The Silence and the Rage

by Pierre Lemaitre

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

From “a novelist at the height of his powers,” a dramatic and jubilant dive into France in the “glory days” of the 1950s, through the lens of one ambitious, troubled, and utterly compelling family (La Croix).
 
It is 1952 and the grown children of Louis Pelletier, a prominent businessman with a dark past, have settled in Paris. Jean, the menacing eldest brother, is trapped in a stifling marriage, his days lightened only by his love for his three-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, the bloody consequences of his violent impulses threaten to catch up to him at last.
 
François, an up-and-coming reporter, is caught up in a turbulent love affair with an intriguing woman who isn’t quite the person she pretends to be. And Hélène, their younger sister, strives to make her own way as a journalist as she fights to expose a vast industrial scandal. But as a woman in a man’s world, Hélène’s devotion to her career comes at a life-threatening cost.
 
Dark and compelling, witty and vivid, and filled with surprising reversals and cliffhangers, The Silence and the Rage is the story of one remarkable family against the backdrop of France during one of its most thrilling and volatile periods.

Release date: July 8, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 512

Sample

From early February, the prospect of the “Pelletier pilgrimage” occupied the minds of everyone in the family: the parents, who longed to carry on the tradition, and the children, who each year did their utmost to avoid it. The ceremony, on the first Sunday in March, commemorated the founding of what Louis Pelletier still called “the family soap factory”, though it was actually his alone. The family were expected to move in a cortège through the streets of Beirut, along the rue de la Marseillaise, past the Customs Offices, and around the factory, then have lunch on the avenue des Français, after pausing for an aperitif at the Café des Colonnes.

“All we need is for someone to lay a wreath and toll a death knell,” François would often say.

His father was very attached to this ritual, which, he claimed, embodied the “Pelletier spirit” (though no one knew quite what that might be), and would spend months organising the ceremony. His wife, Angèle, could not help but wonder what preparations were needed for a ritual that had not changed one iota in thirty years. “You don’t understand,” her husband would say. Angèle understood perfectly well. This celebration was symbolic of her husband’s passionate aspiration to be a patriarch. For as long as she had known him, he was constantly trying to manufacture “family traditions” out of trifling matters without, it must be said, much success. When the children were still living at home, his suggestion first of a weekly family meeting, then of an annual expedition to the ruins of Baalbek and finally, on a more modest scale, of Sunday outings to the Gaumont Palace cinema all quickly foundered. And so, with a passion born of despair, he clung to the annual commemoration of the soap factory, going so far as to pay the travel expenses of his children, all of whom now lived in Paris.

The death of the youngest son, Étienne, four years earlier had cast a pall of grief over family reunions and threatened the hallowed pilgrimage, but Monsieur Pelletier had been searching for another reason to keep it going “in memory of Étienne”, who, it should be said, would not have given a tinker’s curse, but when it came to the pilgrimage, Monsieur Pelletier was prepared to resort to anything.

Angèle attached far less importance to the event, but she supported him because she rarely got to have all her children around her. “Do it for your father…” she would write each year, but they all knew that she really meant herself.

And so, though Jean, François and Hélène conjured up all manner of excuses, they were caught between their father’s intransigence and their mother’s gentle insistence, and resisted only for the sake of form. By early February, what pained them more than the drudgery of their annual trip to Beirut was the fact that, at their age, they were still expected to bow to their father’s wishes.

This year, they each had an excuse they could use in an attempt to once again shirk their duty.

Hélène was dreading a betrayal; Jean feared bankruptcy.

As for François, he had scarcely had a life since Nine disappeared. Her boss had assigned her to cover Normandy. She had left on Monday morning and was supposed to come back on Friday.

Last night, there had been no one on the train.

No message.

The hotel where she had been staying confirmed that she had checked out in the late afternoon.

Since then, no word.

François had waited on the platform until the last train arrived from Rouen, and had gone to bed at midnight, sick with worry.

