favorite book,favorite author,an article.(5)

What are we to make of Maurois and his love life? By his own account, he married one unsuitable young woman because of a romantic idea that had nothing to do with her true personality, and made her life miserable, as well as his own. Afterward, he married another woman who, he hints, loved him more than he loved her. Yet, as Janine saw, he was aware of his own propensity for uneven partnerships, and channelled his literary talents into exploring it in fiction and biography. He was a writer to the core, and this is one vital difference between him and Philippe in the novel. It changed everything, at least for him. Perhaps it changed it for the women in his life, too, so deeply interwoven was his work with his relationships.

There was another difference. Love makes Philippe Marcenat dull—not to the reader, but to his long-suffering beloved. He realizes only belatedly how tedious Odile must find the long evenings in which he does little but gaze adoringly at her. Working long hours at the factory, consumed by jealousy, Philippe forgets how to have an entertaining conversation. Maurois, by contrast, was energetic and vibrant. A friend, Edouard Morot-Sir, wrote of “the gentle expression of his eyes, his smile, the finesse and warmth of his voice,” and he remembered Maurois’s endless fund of stories. He was a man of infinite curiosity about human nature—a mark of a person who surely can never be boring.

****

“Climates” began life in the mid-nineteen-twenties, after the death of Janine, as a short story called “La Nuit Marocaine.” Set in Morocco, it was about an eminent personage who falls ill and is told he will die. He summons his friends, and confesses to them the true story of his life, which revolves around his love for three women, each of whom he has hurt in some way. Unfortunately, he then proceeds not to die. He lives on, but must adjust to the changed image that others now have of him.

Starting from this point, Maurois first realized that the middle woman, an actress named Jenny Sorbier, was less interesting, so he dumped her. He also disposed of the Moroccan setting and the framing story. The novel was easy to write, largely because, as Maurois wrote, “I was able to nourish my imaginary characters on real emotions.”

In turning short story to novel, he also introduced an elaborate literary device. In the first half, Philippe recounts his love for Odile in the form of a letter to his second wife, Isabelle—a bizarre and cruel thing to do, one might think, but something that Isabelle seems to welcome because it enables her to understand him better. In the second half, she responds by writing the story of her love for Philippe, an account meant for him to read. Because Maurois also needs to continue conveying Philippe’s emotions directly, he has Philippe write a diary, which Isabelle reads and (implausibly) quotes at length in her letter back to him. Part Two strains credulity at times, but the device is worth the trouble, for it highlights the novel’s themes of reading, writing, reflecting, reënacting, and transcribing.

Love is interwoven with these activities throughout the book. As in real life, Philippe’s love for Odile is born from literature in the form of “The Little Russian Soldiers.” Odile’s decline is measured out in her habit of reading poems about death. With Isabelle, Philippe reads constantly: Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, Stendhal, Merimée. At first, Isabelle finds Proust and the others dull, but she wills herself to adapt to Philippe’s preferences, though not before remarking, “Nothing could have been easier than understanding Philippe’s taste in books: he was one of those readers who look only for themselves in what they read.” Philippe has already admitted this at the end of the first part: trying to get over Odile, he writes, “books flung me straight back into my dark meditations; all I looked for in them was my pain and, almost in spite of myself, I chose those that would remind me of my own sad story.” This is Philippe all over—he looks for himself in every book he reads, just as he looks for his “queen” in every woman he is involved with. Isabelle has a less self-centered approach, and reads mainly to understand the man she loves. At novel’s end, she even reads his old copy of “The Little Russian Soldiers.” These are two extreme models of reading: looking in books to see oneself mirrored again and again, or reading to enter another person’s experience, and thus to enlarge oneself.