Odile

Bastille Day 2025

In THE DAWN, Odile Marquet Van der Groef is the younger sister of Pascal Marquet, owner of Pascal’s Restaurant in Roussillon, Provence, France.

She is a widow, an ardent Gaullist, and a major force for good among all of the resisters in Roussillon.  She’d lived quite a life by the age of twenty, after which she aspired, in a formidable way, to learn the meanings of mercy, redemption, and, ultimately love.

In bringing Odile to fictional life, I set out to craft, and invent, a certain type of individual who would inhabit this Frenchwoman.  I envisioned her, long before I wrote about her.  Perhaps she served as an ideal for me during my girlhood, and I wanted to give this imaginary archetype a name.  After testing out a few names in my auditory mind, I decided upon “Odile”.

I then researched this name and discovered the story of Saint Odile of Alsace, and the existence of Mont Sainte Odile.  Much more inspiration thereby came my way.

Putting Odile into “action” required working, consciously, with experiences from my own life.  I made much more use, however, of the grievously sorrowed and ennobling pieces of the pasts of several women whom I’d known and loved, and to whom I’d bade adieu.

I was completely unaware of this metamorphosis taking place while it was taking place in the fictional rendering of Odile. It has only been during the course of the past year or so — as I undertook the final review of my translation of THE DAWN into L’AUBE — that I’ve come to recognize, and to fully understand, how the writer in me transmuted scenes of real life into the literary art that I named THE DAWN.

Fully fleshing out the fortitude and fears of Odile was instinctive for me.  She thus remains, to this day, a monumental profile of womanly courage, vulnerability, and honesty.  She also evinces a tenacious, sometimes trepidatious, submission to the will of her Maker.

Born in 1905, Odile was the younger sister of Pascal by five years.  While Pascal was tall, slender, fair, and blue-eyed, Odile was tall, statuesque, and dark.  She’d been a stunning sloe-eyed, olive-skinned beauty at the age of eighteen.  Disobeying the wishes of her parents, she’d become romantically involved with an older man, a man who had acquired fast money through disreputable means.  Odile did not care about the secretive business practices of this man. She’d fallen in love with him, or with the image of him.

This man, who was in his early forties, was a typical dashing debonair rake of the 1920’s.  He was one of so many who formed a riptide in the flotsam and jetsam of the illegal activities that were part of rebuilding Europe after the Great War, this portion of the boom which always follows a bust.  There are profits to be made in each part of the cycle.  This man had been ruthless enough to make money in both bust and boom portions.  The next bust, during the year 1929, would crush him, but until then, life was a huge ride.  Odile innocently became a part of it.

After a brief courtship and the gift of a large emerald ring, set in platinum, this rich roué seduced Odile.  When she discovered that she was pregnant, she also discovered that her handsome wealthy lover was gone.  The two business associates whom she had met through him assured her that he was in Monaco on urgent business and that he would return soon.  Until that time, he could not be contacted or located.  Odile believed these criminal accomplices, and she felt better, for a while.  Initially, she was overjoyed to be with child, his child, the child of the man she loved, the man who would return to her.  He’d gone to Monaco, but he would return to her and then they would marry.

Months passed by.  He did not return to her.  When Odile gave birth to a stillborn boy, her mother confirmed that it was a sign from God that this union had been cursed.  Odile believed her mother; how could she believe otherwise?  The tragedy is that these women experienced their Heavenly Father not as a benevolent spirit of grace, but as a vengeful force of wrath.

The father of this young woman wept over the death of this newborn.  It had been a male, a grandson, whom this Frenchman would have loved, regardless of his ignoble origin.  Odile named the child, Bénézet, after this loving man, her father.  This name is Provencal for the Latin, Benedictus, meaning blessed.  It is also the name of the shepherd boy who, according to legend, heard a voice from Heaven, the voice that inspired construction of a magnificent stone footbridge in the 12th century over the Rhône River.  This bridge originally contained 22 arches, four of which remain and extend from the wall of le Palais des Papes.  The remains of the shepherd boy, Bénézet, are consecrated in a chapel on the bridge.

Odile knew the story of this shepherd boy, and she yearned fervently to believe that this nouveau-né, this newborn, whom she tearfully named Bénézet, was blessed.  She daily and desperately prayed for the soul of this little lamb.  She wept as she entreated her Heavenly Father about the fate of this tiny babe.  This nouveau-né, whose voice she’d never heard; this tiny son, whose eyes had been sealed closed to his mother; this mort-né, this stillborn, she prayed that he would be brought safely home to the arms of his Heavenly Father.

This loss was a wound from which Odile would never completely heal.  It was a sorrow from which no one could ever fully heal.  Odile was still young.  She was not yet twenty.  She possessed the vigour of youth and the fervent faith that, with the help of God, she could overcome the anguish of this loss.  She did not know how long it would take or what she needed to do to atone for her sins.  She prayed, and she went to confession.  The anguish did not diminish.  She pawned her ring and gave the money to the poor.  The agony in her heart grew more acute.  She slept as a means of escape.  She slept, until her days began to blend with her nights.  At length, day and night became indistinguishable.

Despondency and the soft, caressing fingers of despair began to hold Odile in a silken caress, a surrender from which the devil did not intend to release her.  She slept long hours.  Days went by without her being able to eat; she then would eat too much and fall into a sleep of stupor, a more insidious alliance with despair, another step toward the supreme succumbing of the soul to her undoing, a bondage from which Lucifer does not grant release.

Odile was ill-prepared to care for her own self, much less leave the house of her parents.  Her father, Bénézet, provided the blessing of a stern command, one which did not accept a refusal.  It was a benevolent ultimatum: Odile had to get a job and earn money.  She had to “faire son chemin,” to make her way into the world.

These words sounded harsh and cruel to this young woman.  She accepted this gift as punishment.  She believed that she had reaped a cruel harvest from ignorance, sin, lust, and shame.  She now had to sow some seeds, any seeds, which would replenish the inner strength, virtue, dignity, and hope that she had squandered.  She dimly perceived that she had not tossed away her youth as much as she had cast her pearls before swine.  She had foolishly, facilely, and freely favored a fiendish man who had proved incapable of comprehending this fortune that she’d blindly given to him: her maidenhood and a grand, self-sacrificing love that might not ever be restored within her heart.

Odile could not undo her errors, but she prayed and vowed to atone for the anguish that she had caused her parents.  She silently sought to punish her heart for having been so foolish, so unknowing, so trusting!  And the babe, whose voice she had never heard and whose eyes she’d never seen, that tiny innocent stranger would forever haunt her conscience.

In 1925, at almost twenty years of age, Odile was hired at one of the many textile mills that flourished in Avignon.  Her entry-level job as a sparehand consisted of carrying a finished portion of jacquard upholstery from one station to the next.  Her work was laborious and tedious, but somehow its monotony soothed her soul.  The hours of exhausting effort and the stimulation of learning new skills moved this Frenchwoman from the valley of crushing guilt and the despair of grief toward a plateau of steady functioning.  Her life persisted without the awful weight of tormenting emotions.

Over the course of several months, Odile began to perceive a vision of life that included travail, work, this activity that gave to her as much as it took from her.  She no longer felt bowed by the

burdens of trial, turmoil, and tribulation.  She felt an obligation to her employer, a sense of responsibility that superseded anything else that she had been able to feel in her brief life.  Her work became more than drudgery.  In the mundane, Odile found transcendence.  In the simple, she sensed the profound.  The menial, robotic, and banal tasks that Odile performed hourly proved to be her saving grace, even amazing grace.