If asked what was the most important thing in his life, he would not have thought twice; despite his passion for his job as a journalist at Le Journal du Soir, he would have said it was Nine. They had fallen in love at first sight, had fallen into each other’s arms at their second meeting. Nine’s body was the answer to all his hopes and dreams, there was no longer an inch of her for him to discover, and her scent, her skin, her warmth, her silken lips, her velvety bush had, in the space of four years, become his homeland. Nine, who was often taciturn, hung on to him and she too seemed to have reached a place she did not want to leave, though she still refused to consider their living together.

Should he have insisted on going with her?

When he had suggested taking a few days’ leave to accompany her, she had exploded.

“I’m not your responsibility! You’re not my father!”

She could not bear his attempts to help her. A common reaction among orphans, François thought, they don’t like to be dependent on others.

He remembered her excitement as she told him she would be working away from home. She would have to make a complete inventory of a library, calculate the order and draw up an estimate.

“It’s the first time I’ve been sent to deal with such an important order.”

Nine was a ravishing, dark-haired girl of twenty-six, with a tiny mouth and eyes that were dark and glittering. She worked for Léon Florentin, a bookbinder and restorer of old books, a silent, solitary profession that suited her perfectly and one at which she excelled. When he took her on as his apprentice, Monsieur Florentin, like most people, wondered about her slight accent. Hungarian? Dutch? Scandinavian? In fact, it was a hearing problem – since adolescence, Nine had been eighty per cent deaf. What little she could hear came to her through “a thick layer of wadding”, was how she explained it to François.

Gradually, after years of hearing only her own voice, she began to have trouble enunciating. Worried that she might shout without realising, she was in the habit of speaking in a low voice; to understand her, you had to listen intently. She stared at people with an insistence that many found embarrassing. It took some time to realise that she was lip-reading. She avoided anywhere there were crowds, since she felt disoriented and worried that she would miss what was said or appear ridiculous. She had never learned sign language, nor used any form of hearing aid, she wanted nothing to do with them, “This is how I live,” she would say, and that life, an unending feat of social gymnastics, was deeply stressful and triggered rare but devastating fits of temper.

Their relationship was marked by Nine’s refusal to ask for help and François’s helplessness. Four years after their first meeting François still knew little about her (a humble childhood in Courbevoie, a mother who had died before her time, a father, a professor of medieval studies, who drank himself to death). Theirs was a relationship of great passion and frequent arguments. Nine was sensitive and very highly strung. And François was not always as considerate as he might be. Things between them were complicated.

Where was she? François did not know the name of the client in Normandy. Monsieur Florentin had taken a few days off to go somewhere in the Auvergne and had not left a telephone number.

Right now, François was at Le Journal du Soir, attending the editorial meeting held by the heads of department every morning.

His participation was limited to pretending to follow what was being said. He stared, unhearing, at the editor-in-chief. It was not enough for Adrien Denissov to tower head and shoulders above everyone, he always insisted on standing. Although he had nothing of the looks of a leading man, he was extraordinarily attractive, and, despite the fact that he was married with children, was rumoured to have more than his share of conquests.

The daily editorial meeting was a battle royal of arguments, insults and showdowns over a banner headline, a photo, an article… Only when the combatants had duly disembowelled one another would Denissov announce his decision. Of the many jousting sessions, the classic pitted the head of news, Stan Malevitz, against Arthur Baron, the head of politics and diplomatic affairs. Their Homeric battles and caustic jibes circulated through the office the moment the meeting was over and accounted for some of the finest moments in the history of the paper.

There would be no bare-knuckle bout today, as Malevitz was absent.

“At his age, I mean, honestly…”

“Next thing you know he’ll be getting acne…”

Everyone found it hilarious that Malevitz had appendicitis at the ripe old age of fifty-seven.

“Did anyone send him a lollipop?”

François smiled politely. Since his coverage, four years earlier, of the Mary Lampson case, in which an actress had been murdered in a local cinema, François had been considered the rising star of the news department. As such, he was standing in for Malevitz and considered it inappropriate to join in the general mockery.

Thunderous applause roused François from his thoughts.

“Yes, yes, bravo!” he mumbled.

