But there were inconsistencies. Gringoire, Candide and Je suis partout all prided themselves on the amount of space they devoted to literary criticism as well as political commentary. For example, alongside a diatribe against Léon Blum, Gringoire published the work of Irène Némirovsky, the Russian Jewish novelist who had become something of a darling of the right-wing press after her novel David Golder, the story of a greedy Jewish banker with an unfaithful wife and demanding daughter, had achieved enormous success in 1929 before being turned swiftly into a film. Brasillach, as well as the literary critic of Gringoire, greatly admired Némirovsky. Yet in 1938 Brasillach called for Jews from foreign countries to be considered ‘as aliens and to place in opposition to their naturalization the most imposing of obstacles’.
In June 1939, when Irène revealed in an interview, ‘How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now I would do it quite differently … The climate is quite changed!’, she clearly understood that the establishment had not embraced her after all, that she was merely tolerated. Yet by 1939 she had been living in France for twenty years, ever since her family had fled Russia after the Revolution. French was her language of choice, the language which she had spoken since childhood, which she had studied at the Sorbonne and in which she now wrote. France was her country of choice. She wanted to be a French (not Russian nor Jewish) writer, writing about the French bourgeoisie. In 1926 she married a banker, Michel Epstein, a fellow Russian Jew whom she had met in France, and by 1939 the couple had two daughters, Denise, born in 1929, and Elisabeth, born in 1937, both French citizens by virtue of their birthplace. With her elegant clothes and fine seventh-floor apartment in the Avenue Constant Coquelin near Les Invalides, as well as a French nanny for the children, a maid and a cook, she was to all outward appearances a true Parisienne with a lifestyle largely paid for by her literary earnings. Yet Irène and her husband were actually foreigners who did not even apply for naturalization until 1938, even though Irène had been eligible since 1921, three years after the beginning of her stay in the country. Michel’s formal request to the Service des Naturalisations de la Préfecture de Police was supported by letters from his employers, the Banque du Pays du Nord, as well as from some of Irène’s impeccable literary admirers. Yet they heard nothing in response. In April 1939 they were asked to produce documents already submitted, yet by September, when they had still heard nothing, they were told that the delay was caused by ‘circumstances’ – that is, war. Their request had effectively been ignored, a rejection from which Irène suffered deeply. They were now stateless.
Earlier that year Némirovsky and her family had converted to Catholicism, with the baptism celebrated on 2 February in the old chapel of the Abbaye Sainte-Marie de Paris. It may not have been a deeply spiritual act but she had never identified herself as Jewish (she had been married in a synagogue, she maintained, purely to please Michel’s father) and felt genuine affinity towards Christianity. Presumably Irène also saw the conversion, in a world climate of increasingly virulent anti-Semitism, as a protective measure for the whole family.
In August 1939, following the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Michel started to worry that he and his wife might be viewed not merely as stateless but, worse, as Russian and therefore as enemies of France. In addition, if he lost his job in Paris, they might need to rely solely on Irène’s earnings for the entire family. He therefore wrote to her publishers asking for support and received a warm but useless letter in reply. The Epstein family then took their summer holiday in Hendaye, on the Basque coast, but in September, as soon as war was declared, Irène sent her daughters out of Paris to stay with the family of the nurse she had employed for the last ten years, Cécile Michaud, at Issy-l’Evêque, a small village some four hours to the south-east of Paris. During the first winter of the war, Irène came often to visit her daughters but did not move herself. There was, she felt, no need to leave Paris as yet.