Jules et Jim

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Jules et Jim

Henri-Pierre Roché was born in Paris in 1879. After studying art at the Académie Julian, he became a journalist and art dealer, mixing with the avant-garde artistic set in Paris at the turn of the century. His friends and acquaintances included the artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and in 1905 he introduced Leo and Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso. In 1916, following his discharge from the French army, Roché went to New York and set up a Dadaist magazine, The Blind Man, with Duchamp and the artist Beatrice Wood. It wasn’t until he was in his seventies that Roché wrote his semi-autobiographical first novel, Jules et Jim; his second novel, Les deux anglaises et le continent, was published in 1956. Roché died in 1959 in Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine.

Agnès Catherine Poirier was educated at the Sorbonne, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and the London School of Economics. She moved to London to write for Le Monde, and was subsequently UK arts correspondent for Le Figaro and political correspondent and film critic for Libération. She writes articles for the Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard and the Independent on Sunday and is a regular contributor to the BBC on politics and films. Her most recent book is Touché! A French Woman’s Take on the English (2006).

François Truffaut was born in Paris in 1932 and developed a love of film at a young age, often playing truant from school to go to the cinema. In 1950, Truffaut joined the French army and was later arrested for attempting to desert. He then became a critic and editor of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, and made his first feature film Les Quatre Cent Coups, in 1959. Having stumbled across Jules et Jim in a secondhand book-stall, Truffaut befriended its author and in 1962 made the novel into a film. His Jules et Jim, which stars Jeanne Moreau, is today recognized as one of the seminal films of the French New Wave. In 1971 Truffaut made Roché’s second novel, Les deux anglaises et le continent, into a film. He died in 1984.

Introduction

‘It was about the year 1907.’ So starts Henri-Pierre Roché’s Jules et Jim. Was there ever a better year than 1907 to be young and in Paris?

Henri-Pierre Roché is Jim, a Parisian – though one has to pronounce his name the English way, ‘Djim not Zheem’. Jules is his best friend, in real life Franz Hessel, Proust’s first translator into German. Both men are in their twenties. At this particular time in her long history, Paris is the city of eternal youth. The world’s youngsters flock to the French capital to grab a share of its carefree gaiety, and they, in exchange, contribute to the city’s radiance. ‘The new Athena’, ‘The new Babylon’, ‘the new Jerusalem’ as flâneurs can see written in big bold red letters above the new theatres and cabarets of Pigalle. Paris is the capital of all capitals, the incubator of avant-garde, the laboratory of new ideas, and, of course, the garden of forbidden fruits.

Henri-Pierre Roché was approaching seventy-four when he wrote Jules et Jim, his first novel. A recollection of his youth and of his amours, Jules et Jim is written in a style reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel: furiously modern, fast, fresh and free. Once young in Paris, forever young? No doubt.

In 1907, Henri-Pierre Roché is an inquisitive young man, curious about the world, eager to discover new horizons in life, whether the cleavage of a new lady friend or the curve of a cello in a Braque collage. An avid art collector, a discoverer of new talents, he makes friends wherever he goes. In Paris, he introduces Picasso to Gertrude Stein, in New York he lives with Marcel Duchamp and their mistress and fellow artist Beatrice Wood. Henri-Pierre Roché is the archetype of the French intellectual dilettante. Albert Sorel, his professor at Sciences-Po, the Institute of Political Sciences of Paris, once tells him: ‘Give up diplomacy. Be an inquiring mind. It’s not a job yet. It soon will be. The French have shut themselves away behind their frontiers for far too long. They should travel. You will always find some newspapers which will pay for your escapades.’ Advice Roché is going to apply to the letter.

Where else to start his travelling but in Paris, the most cosmopolitan of all cities where the world’s nationalities are represented in its every quartier? Roché and his friends are true Europeans, fluent in at least four languages. For them, chauvinism is an alien concept. How could they see the clouds looming on the horizon? They have only one homeland, the European culture. Their patrie is that of Goethe, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Apollinaire, Shakespeare.