Denissov was holding up the back page of today’s edition, entirely composed of large, captioned photographs – an idea of his own that had revolutionised the French press, and one that proved very popular with readers. This was a ritual. The editorial staff took their time decoding and evaluating the page, which was then greeted with a round of applause, except when someone voiced a reservation. There was nothing systematic about the collage: it could include anything that did not warrant an article, images that were funny, startling or reassuring… The page was intended to reflect the news itself: exuberant and diverse.

At the top left, a photograph of a mangled car – road accidents were very much in fashion just now. François recognised the picture as one taken by his sister Hélène, a stringer for Le Journal. Four years earlier, Denissov had seen some of her photographs of Indochina, decided she had “the eye” and started to commission her regularly. François did not point out that (as Denissov knew perfectly well) the photograph had not been taken on the road, as the angle and the presence of a man in a raincoat implied, but in the garage to which the car had been towed. In matters of truth, it was the sort of venial sin that everyone was happy to countenance. It was all in a good cause, was the oft-repeated formula. The cause being Le Journal du Soir.

The conversation moved on to a discussion of the main issues in today’s edition.

François, meanwhile, had not stopped thinking about Nine’s disappearance. He was increasingly worried. He had feared he might lose her a thousand times before. That she might lose herself. He tried to be reasonable, to give her some space. This was also the advice of his sister Hélène, who was very close to Nine. It’s ridiculous getting so worked up about someone missing a train, François thought, but his uneasiness had not come out of the blue. He knew only too well that Nine was… fragile. She had a tendency to overreact, to make mistakes… He tried not to think of her as someone in difficulty, but he could not help himself. He worried about these moments of madness.

Nonetheless, he tried to focus on what was being said, because it seemed as though Denissov was about to make some big announcement – it was obvious from the way he was nodding his head and biting his lower lip. He was a vain man.

“Gentlemen, next week we are going to take an interest in… women.”

“Ooh…”

The lack of any women at the meeting made these catcalls all the more lewd.

“Though not necessarily in their best light…”

“Ooh…”

With his exaggerated sense of staging, Denissov held up a page emblazoned with the headline:

ARE FRENCH WOMEN DIRTY?

Despite the fact it was “men only”, all those present found this question discomfiting. After a second’s thought, it seemed scandalous. François considered it downright insulting.

The article was illustrated by a vaguely amusing sketch of a smiling woman putting on make-up in front of a mirror. She was wearing only a brassiere, and it was difficult to see a connection with the headline.

Denissov was elated. The reaction of the editorial staff merely confirmed his intuition. He lowered his hands, put on his thick tortoiseshell glasses and began to read aloud the standfirst:

French women are universally recognised as

being the epitome of elegance and glamour

But does this reputation mask

an ugly truth?

He set the page down on his desk and flashed a beaming smile.

“It is a series about feminine hygiene. Five days, five articles.”

Everyone around the table was dumbfounded.

“Who wrote this?” said François.

“Forestier.”

The name meant nothing to anyone.

“I didn’t want to risk being scooped,” said Denissov, “so I thought it safest to commission a freelance – though if the series is a hit, they’ll join the full-time staff.”

“I don’t understand,” Baron said, “surely our women readers will find the whole thing offensive?”

Denissov gave a booming laugh.

“Of course they won’t. Every woman will assume it’s about her neighbour or a colleague at work. And when she starts to recognise herself in the articles, there’s no way she’ll say as much. It’ll go down a storm.”

People rarely contradicted Denissov. He often came up with good ideas, but this one was greeted with little enthusiasm and some considerable distaste because the focus on women’s private lives conjured embarrassing images. Denissov was overjoyed.

“Back to work, gentlemen.”

This was the signal that the meeting was at an end.

François felt suddenly panicked. There was only a week before the annual “Pelletier pilgrimage”, and only now did he wonder what he would do if Nine had not reappeared by then.

As a seasoned reporter of human interest stories, he knew that if a young woman was still missing after a week, it would be a very different matter, that the police would be involved and the newspapers would be asking questions… This prospect sent a shiver down his spine.

The idea that Nine’s disappearance would give him his first real excuse to duck out of the tedious trip to Beirut was too cruel.

