Le Coup de grâce Reading Order

Le Coup de grâce (A Coin in Nine Hands, translated also as Coup de Grâce, 1939) by Marguerite Yourcenar is one of the great short novels in French literature — a novella of barely a hundred pages that is also a study of war, desire, friendship, and the fatal logic of irreconcilable loyalties. Set in the Baltic states during the civil wars and foreign interventions that followed the Russian Revolution and the First World War, it is narrated by Erick, a German-Baltic aristocrat and soldier, who is recounting years later how he came to kill Sophie, the sister of his closest friend Conrad. Sophie is in love with Erick; Erick loves Conrad with a devotion that cannot be named in the terms available to him; Conrad dies of typhus; Sophie, the civil war on the side of the Bolsheviks, is captured by the White forces with whom Erick is fighting; and Erick, at her request, shoots her — the 'coup de grâce', the mercy shot that ends a wounded enemy's suffering. The geometry of this love triangle (Erick loves Conrad, Sophie loves Erick, no one can give the other what they want, everyone is destroyed by the war and by their own refusal to compromise) is rendered with the pitiless lucidity that is Yourcenar's characteristic method: Erick tells the story years later, still unable to admit to himself what he felt, still using the conventions of soldier's honour to conceal the real nature of his actions.