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At eleven, Elizabeth is convinced that her mother’s threat will never be carried out: she may well be a rebel, a wild girl, but she’ll never be sent to boarding school. This is 1959. Her father has just been posted to Algeria, and her mother cannot look after her unruly daughter and her three sons by herself.
“Land and honour”, such is the motto of the boarding school where Elizabeth will spend seven years away from her family. She experiences the strict discipline of an institution that lives out of its time: wearing a uniform, washing in cold water, humiliating and ritualised punishments. She suffers from her mother’s coldness, the separation from her brothers, and the anxiety of knowing that her father fights in the Algerian war. Then the war ends. The soldiers go home. Her father asks her to come back home yet to her own astonishment, the little girl, now a teenager, declines: she prefers to stay at the boarding school.
At last she is eighteen. She returns home, faces again the indifference of her mother, the military strictness of her father. She does not know where her place is anymore.
This novel takes us to the heart of life in the schools of the French ‘Légion d’honneur,’ these prestigious institutions created by Napoleon to house the daughters of deserving soldiers.
Forty years later, she recounts her seven years of internment without pathos or complacency. This is a deeply affecting book, sparing in style, and non judgmental: the book of an author who does not condemn, yet does not forget.

Elisabeth Carle lived in Germany where she taught French at the French Institute in Köln. On her return to France she worked in luxury retailing before she became a journalist. D’honneur et d’eau fraîche is her first novel.