Copyright © The Maurois Estate,
Anne-Mary Charrier, 2006, Marseille, France
Originally published in France as Climats
by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1928
Translation Copyright © 2012 Adriana Hunter
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.
The work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Maurois, André, 1885–1967.
[Climats. English]
Climates / by André Maurois; translated by Adriana Hunter.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-539-6
I. Hunter, Adriana. II. Title.
PQ2625.A95C4513 2012
848′.91209—dc23
2012008856
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
To Simone
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part One: Odile
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Part Two: Isabelle
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
We always hope to find the eternal somewhere other than here; we always orient our minds toward other things than the present situation and the present aspect; or we wait to die as if every moment were not dying and coming back to life. With each moment we are offered a new life. Today, now, immediately, it is our only foothold.
—ALAIN
INTRODUCTION
by Sarah Bakewell
Is there any human topic more interesting than love?
The French don’t think so. Ever since Pierre Abelard’s twelfth-century Historia Calamitatum, they have been writing lucid, passionate first-person accounts of their loves. Sometimes they write autobiographically; sometimes they turn reality into fiction. Their books may be vast, like the swathes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that deal with jealousy and desire. Or they may be slim tales or treatises, distilling love to its essence and running it through endless filters of analysis, imagination, reflection, and interrogation. It is not only French writers who do this, of course, but they are more than usually observant and often merciless with themselves. They reveal every power game, every change of emotional weather. Every painful or embarrassing moment is needled out for us on the page. Among the miniature masterpieces in this genre are Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, André Gide’s Strait Is the Gate, Stendhal’s On Love, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse—and André Maurois’s 1928 novel, Climates.
Like the other works, Climates stays close to its author’s own experience, while making it feel universal. His setting is local: bourgeois France just after the First World War. His people are precisely located too, behaving in ways typical of their sex, class, and upbringing. Yet they dramatize the deepest structures of love’s psychology, as well as other strange phenomena: jealousy, self-delusion, fantasy, and the desire both to lose control and to impose it on someone else.
At first sight, Climates is a simple fable. It tells of Philippe Marcenat, heir to a provincial paper-mill business, who falls in love with the woman of his dreams, Odile Malet. He loses her, but is later loved in turn by Isabelle de Cheverny, a woman not of his dreams at all, although he tries (Vertigo-ishly) to make her so. We follow first Philippe and then Isabelle as they reflect on their love. There is a happy ending of sorts, though not for Philippe. Maurois has summarized his first vision of the story, in its bare-bones form, as:
Part 1. I love, and am not loved.
Part 2. I am loved, and do not love.
Put that way, it sounds like a perfectly balanced diptych. In fact, it is neither balanced nor anywhere near as simple. Each of these four “love” and “non-love” elements conceals some complication, something moving at cross-purposes to it. Beneath what seems to be love, there lurks tyranny or submission, or a mixture of both. Beneath what seems to be non-love, there is … it’s hard to say what, but something indefinable that looks very much like love.
Climates is about reading, writing, and talking, and also about silence. It is a novel in which a wife cannot find the words to tell her husband where she has been all day, a husband can think of nothing interesting to say to his wife, and everybody fails to say out loud what he or she can write in notebooks and letters. All this silence points backward into Philippe’s childhood. His father and mother never talked about anything at all, he complains, and certainly never about emotion.
Maurois’s family was similar. In his memoirs, he calls his father “bashful” and his mother “reserved.” Between them, they filled the house with “melancholy reticences and unexpressed doubts.” Some of the silence surrounded a particular subject: the family’s Jewishness. This was not exactly hidden, but it was not brought to the fore either. Maurois, who was born Émile Herzog on July 26, 1885, found out that he was Jewish at the age of about six, when a friend at the local Protestant church told him so. His parents confirmed it, but they also spoke highly of Protestantism. When he became famous, after World War I, Maurois changed his name, probably more because it sounded German than because it sounded Jewish. He chose “André” from a cousin killed in combat, and “Maurois” from a village near Cambrai, because he liked the name’s “sad sonority.” It was a veiled name, and a melancholy one, but it accompanied him through a generally very cheerful literary career.
The Herzog family had fled their native Alsace during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and settled in the town of Elbeuf in Normandy, where they ran a successful textile mill. The bourgeois and provincial atmosphere of Elbeuf horrified Maurois sometimes, but he felt at home th
ere and liked to return to breathe in “the moist, vapid odor of steam and the heavy odor of greasy wool,” and to admire the bright colors of the river, which ran blue, green, and yellow from the mill’s dye works. The whole town reverberated to the clang of the looms, which pounded like a heartbeat.
