In this magnificent work, Gaëlle Nohant tells how war can upset a frozen company. And expose desire and love. A major novel about this literary school year.
It is a story of women. They occupy the role of all the characters in the novel. With one exception: man under the storm. They are omnipresent since the men left on the front. It has been three years since this First World War started. Three years during which the lives of women has also changed. Isaure, without her husband and her son mobilized, learned to become the mistress of a wine estate near Perpignan. Right and stiff in front of the holy water font, she forged a role to measure strict religious principles. Rosalie, her eighteen daughter, in the manner of Jane Eyre in which she reads history, follows her precepts, by mimicry, by obligation, by renunciation. And then there is Marthe, Julie, Louise and others, the “servants”, those who did not have the chance to be well born. This has been so for decades: women have been in their place, housekeeper or employees. Men in power or war. We must not believe that they are weak or abandoned. They have been under a painted painting for decades. Only Adie, the young crush dares to break this confinement.
In this castle, a stormy evening, a man appears at the door. He knew Isaure and wishes to take refuge, protect himself from the threatening lightning, that of heaven and that of the war he fled. He is a painter, he frequented Matisse, Derain in Collioure and elsewhere, he exhibited at Berthe Weill, one of his paintings representing Isaure is hung at the show. His name is Théodore. Isaurus sends him back, Rosalie cache. The wolf in the sheepfold would be trying to write by simplism, but Théodore is not a predator. And the sheepfold is not filled with consenting victims. Hunted by the gendarmes he was driven out and flees three years of war, from the front which bring him sweat and nightmares when night came. It is made to be a painter not to be a soldier.
Gaëlle Nohant has words to make this predictable situation a text with multiple facets. By discreet touches, like an impressionist painting, she tells the body, that of Rosalie, corseted and locked up, which gradually, under the brush of Théodore will free herself from her layers of clothes but also hypocritical social requirements. Without artifices, without grandiloquence is gradually appearing the growing birth of desire, this unknown, refused world, but so liberating. It is necessary for Rosalie, to dare, to leave social conventions, to finally discover life: ” She thinks of the offspring who need to move away from CEP to be fruitful ».
No manicheism in these pages where each word counts, weighed in the light of an era when men are not necessarily bastards. The absent in war, such as Achilles, Rosalie’s brother, tell their sufferings, their misunderstanding in relation to life in the back. Socially strong, men have their weaknesses when they have to fight the noise, the violence, the fury of the trenches. Man under the storm is also a novel on war, his absurdity, the cowardice which is perhaps more that of submitting to the inevitable character of the conflicts than to fight it. Wouldn’t desert be an act of courage and not of weakness? Be loyal, but in relation to what value?
The violence is on the forehead, the sweetness is in the colors stains posed on the canvas Théodore. Violence is in the Somme or in Verdun, not in the Grenier cugibi or Theodore has been hidden for months now. Gaëlle Nohant says the installation sessions wonderfully, the search for the right and realistic portrait to show, or its simplification to say the essential. Painting is released from the shackles of academism, the ancestral life in the wine estate of Isaure bursts under the storm. To give up your desires to live according to social and religious conventions has chosen Isaure. Listening to his body and his desires is the choice of Rosalie.
In this novel, Gaëlle Nohant Speaking of his delicate words, love, desire, the beauty of being yourself. She makes Rosalie discover that “ This joy that never ceases to resonate in her body reconciles it with the little girl who thought that if she was running quickly enough, the devil himself would not be able to catch her ». Running adolescence in adulthood, running to discover that life is only uncertainty and discoveries. When the storm comes, even the devil cannot prevent it.
Man under the storm of Gaëlle Nohant. Iconoclast editions. 350 pages. € 21.90. Publication on August 21, 2025