LeSilence de la mer (The silence of the sea), the Resistance novella by Jean Bruller (1902-91) — then writing under the pseudonym of Vercors — was published in occupied Paris by the clandestine publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit in 1942; it had been written between July and October, 1941. It is an ostensibly naturalistic story, one with a simple plot. It is the contention of this essay that the apparent naturalism of the prose is complicated by its investment in a clear Shakespearean allegory: the German believes he represents a “good” Shakespearean regime like that of Henry V but, clearly, he instead represents a dishonorable regime such as that of Macbeth. A Shakespeare-obsessed Nazi officer named von Ebrennac is billeted in a house that is owned by the unnamed first-person narrator, who continues to live there with his niece and the German. With restrained language the narrator recounts the German's wordy, seemingly well-intentioned, yet utterly naive efforts to prove that Germany is a friend to France, as well as his attempts to connect emotionally with the narrator's niece. Uncle and niece resist the German's advances using no tactic other than silence: disillusioned with the wall of silence he faces from his would-be friends and with the Nazi brutality that he finally begins to notice, von Ebrennac leaves France to go and voluntarily fight against the Soviets in the east — virtual suicide. Instinctively patriotic through a sort of passive resistance, the uncle and niece have thwarted what they perceive to be a cloyingly emotive wing of the Nazi invasion.