He had a good education at the lycée in Rouen, falling under the influence of a charismatic teacher, Émile-Auguste Chartier, known as “Alain.” Alain inspired other pupils too, including Simone Weil and Raymond Aron, urging them to think for themselves and to question received ideas. He awakened in Maurois a love of literature, but also, perhaps surprisingly, urged him to take up the mill business after leaving school. Maurois did so, but in his Elbeuf office he kept a secret cupboard filled with Balzac novels and notebooks, and copied out pages of Stendhal to improve his writing style. He became a Kipling enthusiast, and learned excellent English.
He traveled to Paris at least one day a week, and frequented brothels there. One can almost see him starting to turn into one of those coarse provincial industrialists who keeps a mistress in the city and a stifling respectable household at home. But he was diverted away from this path by falling madly in love.
It happened on vacation in Geneva. An actress friend with whom he was traveling introduced him to a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl of Russo-Polish origin, Jane-Wanda de Szymkiewicz, nicknamed Janine. Janine’s father was dead and her relationship with her mother was troubled; she was emotionally vulnerable, beautiful, and charming. Photographs show a fashionably dressed, very young woman with a forthright gaze, delicate lips, and a languid droop to the lower eyelids, which gives her an air both soft and sad.
Maurois and Janine went walking in the town, and she told him that she had dreams of walking on a seabed, surrounded by fish. They looked at flower stalls and cheap jewelry, just the kind of trinkets he normally despised. She loved them, so they became instantly magical to him too. “I have been waiting for you for twenty years,” he cried.
He meant this literally. Janine matched a template that had originated in a novel he had read in adolescence called Les Petits soldats russes—The Little Russian Soldiers. (The same novel appears in Climates and plays the same role.) It told of a schoolgirl who is elected a queen by the boys in her class; they become her willing slaves and compete to make ever greater sacrifices for her. It influenced Maurois’s erotic fantasies permanently. He too longed for “a love that would be at once suffering, discipline, and devotion,” as he wrote in his memoirs. With her Slavic features and her cool, rather fey manner, Janine de Szymkiewicz made a perfect Russian Queen.
She was wiser than he, for she responded to his “twenty years” announcement by warning, “Don’t put me too high.” But he did just that—or rather, he treated her with the same mix of submission and domination that he later ascribed to Philippe. Maurois arranged for Janine to transfer from Switzerland to a finishing school in England, where he visited her frequently. In 1912 they married, despite his family’s disapproval, mostly silent of course. Janine’s mother was rumored to have a lover, which was scandalous, and they suspected rightly that Janine would have difficulties fitting into Elbeuf society.
Still, the marriage started well. They took a house near the mill; Maurois worked, and Janine poured her creativity into flower arranging and gardening. She bought vases of Venetian glass and Lalique crystal; Maurois balked at the expense but marveled at her ability to spend hours “studying the curve of a stem or a green cloud of asparagus ferns.” She called him Minou, he called her Ginou. Amid the throbbing of looms and the bubbling of blue-yellow waters, they built their private Eden.
But life in Elbeuf was difficult. Janine made few friends. “I don’t know whether I can live here,” she told Maurois. “It seems so sad, so sad …” The image with which their love had begun, walking on the bottom of the sea, summed up the marriage’s combination of enchantment and oppressiveness. Janine gave birth to the first of their three children in May 1914, but the war began and Maurois went away, leaving her more isolated than ever.
With his excellent English, Maurois was posted as liaison officer to the British Army. That experience inspired his first novel, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble. After the war he returned to the mill, but was also lionized in Paris, and spent more and more time writing. The children’s nurse complained, “Instead of scribbling in the evenings, Monsieur would do better to go out with Madame, and instead of scribbling during the day Monsieur would do better to look after his business.” Janine scribbled too, filling notebooks with records of her migraines, stomachaches, cramps, and aching legs. She wrote notes, in English, of times when she felt “moody” or “awfully bad,” and wrote, chillingly, “Something is broken.”
Sometime in the early 1920s, Maurois began having affairs. Janine had them too, or at least flirtations, especially on their seaside vacations in Deauville. Maurois enjoyed great success with Ariel, a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley—more a novelization of his life, really. (It became memorable for later English-language readers for being reprinted in 1935 as Number 1 in Penguin’s first series of paperbacks.) It recounts Shelley’s disastrous marriage to Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in the Serpentine River after the poet abandoned her. Maurois put a lot of his own personality into Shelley, and wrote of Harriet as a “child-wife” made bitter by unhappiness. He could be savage: “Even when she had the air of being interested in ideas, her indifference was proved by the blankness of her gaze. Worst of all, she was coquettish, frivolous, versed in the tricks and wiles of woman.”
