favorite book,favorite author,an article.(7)

For it was a successful marriage. Maurois lived with Simone for the rest of his life, and she seems to have tolerated his occasional affairs.

He succeeded in his writing, too. He became a sought-after lecturer and speaker, and was elected to the Académie in 1938. His output was prodigious: he wrote biographies of Byron, Disraeli, Balzac, Dumas père and fils, Hugo, and Proust, among others, as well as novels, memoirs, and collections of essays, including works on politics that aired his genial, mild brand of conservatism.

During the Occupation, he and Simone fled to the United States, then returned to set up a country estate, Essendiéras, in Périgord. Simone ran it as an artists’, writers’ and filmmakers’ haven; people would stay for months, and work in peace. When money ran short, she and Maurois converted part of the property into a lucrative apple orchard. The Herzog mill in Elbeuf eventually went out of business, the victim of international competition and cheap nineteen-sixties artificial fabrics. Maurois does not seem to have mourned it much. He and Simone had one great sorrow, losing their daughter Françoise to liver disease; otherwise, he lived a generally pleasurable, productive life until his death, in 1967.

His last lecture, prepared in that year but never delivered, was called “Illusions.” In it, he included a kind of manifesto of his art and life. Most of human existence is neither extreme nor tragic, he says, yet:

we know that in his daily life man is ever, to a greater or a lesser degree, hag-ridden. Even when all goes well, all does not go perfectly well. Life remains, on the face of it, absurd. What is the meaning of this strange carnival? Why are we here on this fleck of mud, revolving in darkness?… We want peace, concord and the affection of other peoples, and lo and behold here we are at war, massacring and being massacred. Or again we are in love with a woman who at times seems to love us in return and, at others, for no reason known to us, grows cold and distant. We do not understand the universe; we do not understand those who hate us; we do not understand those who love us; often we do not even understand our parents, our children. We do not understand ourselves.

The only possibility of introducing meaning into such a world lies in art, he concludes, and especially in literature. It is the author’s task to create stories that are orderly enough to be coherent, but not so neat that they fail to reflect the true mystery and complexity of human life.

“Climates” is such a story. It is orderly yet unsettling. It breathes an air that is profoundly civilized, but there is something violent and shattering about it, too. “Even when it’s mutual, love is terrible,” says Philippe. It is terrible simply to be human—and there can be no subject more interesting to write about, or more beautiful, than that.

This essay is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Climates” by André Maurois (Translated by Adriana Hunter) to be published by Other Press on December 4th.

Sarah Bakewell is the recipient of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle biography award for “How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.”;