Did Henri-Pierre Roché and Franz Hessel, our Jules et Jim, meet with the then twenty-six-year-old Austrian Stefan Zweig who, at about the same time, as he writes in The World of Yesterday, promised himself Paris as a gift for the first year of his freedom? Zweig too felt the elation of the time:

And nowhere could you ever have experienced the artless yet wonderfully wise lightness of life more happily than in Paris, where it was gloriously affirmed in the city’s beauty of form, mild climate, wealth and traditions. […] We were under no compulsion, we could speak, think, laugh and criticise as we liked […] the street was common property! […] You walked, talked, and slept with whoever you liked, regardless of what anyone else thought. […] Paris accommodated everyone side by side; here was no above and below, […] there was always laughter in the air somewhere, or the sound of someone calling out in friendly tones. […] Nothing was stiffly formal. It was easy to meet women and easy to part with them again […] What a carefree life that was! You could live well in Paris, especially when you were young!

Did Jules and Jim meet twenty-three-year-old German Daniel-Henry Kahnweiller, son of a banker and father of all art dealers, who would, in the spring of 1907, climb up the stairs of the decrepit Bateau Lavoir studio in Montmartre and find the young black-haired Pablo Picasso standing silent and perplexed in front of his Demoiselles d’Avignon? Paris, 1907: the place and time Jules and Jim live in, one of continuous experiment and limitless possibilities, where one can be free, creative and, it seems, always merry. Jules et Jim is an epoch; it is also a quest. That of harmonious love, kind, free, selfless and passionate, a pioneering love which keeps reinventing itself. Jules and Jim find the freedom they seek in the arms of many passing lovely ladies, the mysterious Lucie, the extravagant Odile, the placid Gilberte, the simple Michèle, but they find love in only one woman, Kate.

Who is Kate? She is the woman with the archaic smile. The same smile Jules and Jim saw once on the lips of an excavated sculpture, which they travelled to see at an open-air museum on the Adriatic. ‘They lingered round the goddess in silence, gazing at her from different angles. Her smile was a floating presence, powerful, youthful, thirsty for kisses and perhaps for blood.’ There, they decided that, if they ever saw a woman with such a smile, they would both follow it. Kate is not only a smile, though, she’s a force. ‘She is Napoleon,’ says Jim to Jules. Cruel? No, free. In this love triangle, all parties are free and equal, always loyal to one another; this is what makes it so subversive.

Kate may be the epitome of female beauty, but she behaves in what many would consider a masculine way. ‘Her gospel was that the world was rich and that you could cheat a bit sometimes; she always asked God’s forgiveness in advance and was confident she’d get it.’ Kate had been drawn by Jules’s mind but she also needed a male of her own sort, Jim. What about Jules? Unable to truly satisfy Kate, he chooses to give her away to Jim, thus making sure of never losing her. From her husband, he becomes her confidant, agreeing to divorce and let Jim marry her. What about Jim? Jim takes her, loves her, wants to marry her and have children with her. However, it is not that simple. Even the purest love can be contrarian.

Jules loves Kate, Jim loves Kate, Kate loves Jules and Jim, yet all are independent. ‘They are alone and together,’ writes Henri-Pierre Roché. It would be wrong to view Kate’s independence as a political manifesto. She is no more an activist than Jules and Jim are. She doesn’t fight for a cause nor does she take refuge behind a group. Activism is only a way of escaping personal responsibility. Kate is her own pioneer.

Of course, we would probably not know about Henri-Pierre Roché and his Jules et Jim if it hadn’t been for the enlightened enthusiasm of a reader of his, the twenty-three-year-old François Truffaut. A budding film critic in 1955, Truffaut, like Roché an eternal amoureux, is immediately struck by this story of a tender love triangle ruled by ‘a new aesthetic moral ethic which is constantly under review’.

François Truffaut feels so attracted to Jules et Jim’s story that he swears he’ll make it into a film. In 1962, three years after Henri-Pierre Roché’s death, Jules et Jim is released internationally: a resounding success both with the critics and the public. Jules et Jim is the blueprint for Truffaut’s entire oeuvre. Film after film, François Truffaut will never cease to try and answer those questions: How to live and love? How to love and be free within a couple? How to be free and not cruel to others? In Jules et Jim, the quest for free and harmonious love is almost found. There is no competition between Jules and Jim in their love for women in general and the magnificent Kate in particular. What only counts for the three of them is la joie de vivre.

It is today impossible to think of Jules, Jim and Kate and not see Jeanne Moreau who plays Kate, or Catherine in the film, wearing a black and white Breton top, cycling away, her hair in the wind, the men in her life in hot pursuit.

