La femme vertueuse

«La femme vertueuse» is a traditional song sung on Friday evenings in praise of the virtuous wife. In Adam Wizman’s household, it gives ritual form to an ideal of feminine devotion and marital support; as his marriage deteriorates and he falls in love with Claire Farel, that ideal also exposes the tension between communal and religious expectations and the life he wants for himself.

Place in Adam’s Marriage

For nearly twenty years, Adam remains faithful to a wife who encourages his professional projects and cares for their daughters. At her request, he sings «La femme vertueuse» each Friday evening, celebrating the kind of courageous, steadfast woman praised in Jewish tradition. The ritual is part of a marriage organized around shared family responsibilities, but the song’s praise sits uneasily beside Adam’s growing sense that he is living without desire or a future.

His wife’s increasing religious observance reshapes their domestic life. She takes the name Sarah, changes her dress, covers her hair, and adopts stricter dietary and Sabbath practices. She also observes the laws of family purity, which prevent physical contact between spouses during menstruation and require immersion in a ritual bath afterward. During that interval, she sleeps on a mattress on the floor, an arrangement Adam cannot bear to see. The hymn’s ideal of the devoted wife thus appears within a relationship increasingly governed by rules and habits that leave him feeling alienated.

Desire and the Cost of Departure

At forty-two, Adam meets Claire and experiences an intense sexual and emotional passion unlike the calm, codified intimacy of his marriage. After two months, he tells Claire that he cannot commit to her: leaving would mean breaking up his household, losing daily contact with his daughters, and abandoning the religious and moral obligations attached to his Jewish family. For a year, their relationship remains parallel to their marriages, sustained by days together and secret, often erotic correspondence.

The song’s ideal of the wife who supports and sustains a household becomes part of the weight Adam feels when considering departure. He remembers how his wife stood by him when he doubted himself and helped him through periods of despair; leaving her makes him feel that he would become an outcast, a Jew who had abandoned his home. The question is not simply whether he loves Claire, but whether he can accept the shame and communal estrangement he associates with breaking the family he has been taught to preserve.

An Ideal Recast by Separation

After a year, Adam finally tells his family he is leaving and imagines arranging the religious divorce his wife would need if she wished to remarry. The decision does not erase the history the song commemorates: his wife had supported his work and raised their daughters, and he expects to reproach himself for the words he must say to her. The Friday hymn consequently carries both genuine gratitude and painful irony. Its praise of a wife’s devotion is inseparable from the story of a marriage Adam can no longer inhabit.

The later family arrangement makes that conflict concrete. Adam’s former wife moves with their daughters to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood; Adam does not object, and he and Claire retreat into a relationship that temporarily isolates them from their families. When Mila arrives at their apartment with a suitcase, distressed by the religious control she has experienced in New York, the costs of that retreat are no longer abstract. The song’s domestic ideal remains in the background of a family divided by religious practice, separation, and competing claims of care.

Narrative Significance

The song is not presented as a doctrine or as a simple condemnation of religious tradition. It marks how an ideal can be sincerely honored while also becoming entangled with gendered domestic labor, marital duty, and communal survival. Adam’s wife is remembered as a real source of support, not merely as a symbol; yet the life organized around her devotion has become, for him, a life without desire.

That doubleness gives the hymn its force in the novel. Sung at the household’s weekly gathering, it voices a stable image of marriage at the very moment Adam’s experience reveals how fragile that stability is. Its praise remains meaningful, but it cannot settle the conflict between gratitude to the woman who sustained a family and the desire to leave that family for another life.