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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Passion, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion
Storytelling
Gambling
War
Hero-Worship and Religion
Summary
Analysis
Henri’s first job in the Napoleonic army is to strangle chickens for Napoleon’s meals. But, due to his short stature, he becomes the person to serve the chicken—for which Napoleon has a “passion”—in Napoleon’s tent. No one more than five feet two inches in height serves Napoleon, though he likes gigantic horses. His horse is 17 hands high and so mean that it kills its grooms. The groom who eventually survives Napoleon’s horse is an ex-circus performer (later revealed to be Domino) with dwarfism whom the horse can never buck off. Napoleon enjoys the ex-performer’s sense of humor, so he keeps his job, and he and Henri become friends.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was a Corsican-born French general, dictator, and—from 1804 to 1814—emperor. Napoleon’s appearance marks the novel as a work of historical fiction, thus prompting the reader to wonder which parts of the narrative are true to historical fact and which are invented. Napoleon was famously short—approximately five foot two—hence the requirement that none of his attendants be taller than that. Meanwhile, the first “passion” mentioned in a novel titled The Passion is Napoleon’s love of eating chicken—which suggests that passion can be directed toward random and trivial objects as well as grand ones.
Themes
One snowy evening, Henri, Domino, and some other men are in the kitchen tent when they hear bells ringing demandingly. One man rushes to roast a chicken, and Henri carries the chicken to Napoleon’s tent. Napoleon—looking fearful—tells Henri to deposit the chicken and leave. Henri asks whether Napoleon wants it carved first, but Napoleon says no. Henri knows that Napoleon is going to try to eat the bird whole without carving it—something he has started to do more and more often.
The fear and furtiveness that Napoleon begins to display around eating chicken—for which readers know he has a “passion”—represents the humiliation that may result from having a passion for an arbitrary, unworthy object. This scene implies that Napoleon is embarrassed by how intensely and savagely he wants to eat the chicken.
Themes
Even in the kitchen tent, the camp is freezing. Henri jokes that Napoleon is using the Russian winter like a larder to keep his chicken from spoiling. In the future, people will discuss Napoleon’s actions as though arrogance or “bad luck” caused even his most disastrous errors, but according to Henri, it’s simply a “mess.” Descriptions of the violence protect listeners from the facts rather than communicating them. After explaining this dynamic, Henri adds: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
The French invasion of Russia under Napoleon lasted from June 1812 to December 1812. The invasion was disastrous: the French army suffered massive casualties due not only to battle but also to cold and starvation. The association of the Russian winter with Napoleon’s chicken suggests that Napoleon’s passion for war may be as arbitrary as his passion for chicken. Henri’s sense that war stories ignore “mess” and downplay violence points to the reality-distorting nature of many stories, while Henri’s request that readers “trust” him as a storyteller points to a difficult reality: everyone relies on narratives to understand their reality, yet narrative is intrinsically linked to storytelling as artifice and as such is always potentially deceptive or false.
Themes
In a flashback, Henri joins the army hoping to become a drummer, but the recruiting officer gives him a test of hand strength—cracking a walnut between thumb and forefinger—which he fails. The officer sends him to the kitchen tents, where the cook decides he’s too skinny to chop meat and assigns him to strangling Napoleon’s chickens. Later, Henri wanders to the docks and falls asleep. The recruiting officer kicks Henri awake, orders him on his feet, and kicks him again. He comments on Henri’s “firm buttocks,” but though the officer has a “reputation,” he leaves Henri alone (due to Henri’s “chicken smell,” Henri speculates).
Henri comes to the army with a romantic ideal about his career: he wants to be a drummer, a musician, a kind of artist. Yet his romantic ideas about war are quickly dashed: he is assigned to the menial task of servicing Napoleon’s arbitrary passion for chicken and sexually harassed by his recruiting officer, who evidently has a “reputation” for preying on new recruits. This dismal beginning to Henri’s career as a soldier foreshadows his disillusionment with war.
