The Alice Network - Kate Quinn Page 0,190

we breathe, we go about our daily routines, but the color is gone, perhaps forever. For we who have seen so much, how can the world appear in other than mourning hues of grays and black? It seems the world around us has been no other way, and yet there was once music and art and life. People danced and sang. Life was beautiful here once, little sister, and that memory kept so many of us alive. I believe it can be that way again as long as we who loved this place so refuse to give up on it. I believe it because I must, for to believe that beauty gone forever would give them a victory my heart will not permit. War changes everything, this we know. Change is inevitable, but where does it say change must be eternal? We can never recover our innocence, but we can rebuild. No, we owe this to our dead: we must rebuild and this can only be done by those who knew what our city was before the war. For this reason, if no other, I must stay. You, my sister, of you, I would ask that you savor every moment and preserve the beauty around you for while I pray there will never be another war such as this, ours is a troubled history.

Antoine le Four is mentioned briefly in this novel as Louise de Bettignies’s document forger—and he was a very real man, a citizen of Lambersart near Lille. Writing to his sister some nine months after the war was over, his words make poignant poetry of the wretched state of occupied France during the First World War. It was a period of unbelievable misery and oppression, and French citizens lived for years under daily reminders of the boot on their necks: clocks turned to German time, French streets given German names, the unbelievable shortages of food and fuel, the requisitioning of everything from weapons to soap to kitchen curtains. Starvation, imprisonment, abuse, and rape were constant hovering threats—Antoine wrote with sorrow and rage of his younger sister Aurélie’s violation by German soldiers, mourning “I think that shadow behind her eyes will always remain.” The legacy of such brutality cast a long shadow from World War I to World War II. It is facile to condemn the French for giving in to the Nazis too easily when many French citizens would have still borne the horrendous scars of the first occupation, would have clearly remembered having to stand back while German sentries robbed them of everything but the nearly inedible ration bread because the only alternative was to be arrested, beaten, or shot. The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive. “Those who have never suffered an enemy invasion in their own land,” wrote another Lille citizen, “can never understand what war truly is.”

Excerpt from trial records, 1953

Madame Rouffanche addresses the court

“I ask that justice be done with God’s help. I came out alive from the crematory oven; I am the sacred witness from the church. I am a mother who has lost everything.”

The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane’s inhabitants is a well-known tragedy in France thanks to the eerie surviving ghost town with its burned clocks and abandoned Peugeot and bullet-pocked walls—but it is less known outside France, where the tragic fate of one small village was subsumed into the broader account of Nazi atrocities. Madame Rouffanche’s words as she recounted her rosary of horrors make for a haunting voice from the past. She told her tale often over the course of her long life, most notably in Bordeaux in 1953 where she was called as a witness against the surviving SS soldiers who had been put on trial for their part in the massacre. She finished her testimony with the plea above, making a powerful impact on the courtroom. One onlooker wrote, “Her voice, without the smallest trace of easy sentiment, reaches us clear and implacable. She is Nemesis, calm and inexorable.”

Reading Group Questions

1.Female friendship is a constant theme throughout The Alice Network. Charlie St. Clair and Eve Gardiner begin as antagonists, whereas Eve and Louise de Bettignies (Lili) are friends from the start. How does each friendship grow and change over the course of events?

2.The young Eve introduced in 1915 is very different from the older Eve seen through Charlie’s eyes in 1947. How and when did you see the young Eve begin to change into her older self? What was the catalyst of those changes?

3.Lili tells Eve, “To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring.” Did the realities of spy work surprise you, compared to the more glamorous version presented by Hollywood? How do you think you would have fared working for the historical Alice Network?

4.René Bordelon is denigrated by his peers as a war profiteer and an informer. He sees himself as a practical businessman, pointing out that he is not to blame for making money off the invaders, or for tragedies like Oradour-sur-Glane that happened on German orders. Did you see him as a villain or an opportunist? Do you think he earned his final fate?

5.Eve loves Captain Cameron and hates René Bordelon—but her relationship with René is longer, darker, and more complex. How is her hatred for him complicated by intimacy? How does his realization of Eve’s true identity change him? How do you think they continued to think and feel about each other during their thirty years’ separation, and how did that affect their eventual climax?

6.Finn Kilgore and Captain Cameron are parallels for each other: both Scotsmen and ex-soldiers with war wounds and prison terms in their pasts, acting as support systems for the women they love who go into danger. How are the two men different as well as alike? How does Finn succeed where Cameron fails?

7.The disappearance of Charlie’s cousin Rose Fournier provides the story’s driving search. Did her eventual fate surprise you? Had you ever heard of Oradour-sur-Glane? How did Rose’s fate change the goal of the search?

8.Everyone in The Alice Network suffers some form of emotional damage from war: Charlie’s depression after losing her marine brother to suicide, Eve’s torture-induced nightmares, Finn’s concentration-camp memories and resulting anger issues, Cameron’s guilt over losing his recruits. How do they each cope with their war wounds? How do they help each other heal? How is PTSD handled in Eve’s day as compared to Charlie’s day—and as compared to now?

9.Charlie dreads the stigma of being a “bad girl” pregnant out of wedlock, and Eve fears shame and dismissal as a horizontale if it is learned she slept with a source for information. Discuss the sexual double standards each woman faced. How have our sexual standards for women changed since 1915 and 1947?

10.Charlie decides to keep her baby, and Eve decides to have an abortion. Why did each woman make the choice she did?

11.Charlie argues that René should be brought to legal justice, and Eve argues for vigilante justice. Who do you think is right? How did it affect the ending? How do you think the outcome will bind Eve and Charlie and Finn in the future, since they cannot share their adventure with anyone else?

12.“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women. The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil.” The theme of the fleurs du mal carries from Lili to Eve—how does Eve pass it on to Charlie? When do you see Charlie becoming a fleur du mal in her own right? How has knowing Eve changed Charlie’s life, and vice versa?

Read on

The Alice Network - Kate Quinn Page 0,190

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