Émigré

Meaning

Lemma.

Émigré denotes someone who has left the country, with acute political implications in the revolutionary setting. The mother avoids discussing Julie’s departure with an aristocrat because the fact is unsafe to say. Later Gamelin turns Élodie’s statement that a former lover left France into the more specific accusation “an émigré,” then “a nobleman.” The narrator supplies a contrary identity. Departure, emigrant classification and noble status must therefore be kept separate; one does not prove the next.