Themes
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In the army, Henri misses the unremarkable village life he used to resent. Once, his village hosted a bonfire, which he and the village’s other young men leaving for the army were given the privilege of lighting. When Henri lit the fire, he wanted briefly to enter the bonfire and burn away his sins—but he didn’t. He judged himself and the other villagers as being “lukewarm” in their religion and their loves, when they secretly wanted to destroy their own lives and start again. When the young recruits left the next morning, a young village girl asked whether Henri would kill people. He said no, “just the enemy.”
Henri resented his village for being religiously and romantically “lukewarm” (i.e., not passionate), which implies that he joined Napoleon’s army hoping to find passion and meaning in war. Yet this scene flags the narratives that surround war as obviously false and alarming: young, deluded Henri believes that soldiers considered “the enemy” don’t count as people, so he won’t really have to kill another person.
Themes
Shortly after Henri joins the army, in the port of Boulogne, Henri and the others prepare to invade England with Napoleon, with whom all France is “in love.” One night, the cook insists on taking the young recruits to a brothel. Henri wants to remain in camp with his Bible. His passionately religious mother wanted him to become a priest, and though he can’t commit to that because he feels God doesn’t “meet passion with passion,” he still observes religious forms like the others in his village.
Between 1803 and 1805, Napoleon trained a large army at French-controlled port cities (including Boulogne) in preparation for a French invasion of England that ultimately never occurred. The claim that all France is “in love” with Napoleon suggests that the population has developed a hero-worshipping passion for him—and, as such, can’t or won’t hold him accountable for poor decisions the way a country ought to be able to hold its leaders accountable. Though Henri is religiously observant, he seems to have lost inner religious feelings because God can’t reciprocate his “passion.” Readers may doubt whether Napoleon will reciprocate Henri’s hero-worshipping passion either—and thus may wonder whether Napoleon will disappoint Henri in the same way God has.
Themes
Henri’s mother came from a “respectable” family. When, at age 12, she informed them she wanted to be a nun, they recoiled from her “excess.” When she was 15, her family pointed out a man they wanted her to marry at a fair, so she ran away. When she reached the village where Henri would be born, she asked Henri’s father, Claude, to direct her to a convent. He let her stay for the night—and she ended up staying for months, helping around his farm, because she had heard her father was bribing nearby convents to return her. Claude asked her to marry him, and after a while, she said yes. Eventually, Henri was born. When Henri left for the army, Claude cried, but Henri’s mother just gave him the Bible she’d first run away with.
Henri’s mother has a passion for religion. Her “respectable” family recoils from the “excess” of her passion, implying that social respectability and volatile passion are fundamentally at odds. Ultimately, Henri’s mother cannot achieve her passion because, as a young woman without means, she lacks the social power to do so. When Henri’s mother gives him the Bible she ran away with, meanwhile, it hints at a parallel between her attempt to run away to a nunnery and his joining the army—in both cases, a teenager is trying to pursue a passion in order to escape a staid, ordinary family life.
Themes
From an unspecified point in the future, Henri considers Napoleon Bonaparte’s life: born 1769, he exploited the tumultuous 1789 revolution to rise through the army ranks. Soon, he was a general invading Italy. He was so in love with himself that all France fell in love with him too, in “an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life.” He divorced the woman he truly loved because they couldn’t have children, and he ended his life on an unsatisfactory island. Henri wonders what other people would do if they became emperor, notes that Napoleon couldn’t beat his wife, Joséphine, at billiards, and concludes: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
Henri refers to France’s passion for Napoleon as “an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life.” This phrase implies that France did not love Napoleon the individual but rather projected onto Napoleon the ideal their own frustrated passions and longings. Several things Henri says about Napoleon here are documented historical fact: he was born in 1769, he fought in the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), he annulled his marriage to his first wife Joséphine in 1810, and he died in exile on the British-controlled island of Saint Helena in 1821. Yet Henri also mixes his personal opinions and dubious anecdotes into these historical facts and advises his audience to “trust him” while he tells “stories.” This juxtaposition of verifiable fact and personal opinion reminds readers that Henri’s story is a dizzying mix of fact and fiction coming from an individual perspective. That the story told from Henri’s perspective invites readers to cast doubt on the strict truth of any narrative, even a nominally true historical narrative, because every narrative has a perspective.
