Climates Read online

  For 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.

  Which way are we, the readers, to approach Climates? Its characters seem to invite us to relate their sorrows or triumphs to our own. I recognized aspects of myself and my life in each character, yet there were moments of remoteness too. For one thing, Isabelle’s self-abnegating idea of love can be unnerving for a female reader. It is one of the elements that keeps Climates from becoming too comfortable, or too blandly universal. It speaks to everyone, yet it is also a historical document about France in the 1920s. It comes from a time when Frenchwomen did not yet have the vote (they got it in 1944), and when it would not have entered Philippe Marcenat’s head that he, not Isabelle, might make real, concrete, everyday sacrifices for a domestic monarch.

  Maurois’s sense of the psychology of love, in all its fits and agonies, manages to be dated yet eternally insightful. His analysis of jealousy rivals Proust’s, and he shows how Philippe helplessly destroys the genuine but fragile love Odile feels for him. And Climates is as good as Stendhal on the first phase of enchantment, in which the lover undergoes what Stendhal calls “crystallization”—the ability to perceive somebody ordinary as a magical, dazzling, twinkling disco ball of fascination. (The crystal image comes from the salt mines of Salzburg, where it was the custom to hang a branch at the mine’s entrance, then retrieve it a few months later, when—says Stendhal—“its smallest twigs, those no larger than a titmouse’s foot, are spangled with an infinity of diamonds, dancing and dazzling.”) Philippe is blinded by Odile. Never seeing her as she really is, he fetishizes her clothes, her flowers, the trinkets she carries everywhere on her honeymoon (“a small clock, a lace cushion, and a volume of Shakespeare bound in gray suede”), and her taste in furnishings. She even decorates their home rather like a salt cave, all white flowers and sleek white carpeting. He adopts Odile’s tastes as his own, to the extent of later trying to make Isabelle imitate them.

  Clothes, houses, flowers, and furniture are all important in Climates. When Isabelle wants to move into her family home, or at least take some furniture from it, Philippe refuses, because he cannot stand their red damask drapes and gargoyle-infested, pseudomedieval chairs. “Don’t you think that what’s important in life is people not furnishings?” asks Isabelle, but he brushes her aside. Yes, yes, that’s the conventional wisdom, he says, but a house’s atmosphere affects one more deeply than people acknowledge. “I just know I wouldn’t be happy in that house.”

  Isabelle gives in, as she tends to, but it is his own natural environment that Philippe is rejecting. Those tasteful oceans of white carpeting were never the real Philippe, and he admits, “My true tastes and my cautious Marcenat mind were things I was now far more likely to find in Isabelle.” Her parents have molded her as his did; when Isabelle and Philippe first meet, they compare notes on “that sort of rural bourgeois heritage that so many French families share.” He can be himself with Isabelle, in a way he could not with Odile—and certainly not with her noisy, bohemian family, in whose company he used to become unrecognizable to himself. “I seemed solemn, boring, and even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.” It was “not my sort of climate,” he felt.

  This is why the novel is called Climates: in its examination of love, it also becomes an examination of the atmospheres we need to be fully ourselves. Philippe’s complaint about Odile’s family goes to the heart of the book. One cannot just transfer one’s personality intact from one environment to the next. Relationships have different qualities of air, different barometric pressures. With Odile, Philippe is first expanded and enchanted, then he contracts and distorts into a jealous monster. With Isabelle, despite himself, he is himself.

  Moreover, Isabelle has a huge advantage in having a certain control over her own climate. She is able to choose her servitude, even to affirm it, rather than be helplessly in the grip of her emotions as Philippe had been with Odile. Looking back to his treatment of Odile, Philippe reflects that he showed “no unkindness, but no generosity of spirit either,” but this is never mirrored in Isabelle’s half of the story. She is all generosity. She even puts forward a strange argument: that we should not attach importance to our loved one’s failings, or to what a person actually does, for what matters is that that person alone enables us to live in a particular “atmosphere,” or, as she also puts it, in a “climate.” That is all we need; it is a devotion that is called forth from our deepest being, but it is not a blind devotion.

