groves and purple-flowering Judas trees, my sister Death came along. She took away Aimée’s singing milk boy to continue his journey elsewhere. His name was Jean-Marie.

Next, Fate took her daughter and her son-in-law, hurling them off a road into a ravine. Even now, as I look into Aimée’s heart, beating in her chest as she moves back and forth across the old patinaed tiles between the stove and the table, her hands reach automatically for four sets of cutlery before she realizes she needs only one.

Hearts, you see, are like beautiful, perfectly glazed earthenware cups at first, but over the years they get cracked and nicked. Hearts break once, twice, repeatedly, and each time you do your best to put them back together again, trying to live with the wounds, patching them up with hope and tears. How I admire you for not giving up on me.

I inspected Aimée’s heart and saw it was shattered. That was my doing. I do not spare people. I force them to depend on what they hate and to lose what they need.

The nicks in the cup continued to grow deeper, and occasionally Aimée would cut her lip on a sharp edge. Her skin wept when she heard a song, caught a whiff of sheep’s milk and the earthy smell of autumn soil; whenever she unwittingly rolled over onto the cold, empty side of the bed; each time the bells of St. Vincent’s struck eleven with the same short, sharp metallic chime as at Jean-Marie’s funeral.

Neither love nor death recognizes such a thing as justice. What wouldn’t I have done to change my nature? I was ashamed, and maybe it was that shame that made me bend over the cradle to avoid the sight of the sharp edges and Aimée’s weeping skin. Maybe what followed was the consequence, the price I had to pay.

“Hello, Marie-Jeanne,” I whispered.

2

The Sweet, Unexpected Taste of Despair

As a precaution I kept my hands behind my back so that I wouldn’t accidentally touch the little baby and burden it too prematurely with yearning and searching. My time—for we all have our time—comes later in someone’s life.

All of us are products of circumstances, characteristics, elements. Whatever you wish to call them. Whichever tiny word you choose to capture our unfathomable nature: Love, Passion, Creativity, Lust, Intelligence, Humor, Fear, to mention but a few of us. You hang us on a particular peg. Not too many syllables, not too long. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t have different names.

We all have our chance to make our mark on a human life and to bestow arbitrary amounts of desire or reason, patience or restlessness. Every one of us, even my horrible distant relative Aunt Logic and her ludicrously rational family—Reason, Pragmatism, Conscience, and a handful

of equally grim characters—seizes the opportunity to pour as much of ourself into an individual as we see fit.

The bad news is that there are no rules. Each of us is as hasty or earnest or reckless as the moment and our mood dictate, our gift ranging from a smattering of passion dispensed from pinched fingertips to a suffocating wagonload. This often results in the most improbable combinations. You’ll know such people: the miserable but amusing comedian, the professor utterly absorbed in his dry profession, the woman who longs for never-ending passion yet remains unwaveringly true, and, of course, all those whose breasts are riven by two, three, four, even eight competing souls.

Another not-so-good piece of news is that we very rarely gather around a child’s cradle, seesaw, bed, or playpen to have a sensible discussion. There are simply too many things to do in the world, and do we really look like Sleeping Beauty’s seven fairy godmothers?

Quite.

Sometimes

Reason and Logic visit a baby only after Desire and Pleasure have already caused a number of problems. These babies will often grow up to be charming characters who throw themselves headlong into disastrous decisions, just for the hell of it; even the best advice won’t deter them from taking this path. In other places and at other times, however, Pleasure arrives so late on the scene that the person is entering the penultimate stages of their journey. In a fit of generosity, she introduces an overdue touch of intensity to a flagging existence. This can sometimes lead previously sensible young fossils to take a leap of faith and enjoy things they have always denied themselves.

It’s as if a window has been smashed open somewhere and they’re suddenly desperate to drink in the unfamiliar, wonderfully fresh air. From the outside it might look as if they are deliberately running away from security into the arms of ruin, but that isn’t true. Those moody beasts Curiosity and Desire cast the first stone and then watch from a safe distance as a hitherto straightforward life suddenly performs a grandiose, crazy pirouette.

The important thing to remember is that whichever of us is the first to leave their mark most influences an infant’s character. They set the tone and lay the foundations.

A short aside about my methods

A few young people in Nyons had been teetering on the edge of adulthood. Their wonderful mental confusion made them most receptive to the many and varied effects of my powers. Everything lit up inside them and they realized they wanted far more from life than to have their own room, hang upside down on the swing, sit around campfires, and never have to go to bed early. In those warm August nights of 1958, as they looked up at the fading meteorites of the Perseid shower, they felt a tugging inside them, and suddenly there was much they could no longer express.

The nights when wishes are made—that’s what people call those nights, and you have to choose your wishes carefully because they will come true.

I wandered among the girls and boys as the stars rained down on the feast of St. Lawrence. The night air

settled warmly on faces and on bare arms and legs, heavy with the scents of thyme, rosemary, lavender, sage, and mint. They sensed they were entering a sweet, forbidden realm that the adults had been guarding so jealously from them.

Under cover of darkness I touched these souls in passing as they began to take notice of their bodies. A shoulder here, a mouth or a hand there. For the rest of their lives these would be their most love-sensitive spots, which explains why people walk hand in hand, hug, and kiss each other on the lips.

Oh, and in case anyone is tempted to ask: No, I never left my mark on someone’s backside. Never. So there’s no point in tapping someone on the bottom in the hope that their eyes will sparkle with delight. The same is true of certain other parts of the body that are within the purview of my capricious sister Lust. I’ll tell you about her, but only briefly and not now.