Themes
Back in the present in Boulogne, the cook leads the young men to the brothel. Henri notes that the women are quite ordinary and older than he thought they would be. The cook picks a woman first, and when she doesn’t help him remove his penis from his trousers, he hits her across the face. Then he demands oral sex. Henri fantasizes about smothering him. The woman who has performed oral sex on the cook spits afterwards. When he demands to know why, she asks “what else” she would do. He moves to hit her, and another sex worker knocks him unconscious with a wine jar. The young men carry the cook back to camp.
The brutality of the encounter between the cook and the sex workers suggests that military life tends toward violence even in the absence of any actual battles. Yet Henri is disgusted at the cook’s behavior, as evidenced by his fantasy of smothering the cook, and the young recruits carry the unconscious cook back to the camp without retaliating against the sex worker who knocked him unconscious—details that suggest the young men are not yet hardened to brutality.
Themes
Later, Henri hears the cook bragging about forcing the sex worker to swallow and claiming that he got his head injury falling on his trip back from the brothel. The cook keeps going to brothels, but Henri doesn’t. Henri only speaks to Domino and a defrocked priest named Patrick. Otherwise, he learns about cooking chickens and waits for the arrival of Napoleon, whom he has hero-worshipped since childhood. The village priest who educated Henri also believed that Napoleon might be “the Son of God come again.”
The cook’s lies about what happened at the brothel are attempts to create an alternate reality in which he is a masculine conqueror rather than merely pathetic and brutal. That Henri’s childhood priest believed Napoleon might be “the Son of God come again”—that is, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, an apocalyptic event in Christianity—draws a parallel between religious fervor and political hero-worship.
Themes
When Napoleon finally arrives in the Boulogne camp, a captain demands that Henri cook chickens. While Henri is spit-roasting the chickens, the captain rushes back. He says Napoleon wants to inspect the kitchens and orders Henri to get the cook—passed out drunk—out of sight. Because the cook outweighs Henri substantially, Domino helps—and Napoleon walks in while Henri and Domino are levering the cook upright. Napoleon praises Henri’s “determination” and orders Henri to become his personal attendant.
Napoleon’s passion for chicken has organized Henri’s entire military career thus far and even leads to Henri’s promotion, showing how Henri’s passion for Napoleon involves a subordination of Henri’s individuality to Napoleon’s own desires, goals, and passions.
Themes
The army camp gossips wildly and inaccurately about what Henri and Domino did to the cook, until the cook becomes Henri’s “sworn enemy.” One day, having been mocked by the other soldiers, the cook spits in Henri’s face and threatens him. Meanwhile, Napoleon is overseeing preparations to invade England. Since all the soldiers would have had to work hard in uncomfortable and dangerous conditions in civilian life, anyway—they are “not free men”—they feel Napoleon gives meaning to their lives.
Though the stories that the soldiers at the army camp army camp tell about Henry, Domino, and the cook aren’t true, they still shape Henri’s reality—earning him a “sworn enemy” in the person of the brutal cook. Similarly, while the heroic mythos surrounding Napoleon may be false, the oppressed common Frenchmen—who are “not free” due to economic and political conditions regardless of what they do—use hero-worshipping Napoleon as a tool to create a meaningful narrative out of their raw experience.
Themes
The army begins practicing on barges for their sea invasion of England. Napoleon estimates that 20,000 soldiers will die during the crossing, but neither he nor the soldiers worry about this number. Many of the soldiers make tourist plans for after they conquer England. Henri wants to see the Tower of London. Though in retrospect Napoleon’s plan will seem quite mad, the soldiers would have gone along with any plan Napoleon proposed.
Neither Napoleon nor the soldiers care that 20,000 men will likely die during the planned invasion. Napoleon’s indifference reveals that he sees soldiers in war as fundamentally replaceable game pieces rather than valuable human individuals, while the soldiers’ indifference suggests that their hero-worship of Napoleon has convinced them that it is worthwhile to gamble their lives with bad odds.