  “I wanted to love you without trickery, to fight with an open heart,” writes Isabelle to Philippe. “It should be possible to admit to loving someone and yet also succeed in being loved.” Should it? Is it? It should, and sometimes it is. But oh, how complicated human beings are. And, in the end, something compelled Maurois to take Philippe away from Isabelle after all, thus parting company both with Isabelle’s optimism and with the story of his own second, successful marriage.

  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.

  His other marriage, to the written word, succeeded 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 1960s 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:

  [W]e know that in his daily life man is ever, to a greater or a lesser degree, hagridden. 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, yet 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.

  FURTHER READING

  André Maurois. Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977. An exhibition catalog.

  Dominique Bona, Il n’y a qu’un amour. Bernard Grasset, 2003. An account of the lives of Jane-Wanda de Szymkiewicz and Simone de Caillavet.

  Jack Kolbert, The Worlds of André Maurois. Associated University Press, 1985.

  André Maurois, Memoirs 1885–1967. Translated by Denver Lindley. Harper and Row, 1970.

  André Maurois, Ariel: A Life of Shelley. Translated by Ella d’Arcy. Kessinger, 2003.

  André Maurois, Illusions. Introduction by Edouard Morot-Sir. Columbia University Press, 1968.

  Stendhal, On Love. Hesperus, 2000.

  . I .

  You must have been surprised when I left so suddenly. I apologize for that but do not regret it. I cannot tell whether you too can hear the hurricane of internal music stirring inside me over the last few days like Tristan da Cunha’s towering flames. Oh! I would so like to succumb to the tempest that, only the day before yesterday, in the forest, urged me to touch your white dress. But I am afraid of love, Isabelle, and of myself. I do not know what Renée or anyone else may have told you about my life. You and I have sometimes talked of it; I have not told you the truth. That is the charm of new acquaintances: the hope that, in their eyes and by denying the truth, we can transform a past that we wish had been happier. Our friendship has gone beyond the point of overly flattering confidences. Men surrender their souls, as women do their bodies, in successive and carefully defended stages. One after the other, I have thrown my most secret troops into battle. My true memories, corralled in their enclave, will soon give themselves up and come out into the open.

  I am a long way from you now, in the very room in which I slept as a child. On the wall are the shelves laden with books that my mother has been keeping for over twenty years “for her eldest grandson.” Will I have sons? That wide red spine stained with ink is my old Greek dictionary; those gold bindings, my prizes. I wish I could tell you everything, Isabelle, from the sensitive little boy to the cynical adolescent, and on to the unhappy, wounded man. I wish I could tell you everything in complete innocence, exactitude, and humility. Perhaps, if I manage to finish writing this, I will not have the courage to show it to you. Never mind. It is still worthwhile, if only for my own sake, to assess what my life has been.

  Do you remember one evening on the way back from Saint-Germain when I described Gandumas to you? It is a bleakly beautiful place. A torrential river cuts between our factories, built in the depths of a wild gorge. Our house, a small nineteenth-century château like many others in Limousin, looks out over heather-clad heaths. As a young boy I was already proud that I was a Marcenat and our family reigned over the canton. My father took the tiny paper business that had been a mere laboratory for my maternal grandfather and built it into a huge factory. He bought up local smallholdings and transformed Gandumas, which had been all but neglected before his time, into the very model of an estate. Throughout my childhood I watched buildings being constructed and saw the hangar housing paper pulp stretch out along the river.

  My mother’s family was from Limousin. My great-grandfather, a notary, had bought the Château de Gandumas when it was sold off as national property. My father, an engineer from Lorraine, had been in the region only since he married. He summoned one of his brothers, my uncle Pierre, who settled in the neighboring village of Chardeuil. On Sundays, if it was not raining, the two families met by the ponds in Saint-Yrieix. We traveled in carriages, and I would sit facing my parents, on a small, hard pull-down seat. The horse’s monotonous trot sent me to sleep; I used to like watching its shadow on the walls in villages or on the banks by the side of the road: it contorted and moved forward, overtaking us, and then, as we went around corners, it reappeared behind us. Every now and then the smell of droppings (a smell which, like the sound of bells, will always be associated with Sundays in my mind) would hang over us like a cloud, and great fat flies would land on me. I hated the hills more than anything; the horse slowed to a walk and the carriage climbed unbearably slowly while the old coachman, Thomasson, clicked his tongue and cracked his whip.

