favorite book,favorite author,an article.(1)

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ıs 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 that are 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 impose it on someone else.

At first sight, “Climates” is a simple fable. It tells of Philippe Marcenat, the 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 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.