THE TRAGIC INNOCENTS is a story about the love of Jean Tarendol and Marie Margherite. Theirs is a love, full and tender, beginning in the spring of the year and of their lives. To love for the first time has never been a simple matter, for youth makes the joys and the pains too sharp. Jean and Marie found their love during the French occupation when the times and the world had little sympathy or help to give them. Rend Barjavel has told their story in near perfect prose against a perfectly realized background. The school at the stuffy little town of Milon, the wild hill village of Saint Saveur-le-Desert, the glum and darkened city of Paris under the occupation, the people of these places, and the terrible atmosphere of a lost war, have been coalesced into a whole that is rich in humanity and warm with affection.
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