Love and war are a timeless pairing, precisely because of the complexity that one engenders in the other. In The Nightingale, both main characters are in love. Isabelle loves her fellow resistance fighter, Gaëtan, and Vianne loves her husband, Antoine. However, the war complicates both romances. For the majority of the novel, Antoine is in a prisoner-of-war camp, meaning that Vianne can only love him from afar. Nonetheless, Vianne loves Antoine and spends much of her free time thinking of him. The fact that he is alive provides Vianne with hope; no matter what the Nazis do, she can look forward to Antoine coming home one day. Meanwhile, Isabelle is in near constant contact with Gaëtan. The two of them regularly partake in romantic rendezvous and spend each night together like it is their last. Because Isabelle and Gaëtan are both resistance fighters, they know that their lives could end at any moment. Yet in the moments they are together, the war is temporarily put on pause, and they effectively use each other and their romance to escape the horrors that war has brought to their everyday lives. Although love is far from a remedy for war in The Nightingale, the novel shows how love can inspire hope and alleviate suffering during war and in other times of hardship.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and War ThemeTracker
Love and War Quotes in The Nightingale
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
“But … but … you’re a postman.”
He held her gaze and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. “I am a soldier now, it seems.”
“Ah. Consequences,” Madame said. “Perhaps now you will see that they should be considered.”
“Something like that. But like I said, a nice girl like you wouldn’t know anything about survival.”
“You’d be surprised the things I know, Gaëtan, There is more than one kind of prison.
Vianne had been so helpless after Maman’s death. When Papa had sent them away, to live in this small town, beneath the cold, stern eyes of a woman who had shown the girls no love, Vianne had . . . wilted.
In another time, she might have shared with Isabelle what they had in common, how undone she’d been by Maman’s death, how Papa’s rejection had broken her heart.
“You are a foolish girl. Thank God your maman did not live to see who you have become.”
Isabelle hated how deeply that hurt her. “Or you Papa,” she said. “Or you.”
She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life . . . or her love for the duration of this war . . . or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected.
Vianne heard the confession that lay beneath. He was telling her his own story in the only way he could, cloaked in Isabelle’s. He was saying that he had worried about his choice to join the army in the Great War, that he had agonized over what his fighting had done to his family. He knew how changed he’d been on his return, and instead of pain drawing him closer to his children and wife, it had separated them.
Don’t forget me, Isabelle thought. She wished she had the strength to say it out loud.
I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts.
We remain.
