Suite Francaise

Forty-seven-year-old Madame Charlotte Péricand is the matriarch of a bourgeois family. She is mother to five children and married to Monsieur Péricand, a curator of one of the country’s national museums. She is tasked with orchestrating the family’s escape from Paris and ensuring they are well provided for.

Némirovsky writes that “you would have thought, to look at her, that God had intended her to be a red-head. Her skin was extremely delicate, lined by the passing years. Freckles were dotted over her strong, majestic nose. The expression in her green eyes was as sharp as a cat’s” (7). However, Providence “wavered” at the last minute, giving her the mousy brown hair of a modest, Catholic woman (7). She is both at odds with those of the lower class whom she physically resembles and a victim of her own snobbery.

Father Philippe Péricand is the Péricands’ eldest son and a priest who lives apart from the family in his Auvergne parish. His task in Storm in June is to lead the boys from the orphanage of the Penitent Children. Although Philippe knows that he should love the children and believe they are worthy of redemption, he, like his mother, looks down on them and conceives of them as damned sinners.