Irène had always loved France and, in Paris, her life changed utterly. She enrolled at the Sorbonne, where she graduated with a distinction in literature, and began sending stories to magazines. In 1927 she published a novella called L'Enfant génial, about a young Jewish boy from the slums of Odessa who seduces an aristocrat with his poetry.

The Némirovskys were soon assimilated into French society and led the glamorous life of the wealthy upper-middle class: fashionable soirées, champagne dinners, balls, luxurious holidays. Irène adored dancing. She dashed between parties, living, as she herself admitted, "the high life." Sometimes she gambled at the casino. On 2 January 1924 she wrote to a friend, "I have had the wildest week: one ball after another, and I'm still a bit heady and finding it difficult to get back into the routine of work…" Another time she wrote from Nice, "I'm behaving like a madwoman, it's shameful. I dance all night long. Every evening there are very chic entertainments in different hotels, and as my lucky star has blessed me with a few handsome young men, I'm enjoying myself very much indeed." A further letter, written just after a return from Nice, reads: "I haven't behaved very well… for a change… The evening before I left, there was a grand ball at our hotel, the Negresco. I danced like a mad thing until 2 a.m. and went outside in the freezing cold to drink champagne and flirt." A few days later she wrote: "Choura came to see me and lectured me for two hours: it seems that I flirt too much, that it's bad to upset boys like that… I broke off with Henry, you know, and he came to see me the other day looking pale, wide-eyed and evil, with a revolver in his pocket!"

In the whirlwind of one of these parties she met Mikhaïl-Michel Epstein-"a small dark-haired man with a very swarthy complexion," who wasted no time in courting her. He had a degree in Physical and Electronic Engineering from the University of St. Petersburg, and worked as a senior banking executive at the Banque des Pays du Nord, Rue Gaillon. She liked him, flirted and, in 1926, they were married. They moved to 10 avenue Constant-Coquelin, a beautiful apartment on the Left Bank, whose windows looked out over the large courtyard of a convent. In 1929 Irène gave birth to Denise (Fanny sent a teddy bear). By the time her second daughter, Elisabeth, was born in 1937, David Golder had been turned into a film, and she had published nine novels. She and Michel moved in high circles and took holidays in fashionable spa towns for Irène's asthma.

In spite of her fame, and though clearly very attached to her new country, Irène still didn't have French citizenship. In 1939 Irène decided that she and her children should convert to Catholicism. This decision should be seen in the context of the obsessive fear of war in 1939, and the previous decade of violent anti-Semitism during which Jews had been portrayed as evil invaders and power-hungry warmongers-a race of bourgeois merchants and revolutionaries. She and her family were baptised early in the morning of 2 February 1939 in the Chapel of Sainte-Marie in Paris, by a family friend, Prince Ghika, a Romanian bishop.

When war broke out in September, Irène and Michel took their two small daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, to the safety of Issy-l'Evêque, in Saône-et-Loire, the village where their nanny, Cécile Michaud, came from. There, they were left in the care of Cécile's mother, Madam Mitaine.

For the first months of the war, Irène and Michel stayed in Paris, making frequent journeys to visit their children. Then, in June 1940, the Germans occupied Paris and the Némirovskys decided to leave Paris altogether, taking up residence in a hotel opposite the house of Cécile Michaud, the Hôtel des Voyageurs. From then on life became increasingly difficult. On 3 October 1940, a law was passed giving Jews inferior legal and social standing. Most important, it defined, based on racial criteria, who was to be considered Jewish in the French State. The Némirovskys, who took part in an enforced census in June 1941, were both Jewish and foreign: their baptism certificates were useless. Michel no longer had the right to work at the bank; the publishing houses were "Aryanising" their personnel and authors, so Irène could no longer be published. Further race laws passed in October 1940 and June 1941 stipulated that Jews could be placed under house arrest or deported and interned in concentration camps. Issy-l'Evêque was now in the occupied zone and the Hôtel des Voyageurs was full of German soldiers. Irène, her husband and her daughters all openly wore the Jewish star.

Irène Némirovsky watched what was happening with pitiless clarity: she had no doubt that these events would result in tragedy. But life went on. Denise celebrated her first Communion, despite going to the local school with the Jewish star sewn prominently on to the front of her coat. Michel amused himself by writing a multiplication table for Denise in rhyme. The family were finally able to find a large house to rent. Irène read and wrote constantly. Every day, after breakfast, she would go out, sometimes walking for ten kilometres before finding a spot she liked. Then she would start working. Between 1940 and 1942, the publishing house Albin Michel and the director of the anti-Semitic newspaper Gringoire agreed to help her publish her short stories under various pseudonyms. She also wrote a life of Chekhov and a novel, Les Feux de l'automne, which would not be published until 1957. But, most important, in 1941 she started work on an ambitious novel to be called Suite Française.

Némirovsky began Suite Française, as was her habit, by writing notes on the work in progress and thoughts inspired by the situation in France. She created a list of characters, both major and minor, then checked that she had used them correctly. She dreamed of a book of a thousand pages, constructed like a symphony, but in five sections, according to rhythm and tone. She took Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as a model.

On 12 June 1942 she began to doubt she would be able to complete this huge endeavour. She had a premonition that she didn't have long to live. But she continued work on her book, simultaneously writing notes. She called these lucid, cynical remarks Notes sur l'état de France (Notes on the State of France). They prove that she had absolutely no illusions, not about the attitude of the inert French masses-"loathsome" in their defeat and collaboration-nor about her own fate. As she wrote at the top of the first page:

To lift such a heavy weight,

Sisyphus, you will need all your courage.

I do not lack the courage to complete the task

But the goal is far and time is short.

In her writing she denounced fear, cowardice, acceptance of humiliation, of persecution and massacre. She was alone. It was rare to find anyone in the literary and publishing worlds who did not choose to collaborate with the Nazis. Every day, Irène would go to meet the postman, but there were increasingly few letters from her publishers. She did not try to escape her fate by fleeing-to Switzerland for example, which was taking in a small number of Jews coming from France, especially women and children. She saw the situation in such bleak terms that on 3 June she wrote her Will and gave it to the children's governess, asking that she take care of Denise and Elisabeth if necessary. She gave precise instructions, listing all the possessions she had managed to save, which could be sold to provide money to pay the rent, heat the house, buy a stove, hire a gardener who would tend the vegetable garden to provide food while rationing lasted; she provided the addresses of her daughters' doctors, and details of their diet. Not a word of revolt. A straightforward understanding of the situation exactly as it was-hopeless.