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Maurois’s sense of the psychology of love, in all its fits and agonies, manages to be dated yet eternally insightful. His analysis of jealousy rivals Proust’s, and he shows how Philippe helplessly destroys the genuine but fragile love that Odile feels for him. And “Climates” is as good as Stendhal on the first phase of enchantment, in which the lover undergoes what Stendhal calls “crystallization”—the ability to perceive somebody ordinary as a magical, dazzling, twinkling disco ball of fascination. (The crystal image comes from the salt mines of Salzburg, where it was the custom to hang a branch at the mine’s entrance, then retrieve it a few months later, when—says Stendhal—“its smallest twigs, those no larger than a titmouse’s paw, are spangled with an infinity of diamonds, dancing and dazzling.”) Philippe is blinded by Odile. Never seeing her as she really is, he fetishizes her clothes, her flowers, the trinkets she carries everywhere on their honeymoon (“a small clock, a lace cushion and a volume of Shakespeare bound in grey suede”), and her taste in furnishings. She even decorates their home rather like a salt cave, all white flowers and sleek white carpeting. He adopts Odile’s tastes as his own, to the extent of later trying to make Isabelle imitate them.

Clothes, houses, flowers and furniture are all important in “Climates.” When Isabelle wants to move into her family home, or at least take some furniture from it, Philippe refuses, because he cannot stand their red damask drapes and gargoyle-infested, pseudo-medieval chairs. “Don’t you think that what’s important in life is people not furnishings?” asks Isabelle, but he brushes her aside. Yes, yes, that’s the conventional wisdom, he says, but a house’s atmosphere affects one more deeply than people acknowledge. “I just know I wouldn’t be happy in that house.”

Isabelle gives in, as she tends to, but it is his own natural environment that Philippe is rejecting. Those tasteful oceans of white carpeting were never the real Philippe, and he admits, “My true tastes and my cautious Marcenat mind were things I was now far more likely to find in Isabelle.” Her parents have molded her as his did; when Isabelle and Philippe first meet, they compare notes on “that sort of rural bourgeois heritage that so many French families share.” He can be himself with Isabelle in a way he could not with Odile—and certainly not with her noisy, bohemian family, in whose company he used to become unrecognizable to himself. “I seemed solemn, boring, and even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.” It was “not my sort of climate,” he felt.

This is why the novel is called “Climates”: in its examination of love, it also becomes an examination of the atmospheres we need to be fully ourselves. Philippe’s complaint about Odile’s family goes to the heart of the book. One can not just transfer one’s personality intact from one environment to the next. Relationships have different qualities of air, different barometric pressures. With Odile, Philippe is first expanded and enchanted, then he contracts and distorts into a jealous monster. With Isabelle, despite himself, he is himself.

Moreover, Isabelle has a huge advantage in having a certain control over her own climate. She is able to choose her servitude, even to affirm it, rather than being helplessly in the grip of her emotions, as Philippe had been with Odile. Looking back to his treatment of Odile, Philippe reflects that he showed “no unkindness, but no generosity of spirit either,” but this is never mirrored in Isabelle’s half of the story. She is all generosity. She even puts forward a strange argument: that we should not attach importance to our loved one’s failings, or to what a person actually does, for what matters is that that person alone enables us to live in a particular “atmosphere,” or, as she also puts it, in a “climate.” That is all we need; it is a devotion that is called forth from our deepest being, but it is not a blind devotion.

“I wanted to love you without trickery, to fight with an open heart,” writes Isabelle to Philippe. “It should be possible to admit to loving someone and yet also succeed in being loved.” Should it? Is it? It should, and sometimes it is. But oh, how complicated human beings are. And, in the end, something compelled Maurois to take Philippe away from Isabelle after all, thus parting company both with Isabelle’s optimism and with the story of his own second, successful marriage.