What terrified François only slightly worried his sister Hélène, who knew that Nine was strange and unpredictable. She was convinced that things would be quickly cleared up. Her only hope was that… But she could not imagine Nine falling in love with anyone other than François. That said, you never know…

At that moment, Hélène was roaming the aisle of La Samaritaine looking for a gift for her beloved niece Colette, the daughter of her brother Jean. She was about to turn three. She was still not really talking (was she a little behind?); the only outward sign of a keen intelligence was a piercing, inquisitive gaze that seemed surprising in a child her age. Her relationship with her mother had never been easy, which perhaps accounted for her defiance, the way she would purse her lips, and fold her arms, staring straight ahead.

Nine was also very fond of Colette, though she seemed unhappy.

As for Hélène, sometimes just the sight of the little girl gave her an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She was twenty-three, and most of her female friends were mothers, or planning to be mothers soon. In her case, it was out of the question at the moment – besides, motherhood meant finding a man. There was no shortage of suitors, because Hélène was very pretty, with dazzling blonde hair, delicate features, high cheekbones and the sensual lips that were almost a family trait. If this were not enough, she had all the right curves in all the right places – in the street men wolf-whistled at her. In the métro, she often had to contort herself to avoid wandering hands.

But no, now was not the right time to have a baby, especially not with him… The man in her life…

Hélène shrugged off this thought and went back to thinking about little Colette.

It was Hélène’s sister-in-law who had suggested she be godmother. Everything had to be done “properly”, which to Geneviève meant “like everyone else”. And so everyone had to endure the sugared almonds they never ate, the baptismal ceremony at a church they never attended, the passing round of the engraved silver goblet that languished in the Henri II sideboard and was only ever taken out on those Sundays when Geneviève managed to persuade all the family to come together. Decidedly, the Pelletiers had something of an obsession with family reunions…

Hélène picked out a little yellow rattle with no price tag and asked for it to be gift-wrapped. She did not earn much money. She freelanced for Le Journal du Soir and occasionally had photographs published in other magazines and newspapers, but the fees were minuscule, it was a constant struggle, every month was a fresh challenge.

She was living on the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles in the 10th arrondissement, in a two-room apartment that now had only one useable room, since the other had been converted into a darkroom. She had to haul cans of water up to the cramped cupboard that served as a kitchen. She slept on a sofa, used the shared bathroom down the hallway – it was not different from many apartments in Paris. But Hélène was happy.

She shared this cramped space with Joseph, a tabby cat that had belonged to her brother Étienne. The cat had a mysterious look, improbably long legs, and a right ear with a slash down the middle, probably the result of a fight during one of his previous lives. He had had three: the first in Beirut, the second in Saigon, and he was now a Parisian cat. He preferred high places – a bookshelf, a wardrobe, anything tall suited him. In Hélène’s place, he spent most of his time curled up next to the Buddha, a cheap ceramic statue she had brought back from Indochina, and from this vantage point cast a grave, penetrating look over the world. His chief pleasure was to leap onto someone’s shoulders when they were least expecting it; he was quite the practical joker.

Hélène was content. Increasingly confident about her talent as a photographer, she was convinced that a precarious existence was a price worth paying for her independence, and that she was destined for great things.

She slipped Colette’s present into her bag and sighed. As if having to go back to Beirut in ten days was not bad enough, she would have to endure another Sunday lunch with Geneviève and Jean (sometimes called Bouboule, because he had always been a little overweight). Usually, Hélène refused to go, but on this occasion she had accepted. Even Bouboule was surprised. “Really? You’re coming?”

It was not unusual for her to pop round to see “her goddaughter” (a phrase Geneviève adored). But Colette was not the reason she had decided to go; she had to talk to François.

She needed to come clean, and she needed to do it now.

Monday would be too late.

And so she told Bouboule, “Sunday would be lovely, I’ll be there,” but as the fateful day approached, Hélène struggled to find the words.

She closed her eyes.

Dear God, how was she to explain the situation? She had spent the last three weeks rehearsing the conversation, deploying an arsenal of pre-prepared phrases, many bordering on insults. She could not imagine François taking it on the chin, and it seemed inevitable that the conversation would turn sour.

