Sweden occupies a small but vivid place in Romain Gary’s recollections: it is a country he says he loved from the moment Gustav V defended him in public, and later the setting for an unhappy visit to Brigitte on the eve of war. These memories give Sweden a double character. It offers an instance of unexpected courtesy and a landscape of pine trees and icy water, while also holding the narrator at a distance from the woman he has pursued and from the European crisis he has not yet learned to take seriously.

A lasting attachment

The narrator’s enduring affection for Sweden began after an episode at Parc Impérial. Following his public humiliation there, his mother welcomed him without reproach, helped him put on his pullover, and wiped his face and neck with her handkerchief. Gustav V then intervened before the watching guests, praising the young man’s courage and determination and offering to pay his club subscription. The narrator says that he loved Sweden from then on, although he never again entered the club. In his account, a single act of courtesy becomes the beginning of a lasting national attachment.

Sweden also serves as a point of comparison in his reflections on France. He wonders why his mother loved France so passionately, considering explanations that range from the values of bourgeois society around 1900 to her memories of two youthful visits to Paris. But he treats his own lifelong warmth toward Sweden as evidence that love for a country may have no specific cause: it can simply take root. This comparison places his affection for Sweden beside, rather than beneath, the overwhelming French patriotism that shaped his childhood.

Brigitte and the Stockholm archipelago

In his third year at law school, the narrator met Brigitte, a Swedish woman whose voice captivated him. He describes their relationship as harmonious and recalls that other students at their hotel smiled when they saw the pair on the stairs. His happiness was unsettled when Brigitte grew pensive and began visiting an elderly Swedish woman late into the night; when she returned, she seemed tired and sad, and touched his cheek with melancholy kindness.

A story published in America brought the narrator 150 dollars, enough to make a short journey to Sweden in pursuit of Brigitte. He found that she had married. His attempt to reach an arrangement with her husband failed, and Brigitte eventually sent him away to her aunt’s summer house on a small island in the Stockholm archipelago. There he wandered among the pine trees while Brigitte and her husband remained together. The island offered no romantic reconciliation: it turned the pursuit into an enforced, solitary stay.

Brigitte’s aunt prescribed an hour-long bath each day in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea, watching from the shore with a clock in hand. The narrator recalls himself standing frozen in the water, miserable and waiting for the sun to thaw him after lying on a rock. The comic excess of this ordeal does not soften its central fact: Sweden had become the place where his hopes for Brigitte were most plainly defeated.

The first sight of the enemy

During this exile, as he lay on a rock, the narrator saw an airplane marked with a swastika cross the sky. He identifies it as his first encounter with the enemy. The sight enters the account without turning the island episode into a military scene; instead, the plane briefly breaks into a landscape otherwise occupied by heartbreak, cold water, and pine trees.

The narrator says he had paid little attention to events in Europe and could not sustain hatred. He trusted the French Army and its leaders, while his mother’s patriotic assurances had built around him what he calls a Maginot Line of certainties. He had not even learned of France’s defeat in 1870 until attending the lycée in Nice. On the eve of the Munich Crisis, his mother’s letters reached him in his sentimental exile at Björkö, declaring her confidence in France’s victory. Sweden is thus also the setting from which he remembers the distance between his sheltered faith in France and the danger already visible in the sky.

Sweden beside the French ideal

The narrator’s account distinguishes the affection he acquired for Sweden from the inherited ideal of France that had shaped him since childhood. His mother had presented France through stories, literary images, and patriotic play, until the country seemed inseparable from her smile and her loving voice. That imagined France would later collide with political reality, but it remained powerful enough that, after France’s defeat, the narrator rallied to Charles de Gaulle’s call of June 18 as much to his mother’s voice as to the General’s words.

Sweden does not replace France in this emotional history. Rather, it appears in more intimate, contingent forms: the king who prevented a humiliating scene from becoming worse, the girl whose voice made the narrator happy, the aunt timing a punishing bath, and the island where a swastika-marked aircraft first made the enemy visible. The narrator’s enduring fondness for Sweden arises from these particular encounters, while his reflections on his mother’s attachment to France help him recognize that national love, too, can begin in personal memory rather than in reasoned argument.