Themes
As previously mentioned, Henri has made friends with Patrick, a defrocked Irish priest. When Napoleon’s General Hoche invaded Ireland in 1799, he heard about a defrocked priest with a left eye better than a telescope, which he used to ogle far-off girls and women. Hoche tested Patrick’s eye by seeing whether he could spot a naked sex worker in a field 15 miles away. Patrick passed the test, and Hoche took him back to France. In preparation for the invasion of England, Patrick sits on a pillar and spies on the English fleet across the channel. He likes working for the French better than working for the English.
English kings claimed political power over Ireland beginning in the late 1100s, but English colonizers began actively confiscating land from the indigenous Irish and settling it in the 1500s and 1600s. Ireland officially became part of the United Kingdom on January 1, 1801, after the Acts of Union of Great Britain and Ireland passed both the British Parliament and the (British-loyalist, largely Protestant-dominated) Irish Parliament. The reference to Patrick’s preference for serving a foreign French empire rather than the British empire dispossessing his own people reminds readers that militarism and imperial wars are unfortunately common phenomena, by no means unique to Napoleonic France.
Themes
Henri begins spending time with Patrick and Domino atop Patrick’s pillar (which has a 20- by 15-foot top). Patrick and Henri play cards or dice, while Patrick and Domino box. Patrick claims he can see weevils in the Englishmen’s rations, but Henri editorializes: “Don’t believe that one.”
The soldiers’ gambling with cards and dice subtly reminds readers that the soldiers are gambling with their lives serving in the army. Henri’s warning not to “believe” Patrick’s claims about how much he can see with his abnormally good eyesight, meanwhile, reminds readers that stories are often untrustworthy—and thus casts Henri’s own reliability into doubt.
Themes
On July 20, 1804, the army parades, and Napoleon reviews them in preparation for a practice launch later in the day. Patrick tells Henri stories about mermaids in the channel who long for men so much that they grab sailors and drown them. By noon, it’s storming terribly. Soon, 2,000 men have drowned. Henri, watching with Patrick from the pillar, thinks that the mermaids will have company now. (In retrospect, the army should have lost faith in Napoleon or at least criticized him them, but no one did.) The next morning, 2,000 more recruits arrive.
The immediate replacement of the 2,000 drowned men by 2,000 new recruits emphasizes that, in the logic of war, human beings are essentially replaceable game pieces rather than uniquely valuable individuals. The failure of the soldiers to question Napoleon after the unnecessary loss of 2,000 of their comrades’ lives shows how deep their hero-worship goes. Patrick’s story about mermaids, meanwhile, suggests that people sometimes use fantastical narratives to blunt horrible truths. In this case, the drowned soldiers aren’t mermaids’ husbands now—they’re dead—but Henri chooses to think of them that way, shielding himself from the horrific reality of the soldiers’ fate.
Themes
Whenever Henri smells porridge, he remembers his childhood. In childhood, he was happy—but only adults, who are often unhappy, talk about happiness instead of just existing happily. No longer a child, he feels as though words have interposed between himself and happiness. One morning, Henri smells porridge and pictures a little boy watching himself in the copper pot, which distorts his reflection, letting him see “many possible faces” and so “what he might become.”
Henri’s sense that words get between reality and the things they describe gives readers another reason to distrust stories, which may conceal or destroy the true experiences they try to describe. Meanwhile, Henri’s sense as a child that he had “many possible faces” emphasizes that the future is uncertain and thus that present action is always a gamble with uncertain outcomes.
Themes
When the new recruits arrive, no one talks to them about the previous day. Henri, comparing himself to the new young men, thinks that army life changes men: without their mothers and “sweethearts,” surrounded only by other men and a few sex workers, they forget how women can “turn a man through passion into something holy.” The army men don’t think of the women they’ve left behind (except in sexual fantasies), while the women’s lives endure without their men lost to the army.