Her brother was very gifted. At Le Journal, he was always the one who came up with the compelling headlines, and it was to François that others turned for advice when they needed an angle on a story. But he had been champing at the bit for a long time now. He had not got into journalism to spend his time turning out hack work about domestic abuse, sordid murder cases and jewellery heists. He dreamed of writing hard-hitting stories about pressing social issues… Denissov, who had no plans to change an editorial team that worked, simply turned a deaf ear.

And now Hélène… She felt sick just thinking about the unfortunate chain of events. This was what she had to explain to François – if only he would listen.

Two weeks earlier, Denissov had been talking about Mademoiselle Blanche, considered by many the sexiest secretary in the editorial department. “She could do with a bath!” Hélène had quipped. A stunned Denissov had stopped in mid-sentence. “I’m serious, she could do with brushing her teeth and washing a bit more often, but…” Hélène was simply making a general observation that applied to women everywhere: hygiene was not their chief preoccupation.

“Are you sure?” said Denissov.

“Of course I’m sure!”

She had girlfriends who only changed their knickers once a week, and only washed their corset once a month.

What, to Hélène, was no more than a sad but unremarkable fact immediately struck Denissov as a subject for an exciting exposé. Within fifteen minutes, he had offered Hélène a budget to hire five girls for a week to conduct a series of questionnaires. “But I don’t want you making them suspicious, right? Tell them it’s a poll about personal hygiene products, you’ll think of something… And make sure we cover all demographics: working-class women, stay-at-home mothers, schoolteachers, professionals – every woman needs to realise it’s about her.” He had given her a second week to write up a series of five articles. Without her realising, he had moved her to the editorial team. Something she had always refused. And to the sort of social issues her brother longed to write about.

“You should probably use a pseudonym,” said Denissov, ever the sly dog. Officially, this was to make a distinction between the photographer and the journalist. As an argument, it was a little crude. François would not be taken in.

And things were not likely to improve when, sooner or later, he found out that she was having an affair with Denissov… Not that most people had a problem with the fact that many girls owed their success to their other charms – that was the way the world worked. But Hélène felt deeply uncomfortable because in her case it was simultaneously true and false. True, in that Denissov would never have suggested that she write the articles if the conversation had not taken place in the hotel room where they regularly met. False, because Denissov devoted his whole life to Le Journal (nothing was more important in his eyes), and he would never have entrusted the job to Hélène had he not believed that she could do it successfully. But try explaining that to François!

She was beginning to regret waiting until Sunday lunch at Bouboule’s to broach the subject. She could kick herself. It was deeply selfish. How could she even think about having this conversation in the presence of poor Jean, who seemed increasingly tormented of late?

Perhaps the business was not going as well as he claimed.

Three years earlier, the eldest of the Pelletier children had opened Dixie, a shop that sold reasonably priced household linens displayed in boxes and wicker baskets, much like a market stall. Customers loved rummaging to find a set of six matching table napkins or a pair of washcloths. Conventional commercial wisdom dictates that you buy low and sell high; Jean had a different strategy: buy low… and sell low, but at a profit. The shop had been a dazzling success, hence his idea of taking a larger space and adding a line of women’s clothing.

Geneviève, who had always felt that napkins and bath towels lacked dignity (to say nothing of the way they were displayed, which she considered vulgar), immediately imagined a ladies’ fashion shop. She saw herself hiring stylists, dress designers and seamstresses, she could picture the first fashion show in a glamorous Parisian hotel… When she found out the shop would be selling ready-to-wear, she glowered. When she realised Jean was talking about mass-produced clothing, she gave him the silent treatment. Her husband was running true to form: this new venture, like all the others, would be mired in bad taste.

“Who exactly is going to buy this rubbish?” she said when Jean brought home the first samples.

“Uh… customers…?”

“Oh, you poor fool, you don’t know anything. You don’t have the first idea what a woman wants.”

“They’re cheap,” he said.

“I should think so, too!”

She gingerly held a print dress at arm’s length, as though it were a dirty nappy she was about to throw in the washing machine.

