First line: J'ai un secret.

Rosalie is a precocious five and a half year old girl who lives with her mother in a French village, her father away fighting in World War I. When her mother begins working in a munitions factory, she makes a deal with the teacher of eight year old boys to let Rosalie sit in the back of the classroom and draw. Captaine Rosalie wiles away the hours by pretending to be a spy on a secret mission vital to the war effort.

In the evenings, her mother reads letters from her father, but Rosalie is suspicious that her mother is fabricating some of the stories she tells about going fishing when he returns and eating delicious food. One day she sneaks back to the empty house to read the letters for herself. Although she can't read all the words, some jump out at her, and they are not words that her mother has read to her:

Je n'ai pas plus assez de souffle pour suivre l'écriture escarpée de mon père, mais je prends les petits mots du papier, ceux qui me sautent au visage dès que je me penche.

Le mot rats, le mot sang, le mot peur.

This poignant story of a child's life on the homefront is particularly sweet because Rosalie is such an intelligent, creative, and brave little girl. Heavily illustrated by gorgeous illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault, the story was easy enough for me to follow, yet it is not a children's book per se. Instead it is a story told from the perspective of a child, but with complex overtones. I loved it. ( )

also featured in The Great War, but without the illustrations. ( )

Que dire après avoir lu ce livre? C’est un superbe livre, un livre pour enfant qui m’a fait monter les larmes aux yeux (et c’est rare qu’un livre me fasse un effet aussi physique). Je ne sais pas ce que les enfants retirent de ce livre, je ne sais même pas pour quel âge je pourrais le conseiller, peut-être parce que quelque soit l’âge du lecteur il pourra y trouver quelque chose pour lui.
Une histoire de petite fille dont le papa est à la guerre, la grande (paraît-il), la première (première d’un genre nouveau, première d’une longue série…). Une petite fille qui écoute sa maman lui lire les lettres de son père. Une petite fille qui ne devrait pas aller à l’école, mais c’est le seul endroit où elle peut aller quand sa maman doit aller travailler à l’usine.
L’histoire du pouvoir de la lecture. Parce que c’est l’accès au savoir, à la vérité, même si cette vérité fait pleurer. En écrivant ces lignes, j’ai les larmes aux yeux rien qu’en pensant à ce petit Capitaine Rosalie. Histoire merveilleusement écrite par Timothée de Fombelle (connu pour d’autres livres, plus fantastiques, mais que je découvre ici) et superbement illustrée par Isabelle Arsenault, avec des traits sûrs comme l’est la détermination de Rosalie, mais d’une grande douceur comme l’est la maman de Rosalie, comme l’est le cœur de Rosalie aussi. Les deux se marient pour créer ce livre, cette petite bulle aussi douce et dure que peut l’être la vie. Un bon condensé, qui ne ment pas aux enfants et qui fait grandir.

Timothée de Fombelle’s tale for older children is an unusual one. Neither a picture book nor a novel, Captain Rosalie tells the story of a little, flame-haired girl in the France of 1917. Every morning, Rosalie is dropped off at the little village school that is presided over by a one-armed school master who has been sent home from the front. He has kindly agreed to allow the little girl to sit at the back of a class of older students while her mother works at the arms factory. Rosalie’s father is away. He is fighting in the war.

Rosalie appears to spend her days drawing in a notebook while the lessons are taught. Really, though, she is fighting her own war, preparing for an important mission, which she believes will earn her a medal. It takes some time for readers to discover what this mission really is, but they eventually understand the clues that de Fombelle and Isabelle Arsenault (his Canadian artist-illustrator) have dropped along the way.

Every evening on her way home from the factory, Rosalie’s mother picks the girl up from school. Often she carries new letters from her husband. Sometimes she is tearful, and this is (strangely) when Rosalie loves her best: “when courage deserts her and her eyes are red.” Later her mother reads the letters aloud, and Rosalie becomes angry. She is impatient with what her father says he will do—swim, fish, and eat walnuts and trout with Rosalie—if he comes home in the spring.

Rosalie particularly cannot abide the parts of the letters in which her father exhorts that she behave herself. He apparently writes: “the children keep us going by lending their mothers support and being good.” “I couldn’t care less about being good,” Rosalie thinks. “I don’t lend my mother to anyone. I don’t want to hear any talk of fish leaping in streams. I don’t believe in stories of walnuts and mills.” The only thing that seems to be true to Rosalie is a drawing she sees on the back of one of the letters: “A forest in the distance and the land in the foreground all churned up, with soldiers hiding in holes.”

Rosalie’s mission—her battle—is a psychological one, both intellectual and emotional. It involves cracking a code, penetrating the words and denial adults place between children and the truth.

In a 2012 interview that appears in The Walrus, a Canadian general interest magazine of culture and ideas, Isabelle Arsenault commented: “I am attracted to deeper work, not to bright, funny or commercial art. I feel I’m much more underground than mainstream.” French author and playwright Timothée de Fombelle would seem to be a kindred spirit. Together the two have created a nuanced piece of literature for older children, and, yes . . . even for adults. ( )