In June 2000, commenting on the film she saw for the first time in thirty years, Jeanne Moreau said:

it is the dreamed image of amorous life. However, today, many would be quick to call their relationship a perverse ménage-à-trois. Truth is, it is not a ménage-à-trois but an equal double love story. The characters all remain individuals. None is consumed in a fusional passion; none is lost in the other. Their individual integrity remains intact. This is what is difficult to understand today and what makes their love story so revolutionary.

François Truffaut wanted to celebrate Henri-Pierre Roché’s Jules et Jim, be as faithful as possible to the book and even more importantly to its style. ‘It is about avoiding clichés,’ the young director declared just after the film’s release. The tacit intimacy which reigned on the shoot meant that Truffaut could translate in images Jules et Jim’s constant jubilation. ‘We were perfectly in synch. The film is un moment arrêté, a fixed impression. You can almost touch the intensity and fluidity of life. We were not acting, just being ourselves. It was such a joyous time. Light and grave,’ says Jeanne Moreau.

The gravity of Jules et Jim comes from the fact that it follows characters from their late twenties to their late thirties. Adult youth, much more profound than adolescent youth, always carries an edge. Their feelings cut deeper.

Jules et Jim depicts an excess of life, rather than life in excess. Their love story is neither neurotic nor muddled nor even bitter. It is rooted in desire and a never-ending curiosity, kindness and respect too. Jules, Jim and Kate delve into the nature of love: an instant that is so difficult to make last.

Agnès Catherine Poirier, 2011

1 Jules and Jim

It was about the year 1907.

Jules, short and plump, a stranger to Paris, had asked Jim, tall and thin, whom he hardly knew, to get him into the Bal des Quat-z’ Arts, and Jim had found him a ticket and taken him to the costumier’s. It was while Jules was gently turning over one material after another and choosing a simple costume, that of a slave, that Jim’s friendship for Jules was born. The friendship grew during the ball, which Jules took in serenely, his eyes round with wonder and brimming with humour and tenderness.

The next day, they had their first real conversation. Jules had no woman in his life in Paris, and he wanted one. Jim had several. He introduced Jules to a young musician. At first things looked promising. For a week Jules was rather taken, and so was she. Then Jules decided that she was too cerebral; and she, that he was too placid and ironical.

Jules and Jim saw each other every day. They sat up late at night, each teaching the other the language and literature of his own country. They showed each other one another’s poems and translated them together. Their talk was leisurely; neither had ever found so attentive a listener. The regulars at the bar soon concluded, without the two young men’s realizing it, that their relationship must be abnormal.

Jim introduced Jules into literary cafés frequented by celebrities. Jules was appreciated there and Jim was pleased. In one of these cafés Jim had a girlfriend, a pretty, independent, casual young woman who could stand the nocturnal pace in Les Halles better than all the poets and still be on her feet at six in the morning. Loftily, as if from a height, she distributed her brief favours; and whatever life might do to her she kept her outlaw liberty and an immediate wit that always found its mark. The three of them went out together several times. She disconcerted Jules, whom she considered nice, but ineffective. He thought her remarkable but alarming. She brought along a pleasant silly girl for Jules – and Jules found her pleasant, but silly.

So Jim couldn’t do anything for Jules. He persuaded him to go hunting on his own, but Jules, possibly through being bothered by his still imperfect French, never got anywhere. Jim told Jules, ‘It’s not a question of language,’ and gave him a lecture on strategy.

‘You might just as well lend me your shoes or your boxing-gloves,’ said Jules, ‘all your things are too big for me.’

Jules, against Jim’s advice, had recourse to professionals. But there was no satisfaction in that.

They fell back on their translations and conversations.

2 Jim in Munich

At this juncture Jules’s mother, getting on in years but still full of life, arrived from Central Europe to see her son in Paris; an anxious time for Jules. She went through all his linen to make sure there wasn’t a button missing anywhere. She took Jules and Jim out to dinner in the best restaurants, but she wanted both of them to be in frock-coats and top hats. Jules found this a strain. Eventually she left.

One rainy evening three months later, Jules improvised a dinner for Jim and himself in his two furnished rooms. Jim, happening to open the fireplace of the tiled stove, found Jules’s top hat sitting in it, without any wrapping and covered with a delicate layer of soot. Jules said with satisfaction, ‘You see, if I keep it there it’s out of the way and the soot protects it against the moth.’ To which Jim answered, ‘I’m not your mother, Jules.’

