Her portrait of French society in the tumult of war and occupation is not judgmental, but it is devastating. In her increasing isolation and danger, Némirovsky had good reason to understand the psychology of collaboration. Unlike the Rostovs, the Péricands cannot be abashed, and cannot repent. Némirovsky understood very well the callousness of those who consider themselves virtuous. The high-minded, religiose Péricands delay not because they wish to help anybody else, but because the monogrammed linen is not yet back from the laundry. Their departure is absurd, and it is observed with cool, merciless comedy. But while Natasha Rostova is horrified by her family's materialism, and shames them into emptying the carts and filling them with wounded soldiers, the Péricands behave throughout with selfishness barely cloaked by convention. For example, Tolstoy's description of the Rostov family loading their possessions into carts as they prepare to flee Moscow before Napoleon's advance is echoed in a scene in Suite Française where the wealthy, bourgeois Péricand family crams its worldly goods into the car as the Germans advance on Paris. Némirovsky creates brilliant and often ironic parallels between scenes in the two novels. There is a great deal of play and echo between War and Peace and Suite Française, some of it respectful, some experimental. Her model for this large-scale novel set in wartime was Tolstoy's War and Peace, which she knew intimately. Némirovsky knew what she was aiming for, how high a standard she had set for herself, and how hard it would be to achieve. This search for simplicity reflects Mansfield's own longing to purge her work of effective little writerly tricks. Like Katherine Mansfield, whose journal she took to the woods on that July day, Némirovsky was an incisive critic of her own work. She intended to revise, noting that the death of one character was perhaps schmaltzy, and that she found "in general, not enough simplicity". Even these sections were not finished, in Némirovsky's view. She completed the first two sections, "Storm in June" and "Dolce", and together these make the novel now published as Suite Française. The book, she thought, would be a thousand pages long: an ironic reference to the German fantasy of a thousand-year Reich. This was to be a novel written in five sections, dealing with France under German occupation. It was Némirovsky's habit to go into the woods to write, and to make notes on her work-in-progress.
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