The mother of the narrator

The narrator’s mother is a devoted caregiver, hotelkeeper, and ardent believer in France whose expectations help shape her son’s sense of duty. Her influence is both intimate and political: she tends to him through childhood illness, imagines a heroic future for him, and gives him an ideal of France that he struggles to preserve even when experience exposes the country’s failures. In the memoir, her courage survives separation and illness as a force the narrator carries within himself.

Identity and Daily Life

She runs the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts in Nice with close attention to its daily work. Her routine includes selecting the menu, dealing with tradespeople, supervising breakfast, listening to guests, preparing picnic baskets, inspecting the cellar, keeping accounts, and attending to other details of the business. The narrator recalls that she climbed the stairs between the restaurant and kitchen at least twenty times a day. Her care for him is similarly practical and exacting: she believed fruit benefited the body and required him to eat at least a kilo daily, a habit he later associates with chronic colitis.

This energetic public life conceals a serious illness. One day, after repeatedly climbing the hotel stairs, she suddenly became weak and collapsed. A doctor diagnosed hypoglycemia caused by an excessive insulin injection. The episode disclosed what she had kept from her son for years: she had diabetes and injected herself every morning before beginning work. The sight of her pallor and distress remained with him, while the discovery changed his understanding of the tireless labor he had taken for granted. He feared not only losing her but losing the chance to fulfill the future she expected of him.

Care, Authority, and Her Son’s Illness

Her devotion is not passive. When her son fell gravely ill after scarlet fever, doctors feared that an acute kidney inflammation would prove fatal. He worried that his death would leave her without support and that he would fail the ambitions she had formed for him. During his periods of consciousness, he tried to reassure her with a smile and a few coherent words, presenting his struggle to live as an effort to meet the responsibilities he felt toward her.

When doctors proposed an operation on his right kidney, she flatly refused, despite the presence and insistence of a distinguished specialist summoned from Berlin. The narrator later understood that she associated the kidneys with a man’s sexual capacity and imagined a future for him that went beyond mere normality. Her decision thus joins maternal protection to her expansive expectations for his life. He kept the kidney and survived, though the specialist had predicted that death was only days away. The narrator recounts the episode with humor, but also with a sense of the powerful authority she exercised when she believed his future was at stake.

France as an Inherited Ideal

She carries an exalted image of France as a land of beauty and justice. Her son eventually recognizes that the French are not a separate or superior kind of people: they, too, can be foolish and unjust. He comes to see the country as made up of many different faces and to choose among them rather than allowing the flag alone to determine his loyalties. Yet he cannot bring himself to tell his mother how far his understanding has changed. He fears that the truth would destroy the ideal she has carried throughout her life, and resolves instead to protect that image from a disappointment she could not bear.

Her patriotism appears in gestures both tender and comic. When her son returned to Nice in the uniform of a private with a lance corporal’s stripe, she had raised a tricolor over the freshly painted hotel, believing him to have come home promoted to second lieutenant in the French Air Force. He saw how the uniform contradicted her expectation and could not bear to confront her with the truth. The scene makes her idealism a pressure on him, but also something he actively chooses to shelter: his invented explanation is meant to console her and preserve the high opinion she holds of him.

Her military confidence is just as direct. At the airfield in Salon-de-Provence, she inspected the aircraft and, once seated on the grass, declared that the army should attack immediately and march on Berlin. The narrator imagines that she possessed the offensive instinct and ability to energize others that the French command lacked. Her certainty is humorous in its scale, but it also expresses a recurring trait: she meets danger by demanding action rather than accepting passivity. Even when she cannot command an army, she brings that combative conviction into her son’s view of the war.

Separation, Illness, and Farewell

The narrator’s later memories of his mother place her beside him in moments of extreme vulnerability. During a long illness in Damascus, typhoid fever and internal hemorrhages left him close to death. Friends offered blood, and a young Armenian nun cared for him; his mother was not there at his bedside. Even so, the memoir presents the maternal bond as something that continues to function through distance. As he slowly recovered from fever and other complications, the narrator describes that bond as a cord that remained intact, and his first concern on regaining the ability to speak was whether he could return to battle.

In a separate recollection of a hospital visit in Nice, her son sits beside her in his leather jacket and cap, with a cigar stub between his teeth. A medal from his 1932 ping-pong championship is visible on the bedside table. They sit together in silence; when she asks him to draw the curtains, he understands what she needs and raises his eyes toward the light without making her ask again. He stays in the chair beside her for forty-eight hours. Their closeness here depends less on conversation than on small acts of attention, and the narrator recognizes that her tears concern someone beyond himself. Even as she speaks about the woman he needs by his side, her attention remains directed toward the life she hopes he will continue to lead.

Before he leaves her, she asks him to remove his cap and traces the sign of the cross on his forehead with her finger, giving him her blessing in Russian. The gesture crosses religious and linguistic boundaries: although she is Jewish, the narrator says that the language in which she expresses herself does not matter to her. He leaves feeling calm and believes that some of her courage has passed into him. Her final influence is not a plan or instruction but a durable disposition toward hope, one that makes surrender difficult.

Narrative Role and Legacy

The narrator’s mother is presented through contrasts that keep her from being only a symbol of patriotic faith. She is a working proprietor attentive to menus, accounts, guests, and stairs; a diabetic who conceals her daily injections; a mother who makes an uncompromising medical decision; and an exuberant advocate for an immediate advance on Berlin. Her grand expectations can burden her son, who fears disappointing her, but they also supply the emotional terms by which he understands responsibility and survival.

Her imagined France is tested by the narrator’s experience, yet it remains powerful precisely because it is not a reliable description of the country. He sees its injustices and refuses to let a flag blind him, while still trying to preserve the ideal his mother entrusted to him. That tension links private love to public allegiance: he cannot simply inherit her vision unchanged, but neither can he discard the hope it gave him. In the memoir’s account of their bond, her courage becomes part of his own, persisting through illness, separation, and the possibility of despair.