Five Quarters of The Orange - Plot

Plot

The story is written from the point of view of Françoise Simon, an elderly widow, who moves into the village of Les Laveuses on the Loire to open a small restaurant. Her business is moderately successful locally, until a notable food critic brings it to prominence in a national magazine. This brings undue attention to Françoise and her business, and brings a visit from her nephew Yannick and his grasping wife, Laure, both eager to profit from Françoise's sudden popularity. But Françoise Simon is not quite who she claims to be. Her real name is Framboise Dartigen, and she is the only surviving child of Mirabelle Dartigen, a woman still remembered and hated for an incident that happened when Framboise was nine, during the Second World War. Framboise has been profoundly marked by this incident and the events leading up to it, and still feels the need to hide who she is. The arrival of Luc and Laure threatens the new life she has built for herself, and forces her to confront the past.

Framboise, her brother Cassis and her sister Reine-Claude lost their father early. Their mother, Mirabelle Dartigen, was a difficult woman, prone to crippling migraines and mre tender with her fruit trees than with her own children. Faced with having to bring up three children and run a farm alone, Mirabelle had to be very tough; sadly, this toughness translated into a lack of outward affection towards her children. When the war came and the Germans occupied Les Laveuses, Mirabelle had to be tougher than ever; the children, with no-one to supervise them, ran wild, eventually falling under the spell of a young German soldier, Tomas, who first bribed them with black-market goods like oranges or chocolate, then manipulated them into secretly giving him information about their friends and neighbours. Framboise, the youngest child, who was nine at the time, and whose relationship with her mother was especially tortuous, became closest to Tomas, and now blames herself for the series of events that resulted in Tomas' death, the retribution killing of a dozen villagers by the Gestapo and Mirabelle's flight from the family home.

Now, sixty years later, Framboise relives these traumatic events and tries to understand how they have shaped her life and relationships. Eventually, as the truth emerges, she learns how to face down the bullies who threaten her, as well as to forgive herself and her mother, to give herself permission to love, to reconnect with her two estranged daughters and to finally put the past to rest.