  At the inn, we met up with my uncle Pierre, his wife, and my cousin Renée, who was their only child. My mother would give us bread and butter, and my father would say, “Go and play.” Renée and I used to walk under the trees or by the ponds, collecting pinecones and chestnuts. On the way home, Renée climbed into the carriage with us, and the coachman folded down the sides of my seat to give her somewhere to sit. My parents did not speak during the journey.

  Any form of conversation was made difficult by my father’s extraordinary sense of propriety; it seemed to pain him if the least feeling were expressed in public. At mealtimes, if my mother mentioned our education, the factory, our uncles, or our aunt Cora who lived in Paris, my father would gesture anxiously, pointing out to her the servant clearing the plates. She would fall silent. I noticed very early on that if my father and my uncle had some small criticism to direct at each other, they always ensured it was their wives who conveyed this with tremendous tact. I also grasped very early that my father abhorred sincerity. In our house, it was taken for granted that all conventional feelings held true, that parents always loved their children, children their parents, and husbands their wives. The Marcenats liked to see the world as a decent, earthly paradise, and I feel that, in their case, this had more to do with candor than hypocrisy.

  . II .

  The sunlit lawn at Gandumas. And, on the plain below, the village of Chardeuil veiled in a shimmering heat haze. A little boy stands waist-deep in a hole he has dug, beside a heap of sand, scouring the vast expanses around him for an invisible enemy. This game was inspired by my favorite book, Driant’s Fortress War. I was a soldier, Private Mitour, stationed in that hole for skirmishes to defend Fort de Liouville, under the command of a colonel for whom I would gladly have given my life. I must apologize for writing about these puerile ideas, but in them I see the first expression of a need for passionate devotion that has been a dominant feature of my character, although it was later applied to quite different subjects.

  If I analyze the tiny but still identifiable trace of the child I was then, I can see that, even at that early stage, there was a hint of sensuality in this sacrifice.

  Besides, my game quickly developed into something else. In another book, one I was given on New Year’s Day that was called Little Russian Soldiers, I read about a gang of schoolboys who decide to form an army and choose a fellow pupil as their queen. The queen was called Ania Sokoloff. “She was a remarkably beautiful, slender, elegant, and able girl.” I liked the oath the soldiers swore to their queen, the work they undertook to please her, and the smile that was their reward. I did not know why this story suited me so well, but it did, I loved it, and it must have been from that book that I formed the image of the woman I have so often described to you. I can see myself walking beside her on the lawns at Gandumas; she is talking to me in a serious voice, her sentences sad and beautiful. I do not know at what point I started calling her the Amazon, but I know the notion of audacity and risk was
always mingled with the pleasure she afforded me. I also loved reading with my mother about Lancelot of the Lake and Don Quixote. I could not believe that Dulcinea was ugly, and I tore the engraving of her from my book so that I could imagine her as I chose to.

  Although my cousin Renée was two years younger than me, she studied alongside me for several years. Then, when I was thirteen, my father sent me to the Lycée Gay-Lussac in Limoges. I lived at a cousin’s house and went home only on Sundays. I really enjoyed school life. I had inherited my father’s love of learning and reading, and was a good pupil. The characteristic Marcenat pride and shyness were becoming apparent in me, as inevitably as their shining eyes and rather high-set eyebrows. The only counterpoint to my pride was the image of the queen to whom I remained faithful. At night, before going to sleep, I told myself stories with my Amazon as the heroine. She now had a name, Helen, because I liked Homer’s Helen (a Mr. Bailly, one of my teachers, was responsible for that).

  Why do some images remain as clear to us as when we first saw them, while others that might seem more important grow hazy and fade so quickly? Right now, on a perfectly focused internal screen, I am projecting Mr. Bailly coming into the classroom with his slow, steady step, on a day when we are to do French composition. He hangs his distinctive coat on a peg and says, “I have found a wonderful subject for you: Stesichorus’s palinode …” Yes, I can still see Mr. Bailly very clearly. He has a thick mustache, a shock of hair, and a face heavily lined by what were no doubt painful passions. He takes from his briefcase a sheet of paper and dictates: “The poet Stesichorus, having cursed Helen in his verse for the ills she brought to the Greeks, is struck blind by Venus and, now realizing his mistake, composes a palinode expressing his regret for blaspheming against beauty.”