They used to have their meals in little wineshops. Cigars were their only extravagance; each picked out the best cigar for the other. They frequented the Concert Mayol and the Gaîté-Montparnasse, where Colette was miming.

Jules told Jim at length about his home district and the girls there. He loved one of them, Lucie, whose hand he had asked – in vain, which was the reason for his departure to Paris. Now, after six months, he was going back to see her.

‘There’s another one, too,’ said Jules; ‘Gertrude. She leads her own life and she’s got a fine little boy. She understands my nature. And she doesn’t take me seriously. Here she is.’

Jules took a photo of Gertrude out of his wallet. She was lying naked on a beach, girdled only by an incoming wavelet, while her year-old son sat on his mother’s buttocks and faced the open sea, like an infant Eros on a fortified citadel.

‘And there’s one more, Lina; I might be in love with her if I wasn’t in love with Lucie. Look, she’s something like this.’ And with small, slow strokes of his pencil on the round marble table he sketched a face.

Jim, talking away, glanced at this face; then he said to Jules, ‘I’m coming with you.’

‘To see them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bravo!’ said Jules.

Jim wanted to buy the table, but the owner of the bar wouldn’t sell unless he bought all the twelve tables in the place.

3 Three Beauties

To prepare the way, Jules set out a week in advance for Munich, where he had spent two years in and around these three women’s company.

He rented two large rooms for Jim in the house of respectable people, and announced Jim to his three friends, with such a different description in each case that they found themselves at sea when they compared notes.

As soon as Jim arrived Jules introduced him to Lina, who knew the story of the table.

To Jules’s surprise, Lina (a beautiful young poppet with a teasing wit) and Jim, even before they had finished the cakes they were taking with their tea, saw eye to eye on the following points:

(a) There wasn’t much likeness between Jim and the description of him which Jules had given her.

(b) There was almost no likeness between Lina and the drawing on the table.

(c) They got on very well together but, to save Jules’s time and their own, issued a joint bulletin that the expected grand passion would not be forthcoming.

‘What clear, quick reactions!’ said Jules. ‘I do envy you …’

As for Lucie and Gertrude, Jules revealed them both at once to Jim, at a supper in the city’s most modern bar.

Once their evening coats had fallen away the two women blossomed out in striking contrast. They sat down at a pale wooden table which was quickly spread with a cloth and strange glasses.

A shy, happy smile played over Jules’s lips, telling the other three that he held them in his heart.

Leisure, without constraint, enfolded them all.

‘How on earth have you managed,’ said Jim, thinking aloud, ‘to bring together at one and the same time two women who are so different and so—’ He didn’t finish his sentence; silence uttered on his behalf the word beautiful. The women heard it.

Jules flushed with pleasure. He was about to reply, but Gertrude checked him with up-raised hand and said, ‘Jules is our confidant; and our producer, too. He’s got a fertile imagination and the patience of an angel. He puts us into his novels. He consoles us, he teases us; he pays court to us, but he doesn’t try to monopolize us. He only forgets one thing – and that’s himself.’

‘What lovely praise!’ said Jim.

‘So when he calls us we come,’ said Lucie, tilting her head slightly back.

Jules, in his own comic way, told them how his plan for Lina and Jim had fallen through. Lina had already told them herself by telephone.

‘But of course,’ said Gertrude. ‘Lina and Monsieur Jim aren’t right for one another. Lina’s a spoilt child, and Monsieur Jim doesn’t like that.’

‘What does he like?’ asked Jules.

‘We shall see,’ said Lucie impassively.

For the second time the gravity of her voice made its impact on Jim. To find himself sitting between these two women made him almost ill at ease, he would have liked to spend the whole time looking at each of them.

It seemed like the start of a dream.

It was not long before Jules, a master of ceremonies, proposed that they abolish once and for all the formalities of Monsieur and Mademoiselle and Madame by drinking to brotherhood, Brüderschaft trinken, in his favourite wine, and that to avoid the traditional and too obtrusive gesture of linking arms the drinkers should touch feet under the table – which they did. Carried away by his happiness Jules quickly withdrew his own feet.

Jim’s stayed for a moment between one foot of Gertrude’s and one of Lucie’s. Lucie was the first gently to withdraw her foot.

