Patrick Modiano - The Occupation Trilogy - La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads

Édouard Drumont (1844–1917):French journalist and writer who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. He later founded and edited the French anti-Semitic political newspaper La Libre Parole .

Each man in his darkness goes towards his Light:a quotation from Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo.

a new ‘Curé d’Ars’:a reference to Saint John Vianney, a French parish priest, known as the Curé d’Ars.

My heart, smile towards the future now …:from the poem ‘La dure épreuve va finir’ by Paul Verlaine

The fireside, the lamplight’s slender beam :from the poem ‘Le foyer, la lueur étroite de la lampe’ by Paul Verlaine.

furia francese: the ‘French fury’ — attributed to the French by the Italians at the Battle of Fornovo.

Giraudoux’s girls love to travel:Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright.

Charles d’Orléans (1691–1744):eighteenth-century French man of letters.

Maurice Scève (c. 1501–64):French Renaissance poet much obsessed with spiritual love.

Rémy Belleau (1528–77):sixteenth-century French poet known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things.

even a thousand Jews … Body of Our Lord:an oblique reference to the line in Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah : ‘A strange Jew who boiled the Host’.

They strolled together … spring waters:alluding to a Swann’s Way , the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where the narrator dreams that Mme de Guermantes will show him the grounds of her house.

‘The energy and charm … eyes of rabbits’:paraphrasing a passage from Proust’s The Guermantes Way .

The Embarkation of Eleanor of Aquitaine for the Orient: an allusion to Claude Lorrain’s 1648 painting The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba .

The Fougeire-Jusquiames Way: alluding to Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. The passage that Modiano follows offers a variation on the Proustian bedtime scenes of Combray.

the Princesse des Ursins:Marie Anne de La Trémoille, a lady at the Spanish Court during the reign of Philip V.

Mlle de la Vallière:Louise de La Vallière (1644–1710), mistress of Louis XIV.

Mme Soubise:Anne de Rohan-Chabot, a mistress of Louis XIV.

La Belle aux cheveux d’or: a story by Countess d’Aulnoy usually translated as The Story of Pretty Goldilocks or The Beauty with Golden Hair .

‘It was, this “Fougeire-Jusquiames,” … with heraldic details’: paraphrasing The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust.

Arno Breker (1900–91):German sculptor, whose public works in Nazi Germany were praised as expressions of the ‘mighty momentum and will power’ (‘Wucht und Willenhaftigkeit’).

The still pale moonlight, sad and fair:from the poem ‘Clair de Lune’ by Paul Verlaine.

Perhaps too, in these last days … anti-Semitic propaganda had revived:a quote from Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust.

The Jew is the substance of God … only a mare:a parody of the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic text Der Talmud Jüde, by August Rohling, a professor at the German University of Prague.

‘Hitlerleute’:‘Hitler’s people’ — a fascist song using the same tunes as the official hymn of the Italian National Fascist Party.

Baldur von Schirach (1907–74):Nazi youth leader later convicted of crimes against humanity.

Marizibill:title of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire about a prostitute in Cologne and her Jewish pimp.

Zarah Leander (1907–81):Swedish singer and actress whose greatest success was in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.

Skorzeny:Otto Skorzeny (1908–75), served as SS-Standartenführer in the German Waffen-SS during the Second World War.

the phosphorus of Hamburg:the allied bombs dropped on Hamburg during the Second World War contained phosphorus

‘Einheitsfrontlied’: ‘The United Front Song’, (by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler), one of the best-known songs of the German workers’ movement.

the anthem of the Thälmann-Kolonne:the anti-fascist song, ‘Die Thälmann-Kolonne’, also known as ‘Spaniens Himmel’ (‘Spanish skies’), was a communist anthem.

Julius Streicher (1885–1946):a prominent Nazi, the founder and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer . In 1946 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed.

the traitorous Prince Laval:Pierre Laval (1883–1945), prime minister of France during the Third Republic, later a member of the Vichy government. After the liberation he was convicted of high treason and executed.

‘I will not be home tonight … black and white’:alluding to the suicide note left by Gérard de Nerval for his aunt. ‘Ne m’attends pas ce soir car la nuit sera noire et blanche.’

Say, what have you done … with your youth?:the last line of the poem ‘Le Ciel est, par-dessus le toit’ by Paul Verlaine.

the roundup on 16 July 1942:The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup was a Nazi ordered mass arrest of Parisian Jews by the French police.

Émilienne d’Alençon (1869–1946):French dancer and actress. She was famously a courtesan, and the lover of, among others, Leopold II of Belgium.

‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my truncheon’:alluding to the line ‘when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun’ often attributed to Hermann Göring. In fact, the line originally appears in Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter : ‘Whenever I hear the word Culture… I release the safety catch of my Browning!’

‘Du bist der Lenz nachdem ich verlangte’:‘You are the spring for which I longed’ — Sieglinda’s aria from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre .

Radio Londres: a BBC broadcast in French to occupied France during the Second World War.

Moi, j’aime le music-hall … danseuses légères:‘Moi j’aime le music hall’ by Charles Trenet.

Patrick Modiano was born in Paris in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, a dark period which continues to haunt him. After passing his baccalauréat, he left fulltime education and dedicated himself to writing, encouraged by the French writer Raymond Queneau. From his very first book to his most recent, Modiano has pursued a quest for identity and some form of reconciliation with the past. His books have been published in forty languages and among the many prizes they have won are the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française (1972), the Prix Goncourt (1978) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2012). In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations from the French, including the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder. He is also the translator from the Spanish of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory , Miguel Figueras’s Kamchatka and Carlos Acosta’s Pig’s Foot . In 2014 he was awarded the Valle Inclán Prize for his translation of Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour .