favorite book,favorite author,an article.(4)

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, of 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,” which was published in 1918. 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 she wrote, chillingly, “Something is broken.”

Sometime in the early nineteen-twenties, 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 to later English-language readers for being reprinted in 1935 as No. 1 in Penguin’s first series of paperbacks.) It recounts Shelley’s disastrous marriage to Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in the Serpentine 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 “The Little Russian Soldiers,” 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 nineteen-twenties, Janine, like her counterpart in “Climates,” 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.