favorite book,favorite author,an article.(3)

It happened on vacation in Geneva. An actress friend with whom he was travelling 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 her 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 jewellery, just the kind of trinkets that 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 read in adolescence, “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. The book 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 rightly suspected 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 marvelled 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.