Climates

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:

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 there 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.