The surviving soldiers fail to mention the 2,000 drowned men to their replacements—suggesting a conspiracy of silence in which the survivors try to sell new soldiers on a happy, heroic story about service in war that simply isn’t true. Henri’s suggestion that true passion can “turn a man […] into something holy,” meanwhile, implies either that passion is a fundamentally spiritual emotion or that religion sublimates passion into a socially acceptable form.
Themes
Henri recalls an optimistic tinkerer with inventions who—when his quiet, hardworking wife died—lost his optimism and his well-ordered household. His wife made him “possible” and yet was “neglected,” just as God makes us possible and is neglected by us.
This strange passage, in which Henri compares God to the “neglected,” ultra-competent wife of a cheerful but absent-minded husband, implies that human beings ought to feel passionate love for the God whose creation made them “possible”—but they mostly don’t.
Themes
After the mass drowning, Henri begins keeping a diary to have an account of events more accurate than his future memories. When he mentions the diary to Domino, Domino argues that Henri’s diary won’t be any more accurate than his future memories—Henri is a know-nothing now, after all. When Henri retorts that he wants a record of how he’s feeling, not of “facts,” Domino walks away.
Domino believes that a near-contemporaneous recording of events won’t be any more accurate than memories recalled long afterward—a belief implying that trying to turn one’s experience into a story automatically falsifies it, whether one composes the story in the near or far term. Henri’s claim that he’s interested in feelings and not “facts” misses Domino’s point—one can falsify the story of one’s feelings as easily as one can lie about the facts.
Themes
Domino himself believes only in the present, not talking about the future and rarely mentioning his circus past. The other soldiers know, however, that he saved Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, from being trampled by a horse after she barely survived the Terror (when she was still Madame Beauharnais). Domino praises Joséphine’s sound mind and claims that back when she was poor, she used to play billiards with army officers: they could have sex with her if they won, but they had to pay one of her bills if they lost. They always lost to her. Later, she suggested Domino for his job as Napoleon’s groom.
“The Terror” refers to the French Revolution’s so-called Reign of Terror, a period characterized by public executions and massacres in 1793 and 1794 during which tens thousands of people died, including Alexandre de Beauharnais (1760–1794), an aristocratic general and political who was also the first husband of Joséphine de Beauharnais. Joséphine and Napoleon subsequently married in 1796. This allusion to the Terror emphasizes the horrors of war and political violence, while Domino’s tales of Joséphine gambling to pay her bills emphasizes the centrality of gambling, risk, and uncertainty to characters’ lives in the novel.
Themes
Despite Domino’s criticism, Henri keeps writing in his diary. Then, in August, Napoleon announces that he will be crowned in December and gives Henri leave to return home for a time. It takes Henri a week to get there, during which time he realizes the French people, who 15 years prior fought to overthrow the monarchy, are happy to have a monarch again: “we wanted a ruler and we wanted him to rule the world. We are not an unusual people.” Villagers on his travels long to hear his stories, to which he adds embellishments and occasional falsehoods. He doesn’t mention the “men who married mermaids.”
The Conservative Senate was an advisory body created during the French Consulate (1799–1804), the government that ruled France after a Napoleon-led coup overthrew the French First Republic. The Conservative Senate declared Napoleon Emperor of France on May 18, 1804, but Napoleon was not officially crowned until December 2, 1804. Henri muses that the French people “wanted a ruler” despite having overthrown their previous monarch, King Louis XVI, and abolished the monarchy in 1792—a musing that suggests people have a fundamental, destructive tendency toward hero-worship. Henri’s belief that people want their hero “to rule the world,” meanwhile, suggests people have another fundamental, destructive tendency toward conquest. Meanwhile, his refusal to mention the “men who married mermaids”—that is, the drowned soldiers—shows his loyalty at this point in his life to the false story of heroic military service.
Themes
Finally reaching his village after six months away, Henri is worried home will have changed. As he approaches the farm, he sees his mother and father in the fields and is struck by his love of them. During his stay, he stays up with his parents and chats, learning that his mother is happy to be gaining a monarch again and contemplating writing to her monarchist parents. Henri thinks: “We all had something to pin on Bonaparte.” Noticing his skepticism, his mother tells him that she’s simply happy to think about and love her parents again. Ashamed, Henri kneels before her, and she compares him to her younger self: “No patience with a weak heart.”
