The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
The Forests of the Night The Forests of the Night The Forests of the Night (1947; French: "Les Forêts de la nuit") is the second novel by French author Jean-Louis Curtis. His best-selling novel, it is also considered his best, winning the 1947 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. Set in Curtis's native region of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the novel is the story of a village under Nazi occupation, centering on the fortunes of French resistors and collaborators. The novel's historical context is that during the years immediately after the war, a myth in France arose that most Frenchmen had been resistors to the Nazi occupation,