Bernard Eschasseriaux: Les Dimanches de Ville-d'Avray (1958)

Bernard Eschasseriaux's Les Dimanches de Ville-d'Avray has many differences from the highly successful cult film directed by Serge Bourguignon and starring Hardy Krüger as Pierre and Patricia Gozzi as Françoise. It wasn't seen as controversial in the far more innocent days of the film and book, although today it would smack of paedophilia, highly suspect as it concerns a relationship between a thirty-year-old-man and an eleven-year-old girl. Sort of, although the man is really a child himself.

Pierre meets the girl with her father at the train station at Ville-d'Avray when the father asks him the way to the 'Les Dames de Sainte-Maguerite' institution, where he is taking her: the child has been born 'out of wedlock', the couple live separately, and the Françoise hardly knows her father. Pierre secretly follows the couple until the father leaves her with the nuns but is then killed in a hit-and-run-accident, whereupon Pierre takes him to a wood and buries him.

This of course is mighty odd behaviour, but then Pierre has been (and in fact still is, although he doesn't know it) involved with a group of criminals, had a bad fall in one of their exploits and has lost all memory of his past. Involved in this is Mado, a prostitute who has taken Pierre in, terrified that he will behave inappropriately, that he will (accidentally) reveal more than he should.

Pierre is fascinated by Françoise, seeing in her to a certain extent the child that he is: Mado is absent from their home on Sundays, so Pierre spends them with Françoise, who swiftly comes to identify with him as the father she has never had, and (uncomfortably for Pierre and the reader too), sees him as her future husband.

Things become increasingly complicated as the body in the wood is discovered, a safer home for Mado and Pierre is sought out in faraway Provence, although two deaths intervene and Françoise is finally left more alone than ever.