Henri has noticed that French hero-worship of Napoleon Bonaparte involves the projection of personal passions and aspirations onto a larger-than-life figure. He cynically assumes that his mother is “pin[ning] on Bonaparte” a reconciliation with her estranged parents—but his mother, anticipating his thoughts, claims not: she is simply taking the opportunity that Napoleon’s coronation offers to love her parents again. Henri’s lack of “patience with a weak heart” shows his youthfully judgmental nature and his emotional extremism.
Themes
It rains for much of Henri’s visit. He goes visiting friends and walks about in the “early dark,” so unlike the true “Dark” that drowns and smothers. On his last night home, he stays up late holding hands with his mother until they’re really in the dark.
This figurative passage contrasts the “early dark” of the village with capitalized “Dark,” perhaps implying that when Henri leaves the peaceful village, he will return to an existence of constant war that is morally and emotionally “Dark.”
Themes
Henri travels to Paris for the coronation. There, he sees Napoleon and Joséphine spending enormous amounts of money on the preparations. Napoleon insists that Henri wear court dress rather than his uniform and then laughs at how tight it is. Henri has been put in charge of Napoleon’s relaxation baths. One day, Napoleon sends Henri to bring Joséphine a snack of melon. She offers to make Henri her attendant instead of Napoleon’s—“melon is so much sweeter than chicken,” she says. But Henri, who wants to stay with Napoleon, claims he can’t because he has special instruction on chicken. After he’s dismissed, he tries to write about Joséphine in his diary but feels that she “elude[s]” him and so just writes about Napoleon.
Joséphine prefers the “sweeter” melon to savory chicken, a preference that makes clear the individual arbitrariness of Napoleon’s passion for chicken. Yet Henri’s perhaps equally arbitrary passion for his hero Napoleon won’t allow him to serve anyone else, even Napoleon’s wife—so he claims to have a special, non-arbitrary relationship to the serving of chicken. Henri’s inability to write about Joséphine, who “elude[s]” him, emphasizes that his narration is partial and unreliable—as perhaps all storytelling is.
Themes
Many banquets are held for the coronation. Though everyone else eats delicacies, Napoleon only eats chicken—and no one alludes to this fact. Paranoid about being poisoned, he starts making Henri taste his meals before he eats them. Then, abruptly, two weeks before the coronation, Napoleon sends Henri back to Boulogne to get more military training. Henri worries that Napoleon somehow “knew his feelings,” but Napoleon tells him there will be a special job for him the next year.
Yet again, the novel emphasizes the arbitrary, humiliating nature of Napoleon’s passion for chicken—no one even mentions that he is eating chicken while everyone else eats fancy food, presumably because mentioning his overpowering preference would embarrass him. Henri’s worry that Napoleon “knew his feelings” is somewhat opaque. Given his previous interaction with Joséphine, he may be worried that Napoleon has noticed the small crush Henri has developed on Napoleon’s wife—or, on the other hand, Henri may be embarrassed by his own hero-worshipping passion for Napoleon and worried that Napoleon has noticed that.
Themes
Henri hears about the tremendous coronation parties secondhand. In Boulogne, he trains hard and eats little. Napoleon sends sex workers to service the army. The women are poorly paid, poorly dressed, and expected to have sex with every soldier who asks. When one woman tells Henri she stopped counting after sex with 39 different men at a party, Henri thinks: “Christ lost consciousness at thirty-nine.”
In three of the four New Testament Gospels, the Romans flagellate (i.e., violently whip) Jesus Christ before crucifying him. The Gospels do not state the number of lashes Jesus suffered, but 39 lashes were a conventional punishment in Jewish communities around that time. Henri’s comparison of the sex worker forced to have sex 39 times with Jesus whipped 39 times suggests there is an almost religiously intense suffering involved in servicing the sexual passions of others.
