Some French Novels
Le Cele de Chelsea, M. Maurois' neat essay in, or satire on, the Proustian Convention, is a very slight affair, but as witty as may be expected from M. Maurois. He has allotted to himself the role of a French man of letters visiting England for the first time, and he finds in this country almost as much to surprise and amuse him as does M. Royer on his trip to the U.S.S.R. In the hands of a less practised writer, the joke might have fallen rather flat, so often has it been exploited. But' M. Maurois is skilled in avoiding the obvious (except when he tells us he mistook a duchess for her own lady's maid) and gives us a picture of England as seen through the eyes of a supposedly nail Frenchman in which there is much humour and no malice.
Clement Benin ou les Amours Aizoises appeared in 1918 under the title of Les Permissions de Clement Bellin. It .comes, technically, under the heading of war books, but the War is merely used as a background, and the central theme is Clement Bellin's love for a mysterious lady who lived in an exotic pavilion at Aix en Provence, surrounded by negress servants and vivid coloured cockatoos. It was whilst painting a picture of the pavilion that he caught sight of the owner, and was at once captivated ; she appeared to him to be the spirit incarnate of her own strange dwelling. For, he said : " cheque monument est un etre vivant, avec son caractere, son visage, ses moeurs, see decants son tine . . . y a uno correspondence secrete entre certainrldilices et certain titres humains. J'ai rencontre en Sicilo des hommes dont la stature et Is regard m'oblige- aient invinciblement & songer a Pun des temples de file; et, dans des souvenirs qua je garde comma des bienfaits, je ne detache point Pun de l'autre tells femme qui vivait dans la villa oh vit aussi tel chef-d'oeuvre d'arebiteeture, et qui en etait d'une facon hallucinante is portrait, Is double."
For a while he was content with the memory only of this one satisfactory encounter. Then came the War : life at the front brought him to a realization of his loneliness. He wrote to her, begging her to reply, if only in a spirit of charity towards a soldier of the War. Her answer was more cordial than mere charity demanded, and soon he was invited, when on leave, to come and stay at the pavilion. But the lady remained unapproachable and enigmatic. To solve the mystery which surrounded her past, to discover the reason for her present mode of life, to win her heart, became the raisons d'être of his existence.
Were it not for the beauty of the writing, one might be inclined to weary of such a minute analysis as M. Vaudoyer gives of a love affair which is purely mental. But he describes the baroque pavilion and its strange inhabitants with a simplicity of style which evokes a painting by Gauguin, and he has put into this book so much thought that he sustains -
• All these books can be obtained from Librairie Hachette, it Ring William Street, W.C. 2.
the reader's interest until the final denouement, which is un- expected and dramatic.
There is nothing mental about the love affair of M. Dekobra's hero and heroine. Those who have read' La Madone des Slecpings, and Flammes de Velours will know what to expect : they will not be disappointed.
M. Royer's knowledge of the technique of the love affair as practised in the U.S.S.R. is admittedly first-hand : L'Amour chez les Soviets is written for a French public, and there is much that may offend British taste. But his book is full of humour, his descriptions of everyday life are vivid, and he tells us so much of real importance that all who are interested in present-day Russia should read it.
ROSAIIND CONSTABLE.
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