Montpellier

Montpellier enters the narrative first as the city to which Vítězslava Kaprálová was taken while fleeing the German advance on Paris; later, Liesel sees its name from a train window and connects the place with Kaprálová’s death and the family’s own flight. The city becomes a point where war, private loss, and the fragile thread linking the exiles to home converge.

Kaprálová’s Flight and Death

In a letter to Liesel, Hana recounts that Kaprálová had left Martinů and married Jiří Mucha, son of Alfons Mucha. When Kaprálová fell ill and was hospitalized as German forces approached Paris, her husband managed to get her out of the city. They fled south, apparently to Montpellier. She died in hospital two days after the fall of Paris. Hana relays the account as information passed through others, and the precise cause of death remains uncertain.

For Liesel, the news is not merely another report from a Europe collapsing around the refugees. Kaprálová’s death makes the loss of the young feel as immediate as the deaths of the old, while Liesel sits in Switzerland, which she experiences as an island of safety amid surrounding disaster. Montpellier is thus first associated with a flight that could not save its passenger.

A Name on the Route

Later, during the Landauers’ journey through France, the train pauses after an air-raid warning and resumes its journey at dawn. Liesel wakes to the French countryside and spots the station sign: Montpellier. The name turns the passing station into a remembered destination. She tells Viktor that this is where Kaprálová died and recalls that Hana had told them of her marriage to Mucha’s son.

Liesel also imagines that Mucha may have hoped to get Kaprálová to Spain, as the Landauers are trying to reach safety themselves. The parallel is tentative, but it draws the dead woman’s escape route close to their present journey: both are shaped by the effort to get away from a continent made hostile by war.

Memory, Exile, and Home

The encounter with Montpellier matters because it gives Liesel a thread of association across distance and time. Confined with Viktor in the train compartment, she holds on to this connection as a link back through earlier years and other lives, all the way to the Glass Room. The city’s significance therefore extends beyond geography: it marks both a failed escape and the persistence of memory among people displaced from home.

That recollection leads Liesel back to the Glass Room and a piano scene involving Němec and Kaprálová. She asks whether the piece Kaprálová played was “Ondine.” Montpellier becomes a hinge between the family’s immediate passage through France and a remembered world that war and exile have made distant but not entirely unreachable.