Jean folded away the samples, but carried on with his project, which was based on the notion that women like to change their clothes. He would sell dresses, blouses, shirts and jumpers. Of mediocre quality, granted, but so cheap that women could afford to buy more often. After all, he thought, a dress that lasts ten years is unfashionable for nine of them. Besides, you had only to look around to see that everyone was having babies. Children who had to be dressed, who stained their clothes, who grew up quickly… There was a clear need for clothing. Dressing younger children in their siblings’ hand-me-downs had its limits, and did not appeal to women who desperately wanted “beautiful children” like those they saw in the advertisements in glossy magazines. Jean decided that the women’s clothing department should be next to another, devoted to children’s clothes. A young woman who came in to buy an inexpensive outfit that would only last the season would inevitably find that she could do the same for her children, and all within her modest budget.

In June, Geneviève had been impressed by the premises that Jean was considering for their second shop: a building that was part department store, part warehouse, ideally located on the corner of the place de la République.

Two thousand square metres!

“It’s not exactly clean!” she said. Jean realised that he had made a wise choice.

The only problem was that Geneviève, who had been very active in setting up their first shop, had since discovered the pleasures of married idleness, and did not lift a finger to help. When he realised the vast amount of work required to refurbish such a space, Jean sank into a deep depression. It was a very difficult period; he lost ten kilos (“You can well afford to,” commented Geneviève) and suffered from excruciating bouts of neuralgia that kept him in bed all morning. It took every ounce of strength for him to get up. Work was often an ordeal.

Maybe this is all moving too fast, he thought several times a day. Simply totting up the amount he would need to borrow in order to complete the work gave him palpitations. He barely slept a wink. In his arrogance, had he not committed the sin of pride? In his pocket, he kept a little notebook in which he feverishly calculated and recalculated. The total was terrifying.

It had all started out so well…

Jean could not pinpoint the moment when the business started to spiral. The sales system he had devised required him to lease a warehouse, and he found one in Montreuil, a thousand square metres, which in turn required him to hire at least six labourers. To say nothing of the two administrative staff – dear God, all these people had been drawing salaries for the past month and the shop was not due to open until the end of March. Perhaps not until early April.

The little notebook quivered in his hand as he watched the landscape flash past.

The train heading back to Paris had just pulled out of Charleville under a leaden sky. Jean’s compartment was empty save for a young man squeezed into a tight suit who wore round spectacles and looked as though he had just left a seminary or was heading back to one. Jean added “15”: the number of women he would hire next week to get the shop ready for the grand opening, organise the various departments, add price tags to the merchandise. And “2”: the number of stock clerks needed to constantly replenish the shelves.

He was utterly exhausted, but he knew that even the soporific rocking of the train would bring him no relief. He was kept wide awake by the column of figures and the shifty looks from the seminarian.

Sleep had always been a problem for Jean.

The night before had been unbearable.

He had spent the evening in a restaurant not far from the hotel where, two tables away, a couple were giggling and kissing in between courses. Jean did not remember the young man, but the woman, on the other hand… Her dress had rucked up as she sat down, leaving her pale thigh, the top of her stocking and even a suspender belt on show – it was impossible to feign indifference. When she cuddled her partner (and she spent the whole meal giggling, putting her arm around his neck and pulling him towards her), Jean studied her profile, the curve of her belly and mostly the heavy breasts the man fondled surreptitiously while she laughed into her napkin. The young waiter, a gangly boy with blond hair and a pale moustache, pretended not to notice. Every time he moved away from the table, the man would put his hand on the girl’s breasts, and sometimes on her thigh, under her skirt. The waiter, who knew what was going on, would post himself by the kitchen door so as not to miss a moment. Then, suddenly, he realised that Jean was staring at him. Far from being mortified, the boy gave him a conspiratorial wink and flashed a lewd grin.

An embarrassed Jean desperately tried to focus on his meal, but his gaze was deflected to the cavorting couple like a needle to a magnet.

As he finished his coffee, he left the café and caught a glimpse of the face of the woman being groped by the young man. She had short dark hair that reminded Jean of a female on the cover of a scandalous book he had not dared purchase.

To make matters worse, the couple had chosen to stay at the same hotel. Jean was on his balcony, smoking a last cigarette before bed, when he saw them