Both he and Janine were suffering from each other, and Janine obsessed over the portrait of herself in Ariel. It is heartbreaking to learn, from Maurois’s own memoir, that she read it repeatedly—the manuscript once and the printed book twice—and copied out passages. “You talk about women better than you’ve ever talked to me about them,” she said. Yet she could see that Maurois was aware of his own weaknesses too. “Since he understands so well,” he imagined her thinking, “why doesn’t he change?” Their relationship had begun under the sign of Les Petits soldats russes, and its disintegration was similarly reflected in literature, through Ariel. Side by side, they looked into the book as into a double mirror, seeing each other’s faces as well as their own.
In the early 1920s, and like her counterpart in Climates, Janine got the idea that she was destined to die soon. She was right. Becoming pregnant again in late 1922, she developed septicemia, was operated on unsuccessfully, and died on February 26, 1923. Maurois was bereaved, and free.
It was not long before he married again, to the woman who would be his lifelong companion, Simone de Caillavet. The granddaughter of Anatole France’s mistress Léontine Arman de Caillavet, Simone was highly educated, patient, and well-balanced, and she devoted herself to Maurois’s work. She typed his manuscripts and learned shorthand so as to be able to help him further by taking dictation. If it is disturbing to think of Janine’s constant reading of Ariel, it is at least as much so to imagine Simone working on the drafts and typescripts of Climates, in which she is cast, very little changed, as Isabelle de Cheverny.
What are we to make of Maurois and his love life? By his own account, he married one unsuitable young woman because of a romantic idea that had nothing to do with her true personality, and made her life miserable as well as his own. Afterward he married another woman who, he hints, loved him more than he loved her. Yet, as Janine saw, he was aware of his dark side, and channeled his literary talents into exploring it in fiction and biography. He was a writer to the core, and this is one vital difference between him and Philippe in the novel. It changed everything, at least for him. Perhaps it changed everything for the women in his life too, so deeply interwoven was his work with his relationships.
There was another difference. Love makes Philippe Marcenat dull, not to the reader, but to his long-suffering beloved. He realizes only belatedly how tedious Odile must find the long evenings in which he does little but gaze adoringly at her. Working long hours at
the factory, consumed by jealousy, Philippe forgets how to have an entertaining conversation. Maurois, by contrast, was energetic and vibrant. A friend, Edouard Morot-Sir, wrote of “the gentle expression of his eyes, his smile, the finesse and warmth of his voice” and remembered Maurois’s endless fund of stories. He was a man of infinite curiosity about human nature—a mark of a person who surely can never be boring.
Climates began life in the mid-1920s, after the death of Janine, as a short story called “La Nuit marocaine.” Set in Morocco, it was about an eminent personage who falls ill and is told he will die. He summons his friends and confesses to them the true story of his life, which revolves around his love for three women, each of whom he has hurt in some way. Unfortunately, he then proceeds not to die. He lives on, but must adjust to the changed image that others now have of him.
Starting from this point, Maurois first realized that the middle woman, an actress named Jenny Sorbier, was less interesting than the other two, so he dumped her. This gave him more space to explore the relationships with the others, and the book became the two-parter we have today. He also disposed of the Moroccan setting and the framing story. The novel was easy to write, largely because, as Maurois wrote, “I was able to nourish my imaginary characters on real emotions.” He adjusted many details: his own family owned a wool mill, so Philippe’s owns a paper mill. He met Janine in Switzerland; Philippe meets Odile in Italy. And he moved the action from Elbeuf to Paris, because that created more scope for flirtations and jealousies.
In turning short story to novel, he also introduced an elaborate literary device. In the first half, Philippe recounts his love for Odile in the form of a letter to his second wife, Isabelle—a bizarre and cruel thing to do, one might think, but something that Isabelle seems to welcome because it enables her to understand him better. In the second half, she responds by writing the story of her love for Philippe. Perhaps because Maurois needs to continue conveying Philippe’s emotions directly as well, he has Philippe write a diary, which Isabelle reads and quotes at length in her letter back to him. Part Two strains credulity at times, but the device is worth the trouble, for it highlights the novel’s themes of reading, writing, reflecting, reenacting, and transcribing.
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