Lust and Curiosity like to sail along in my slipstream, sowing a degree of chaos into someone’s life when they get trapped between love and desire, seriousness and fun. Between you and me, Lust and Curiosity tend to be deceitful, blasphemous, vain, inexplicably good- humored and at the same time devilishly thin- skinned. They have no respect for anything, least of all for Love or Logic. The only one of us they respect is Death, because they are scared of her. All of us are. Our beautiful, never- aging elder sister is capable of silencing us. She tidies up after our mischief and removes all the burdens we have placed

on a single soul in a single life. Only in her presence do Lust and Curiosity stare silently at the ground like the rest of us.

I single out you humans with a mark you cannot see and then bring you together. From that moment on, you will look and long for one another. I give you strength and hope, I make you do things and be there for one another, I create space for stupidity and generosity, patience and imagination.

It is you who make love visible in everything you think and say, everything you do or choose not to. But I am the one who turns you into searchers. One day, one night, you become lovers and you begin to yearn—but for whom, you do not know.

I come and go at will. None of you can pin me down. No one.

Or so I thought.

Suddenly the cicadas fell silent. And she came.

“You’re too early, my dear,” said my sister Death as she stepped closer through the flowering bougainvillea. The bees fashioned caps for themselves from the chalices of wisteria flowers. The wind dropped.

“So are you,” I said. I’d been contemplating mending the last intact area of Aimée’s broken heart. There was someone up in the hills around Condorcet, and the two of them . . .

Sister Death was already heading for the open kitchen door. I saw Aimée straighten and glance toward us. Slowly she wiped her hands on a tea towel hanging from the belt she wore over her dress. She rested her hands on the table to the left and right of the plain blue plate and looked out at the cradle and the mountains. She stared through Death as my sister strode toward her.

“I don’t choose the timing. They do that themselves,” Death said quietly.

“But the child will be alone. Come back tomorrow or, even better, in a few years.”

“She has the olive tree.”

“The tree can’t warm her milk.”

“It will shelter her from the sun and the rain. That will be enough. And if it isn’t, I shall return.”

“May I say something?” said the olive tree as Death crossed the threshold.

“No,” I begged under my breath.

“Jean-Marie?” Aimée whispered as Death stopped in front of her.

The blue plate fell to the floor and then, so did Aimée.

Sister Death caught and held Aimée with the arms of the man who used to sing to her, and her soul breathed its last in them. Released from the body, the soul swelled and unfolded into light, the light increasing and expanding.

“A great soul,” Death whispered, gazing up at the light that was more powerful than her, stronger than death. “She loved. Thank you.”

I was still standing beside the cradle when the soft, warm light enveloped me—the same light I dispense in infinite forms. My hands, I realized, were no longer knitted behind my back but resting tensely on the cradle’s edge.

Marie-Jeanne had grabbed one of my fingers in her tiny fist and was clasping it tightly. The child was staring at me. Her wide blue eyes were studying my face with no trace of fear.

I’d never experienced anything like it. Never before had anyone held on to me, let alone seen me—my essence, my nature, my countenance, my form. It had only ever been the other way around: Love can see inside every person, to the very bottom of their being.

But this was Marie-Jeanne. “Now you belong to her,” said the olive tree, “and she’ll cause you no end of trouble.”

The smart-ass was really getting on my nerves.

Who else can love

Olive trees can love, of course. I’d almost forgotten that. I’ve been doing what I do for so long, for such an incredibly long time. A few centuries ago, I’d leaned against this still- young and fragile trunk when the valleys and hills around Nyons contained nothing but isolated bories and remote monasteries, when the first houses and the fort, the bridge, the donjon, and St. Vincent’s church were taking shape in the town. Pardon , but it’s impossible to recall every tree.

I always remember people, though, each and every one. I visit everyone at least once on their journey (some two or three times: I don’t like to be stingy) and sometimes—I’ve adopted this habit over the millennia—I will drop by once in a while, purely to take stock. Yes, I’m inquisitive. I like to know what they make of what I give them. They. You. Humans in general.

Most of you have an amazing gift for messing up what is actually so very easy. All you have to say is “Oh hello, Love. Come inside and make yourself at home. Know how long you’ll be here? One night? A month? What all my life? Okay then . . . I’ll need to get ready for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. Well, if you have second thoughts and start to leave again fine on your way out I’ll call out, ‘Thanks for coming. I’ve loved and so I’ve truly lived, even if only for one night.’ ”

It’s never that simple, though. People don’t notice me, even when I’m right in front of them, pointing madly at the person with whom they could taste what love is.

Light, strong, bright, dark, soothing, tormenting, searching, and finding: I am all of everything, the one true meaning that makes life worth seizing with both hands.

And yet I’m invisible. I only become visible through your actions. Love is an occupation, though also . . .

But let’s get to the point I’ve been so deftly avoiding: my accidental touch with Marie-Jeanne and its total unpredictability—for Fate, for the universe, for lovers.

I can assure you, though, that I needed to set the scene so that we could get to know each other. Let’s fold up time (even though it hates having this done to it), for

why else would we gather together in this book if we hadn’t already decided that books are precisely where magic, the great wide world, miracles, and good explanations may all converge? Are books not the last remaining place for otherwise inconceivable encounters between different people, different periods, different landscapes, and different emotions?

If Love is the poetry of the senses, books are the poetry of the impossible.