I've already written below about Henri Pierre Roché's Deux Anglaises et le continent, but this is his prevous (and first of only two) novel. François Truffaut's film of the novel is far better known, and generally considered to be a major work of the French cinema: Serge Rezvani's (or Cyrus Bassiak's) playing of his song 'Le Tourbillon de la vie', sung by Jeanne Moreau, is perhaps the most memorable moment, although this isn't in the novel.
The novel also has many others scenes, is a constant sexual coming and going of the main characters Jules (a German based on the writer Franz Hessel), his writer friend the author Henri Pierre Roché, and the femme fatale Kathe here is to some extent a representation of Franz's wife Helen Hessel (née Helen Grund).
Kathe sees life as a constant holiday, although she appears to be a kind of manic depressive, obsessed by suicide, ridden by despair: she sees suicide as an irresistible being, a sort of praying mantis (vide the end of Patrice Leconte's film Le Parfum d'Yvonne).
Trauffaut's film has some beautiful moments, but I couldn't find many in the original novel.
Henri Pierre Roché's two published novels – 'Victor' was to be a third but is unfinished – are Deux Anglaises et le continent (1956) (translated as Two English Girls) and Jules et Jim, both of which were turned into films by François Truffaut. They were of very long gestation, and Jules et Jim was published when Roché was seventy-four: both of them are autobiographical, and in this book Claude is based on Roché himself, Muriel on Margaret Hart and Anne her sister Violet Hart.
Like Jules et Jim, the story involves a threesome – here largely over a ten-year period –although in Deux Anglaises (which begins in 1899 and is told in the form of letters and diaries) there are two females instead of two males. Claude is the Frenchman who at first visits the sisters' family, and he decides to ask Muriel to marry him, which she refuses, saying that she'd prefer them to have a brother-sister relationship.
It's actually far more complicated than this, as Muriel is the puritanical, religiously obsessed sibling, and she's very confused about love, fluctuating between loving Claude and not loving him. She sees the Maître-moi of Claude coming to the fore, as opposed to his Vrai-Moi: a simple analysis of the terms would be that Maître-moi is the Freudian superego, Vrai-Moi the id.
Parental guidance decides on a year of the couple not seeing each other, although before the end of this period Claude has decided that he will not marry, although this distresses Muriel, who remains 'faithful'to him, or to her idea of who she is. She also remains faithful to her religion, although she has harboured feelings of guilt about sexual impurity over a number of years: owing to lack of sufficient space one holiday, as an eight-year-old she once spent every night for a week sleeping with a girl of the same age and they had naked cuddles, fondly exploring each others' bodies; and guiltily, Muriel has often masturbated as it helps her to sleep, although she knows that it's, er, harmful.
To cut a long story short, Claude beds both Anne and Muriel, although they both marry someone else, and Claude seems to be left on his own. A novel exploration of the nature of love, whatever that is.
Helen Hessel (1886–1982) was born in Berlin, where she died, although she was a journalist who made her career in France. She married Franz Hessel, and her relationship with her husband and Henri-Pierre Roché (1879–1959) was fictionalised by Roché in his novel Jules et Jim (1953), which was adapted to film by François Truffaut in 1962.
Stéphane Hessel (1917–2013) is perhaps best known for his thirty-two page essay Indignez-vous ! (2010), which proved to be a great success near the end of his life. It denounced an economic system based on huge inequalities of wealth, and sold several million copies worldwide. He followed this up with Engagez-vous ! and Le Chemin de l'espérance (both published in 2011). There is now a Place Stéphane Hessel in the 14e arrondissement.
Stéphane Hessel's mother was Helen Hessel, who translated Nabokov's Lolita into German in 1960, but is better remembered for the representation of her played by Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962). The famous triangular relationship in Jules et Jim is based on Helen's relationship with her husband Franz and their friend Henri-Pierre Roché, who wrote the novel on which Truffaut based his scenario.
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