Themes
For Christmas, Henri steals a goose and eats it with Patrick atop Patrick’s pillar. Patrick tells Henri fairy tales about Ireland, claiming that goblins shrank his boots while he was hunting for their gold. He shows Henri the tiny boots as proof. When Henri is visibly unsure whether to believe the story, Patrick says: “Trust me, I’m telling you stories.” He also tells Henri stories about the Virgin Mary—namely, that men shouldn’t pray to her, because she only intercedes for women. He claims Mary never forgave God for impregnating her so unceremoniously.
Here Patrick gives a variation on Henri’s repeated assurance, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”—directly after making an unbelievable, supernatural claim. Readers can interpret this either as another reminder from the novel that storytellers are inherently untrustworthy—or a claim that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any secular, anti-supernatural philosophy. Meanwhile, Patrick’s sacrilegious claims about the Virgin Mary indicate that he has heterodox religious beliefs—interpreting religious figures through the lens of his own personal experiences of women rather than using religion as his interpretive lens.
Themes
On New Year’s Eve, Patrick insists that he and Henri go to mass, though Henri claims he doesn’t believe. During the service, Henri finds that the “warmth and nearness” of the worshippers makes him see God. Thinking of his mother, he goes to take communion, but when he ingests the bread and wine, it tastes of “2000 dead men.” He grips the chalice so hard that it leaves imprints on his hands and wonders whether he’ll have stigmata, “bleed[ing] for every death.”
“Warmth and nearness” of other people briefly inspires Henri to religious belief, an inspiration suggesting that group belonging can inspire passion and belief against an individual person’s better judgment. Yet Henri’s sudden recollection of the 2,000 soldiers who drowned due to Napoleon’s reckless orders indicates that he feels a parallel between religious devotion and hero-worshipping Napoleon—and secretly wonders whether both are pernicious. (Stigmata are wounds mystically appearing on devoted religious people in the same places as the crucifixion wounds of Christ: the hands, the feet, and the side.)
Themes
Afterward, Henri rushes from the church and tells himself that Domino was right to think only the present exists. He shouldn’t think about the dead soldiers, as he can’t bring them back. He thinks that people handle the wonder of the world—for example, the uniqueness of every snowflake—by forgetting about it. Seeing a game of noughts and crosses chalked on the street, he thinks that people play whether they win or lose and reveal what they value by what they bet.
Henri represses his guilt and horror over the 2,000 men that his object of passion Napoleon got killed by telling himself Domino’s story: namely, that the past and future aren’t real, so one doesn’t have to think about them. Yet his subsequent thought—that we deal with the uniqueness of every snowflake by forgetting that uniqueness—suggests a parallel between unique snowflakes and unique human beings: Henri can’t bear that Napoleon has recklessly caused the death of 2,000 unique human beings, so he decides not to think of them. Finally, Henri’s musing that people gamble whether they win or lose suggests that risk is an intrinsic part of human life.
Themes
Henri hears a joyful, trusting shout come from the church. He wonders what gives the poor, cold people hope and then wonders at his own skepticism. A woman with a baby wishes him a Happy New Year as she passes by. Then the church empties out—all except Patrick, lurking inside—and the women begin to dance in a round, ecstatically, making Henri long to follow love. Later, Patrick offers Henri wine he has stolen from behind the altar.
Henri longs to participate in the religious passion of the dancing women, yet at this point he has regained his skepticism and can no longer enter vicariously into their communal religious feeling.
Themes
On the way back to camp, Henri and Patrick meet soldiers carrying a freezing man who jumped into the sea to celebrate the new year. The soldiers plan to bring their compatriot to a brothel to get warm. Henri thinks: “Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.” Back in the camp, everyone falls asleep huddled together in the kitchen tent for warmth. In the morning, it’s January 1, 1805, and Henri is 20 years old.
Henri’s thought that “any other role” than “soldiers and women” is temporary suggests two things. First, it suggests that war is man’s natural state: peace is just a “temporary” cessation of war. Second, it suggests that “women” like those in the brothel essentially exist to sexually service soldiers so that they can continue fighting. At this point, young Henri’s view of life, men, and women is bleak and cynical.
Themes
