Climates Read Free

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 oneof 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 toocomfortable, 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 It speaks to everyone, yet it is also a historical document about France in the 1920s.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 infinityof 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 neverthe real Philippe, and he admits, “My true tastes and my cautious Marcenat