Buffa Market is more than a landmark in the narrator’s memories of Nice: it is where his mother’s hopes for his public distinction and her fierce vision of France become visible to other people. The market links an imagined future in which he will escort her as a successful Frenchman to wartime scenes in which she speaks for him, first urging resistance and later announcing his military service.

Setting and Personal Meaning

As a young man, the narrator hoped to receive a posting in the south of France so he could visit Nice often and appear with his mother at Buffa Market or on the Promenade des Anglais. The image is modestly specific: he wants his mother on his arm, present in the familiar public life of the city. His aspiration makes the market a place of recognition, where the future she had long predicted for him might be seen by others.

That imagined future carried the weight of his mother’s insistence that he was destined for distinction. She had repeatedly predicted that he would become an ambassador of France, and the market offered a local setting in which her son could appear to fulfil the promise she had made on his behalf. The narrator’s own career ambitions and his attachment to his mother thus meet in an ordinary public place rather than in an official diplomatic setting.

A Public Call to Resist

In the narrator’s account, his mother’s call to reject the armistice was sounded at Buffa Market on June 15 or 16, 1940, before Charles de Gaulle’s appeal from London on June 18. He presents the timing with wry insistence, claiming that numerous witnesses could confirm his mother’s earlier rally. The market thereby becomes a local counterpoint to the better-known broadcast: resistance begins, in this family’s telling, not only through a national leader’s appeal but through a mother’s voice among the stalls.

The scene he reconstructs from other people’s descriptions is deliberately theatrical. Standing on a chair among carrots, beetroots, and lettuces, his mother brandishes her cane and calls on those present to reject the armistice and continue the war from England and North Africa. She imagines the public cause joined to her son’s supposed achievement, urging people to fight alongside the famous writer and diplomat she believes him to be. To support that portrait, she opens her bag and displays a page cut from a weekly magazine that contains one of his short stories. The gesture brings her private conviction into public view, even as the narrator mourns the distance between the stature she claimed for him and the person he had actually become.

The narrator says he was spared the sight of the market scene, but not its emotional force. During his subsequent wandering through the Medina of Meknès, his mother’s voice remained intensely present to him. He describes her forceful character as overtaking his own weaker resolve; the qualities that had animated her market speech—excess, aggression, and a taste for drama—would also shape how his comrades and superiors regarded him. The market episode therefore marks not just her political defiance but the transmission of her temperament to her son.

Wartime News and a Second Appearance

Buffa Market returns as the setting for another public announcement. While serving on missions with the Royal Air Force, the narrator was part of a small French presence from which the British Broadcasting Corporation could report that the French Air Force had bombed Germany from British bases. His mother took the report as proof that her son had finally acted decisively. For several days, she walked up and down the market with a radiant face, spreading the news that he had taken matters into his own hands.

The two wartime scenes differ in what the market audience is asked to witness. In 1940, his mother uses the place to demand action that has not yet occurred and displays his story as evidence of his imagined distinction. Later, she circulates genuine news of his military activity, again interpreting it through the grand narrative she had long constructed for him. In both episodes, the market is a public stage on which she turns scattered signs—a newspaper clipping, a broadcast report—into a story about her son and France.

France, Belonging, and the Market’s Narrative Role

The market’s importance rests partly on the contrast between the mother’s ideal of France and the narrator’s encounter with the country’s contradictions. He recalls being raised on her luminous stories of France, and says that after France’s defeat he rallied to Charles de Gaulle’s appeal in part because he heard in it his mother’s voice. Her market speech gives that influence a concrete civic form: she addresses other people directly, in the ordinary surroundings of a vegetable stall, as though her conviction could summon the country back to war.

That conviction did not erase the question of who was accepted as French. The narrator later learned that his recent naturalization and Russian birth had been used to deny him an officer’s commission in the French Air Force, despite a nationality rule that he says was inconsistently applied. He describes the injury as unexpectedly making him feel truly French, while also forcing him to see that French people, like everyone else, could be unjust. Against that experience, his mother’s market performance expresses an expansive, passionately imagined belonging; the institutional rejection reveals the limits imposed on it. Buffa Market remains the place where her faith in France and her faith in her son are most publicly fused.