Climates Read Free Page A

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 withIsabelle’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 notseem 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