She was a long-skulled, Gothic beauty; she took her time over everything she did, so that other people found every moment endowed with the same abundant value as she conferred on it herself. Her nose, mouth, chin and forehead expressed all the pride of a German province, the allegorical role of which she had once played as a child in a religious festival. She came of an upper-middle-class family and was studying painting.

Gertrude was thirty; her beauty was classical Greek and she was a born athlete. She won ski races without training, and she could jump off a tram going full tilt and stop dead without an effort as she landed. She made you want to get to know her muscles. She had a fatherless son, aged four years; she didn’t believe in fathers. She lived by her art as an illuminator, so she had her ups and downs. She was nobly born; she was under a boycott from her caste, but the artists respected and cherished her.

The evening flowed on like a winding river. They were all on the top of their form and sparks began to fly. One thing they had in common: they were comparatively indifferent to money and felt they were pawns in God’s fingers; though Gertrude would have said that God was the Devil.

Jules was talking very well. But towards two in the morning he began being a bit too much of an expert about human souls and situations, and tried to counterbalance this by putting in a risky joke here and there. This might have been compensation – saying in public what he didn’t dare to do in private. He poked fun at the two girls and himself and came near to poking it at Jim too; after all, hadn’t he admitted them into a paradise whose gates he could never be sure of entering himself? He may have been feeling, prophetically, that this was how things were. His paean of homage and delight began to be punctuated with scratches, little lunges with the claws out, and there was an embarrassing passage in which he undertook to tell the Creator, lengthily, how to shatter the creation to bits and remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.

Something obvious was dawning – namely, that while Jules was a delicious friend he hadn’t got the stuffing to make a satisfactory husband or lover. He suspected it himself, as he had done before, and tried to drown the suspicion in a flood of words.

‘He’s wrecking his evening, he always does,’ said Gertrude regretfully, when Jules had got up for a moment to go off after the cigarette-girl. Lucie shook her head indulgently.

Jules monopolized their final quarter of an hour with his ramblings; he bungled his effects, repeated them, and wouldn’t let the others get a word in edgeways. All three were suffering on his behalf, and at the same time beginning to want to see each other again – without Jules.

Jim was seeing this side of Jules for the first time. On second thoughts he realized that there had been traces of it in their talks, when Jules, without the real presence, the sacrament of beauty, was borne away on the wings of his own eloquence.

‘What an amazing night we’ve had!’ said Jim. ‘Two flowers, those girls, and so different; sacred love, profane love … I don’t really want to see them both at the same time again.’

‘I know what you mean. Which one struck you most?’

‘I’m still dazzled,’ said Jim, ‘I’m in no hurry to find out. What about you?’

‘I’ve asked Lucie to marry me and I shall ask her again. Gertrude consoled me when Lucie turned me down. I took Gertrude and her son away, to Italy, to the sea. She gave me her body but not her love … Look, Jim, when I met Lucie I was scared. I didn’t want my feelings to run away with me. We were touring in the mountains; she had hurt her foot, and she allowed me to look after her; I used to change the dressings. I’d have been glad if her foot had never got better.’

‘I’ve been getting to know her hand,’ said Jim.

‘It was I who didn’t get better,’ Jules went on. ‘When she was all right again I took my courage in both hands and proposed. She said No – but so sweetly that I’m still hoping.’

4 Gertrude

Jim was an obstacle between Lucie and Jules.

At the end of a fortnight, after a siege which she made heroic and amusing, Gertrude gave herself to Jim. She came to see him in the evening once or twice every week. She was a generous, full-blooded creature. When they were not making love she told him all about her own life, which she looked upon as a perpetual game against God; she was always the loser. A whole gamut of Northern temperament and emotions, such as he had never met before, was revealed to Jim. She told him about her problems. Neither of them slept when they were together, though Jim did sometimes feel his eyelids flicker. She liked his way of listening but never gave him her close attention. She was fascinated by Napoleon; her daydream was that she’d meet him in a lift one day and he’d give her a child, and after that she’d never see him again.

‘Our Jules is a charming man,’ she said. ‘He understands women better than any man I know, and yet, when it comes to taking us – he loves us too much and not enough. Sometimes he’s witty, sometimes he wants us; either way he always chooses the wrong moment. I’ve done my best to help him but it’s no good. He turns Lucie into a patient idol and worships her. Jules is a discoverer and a poet, but as a husband he’d be too gentle, one would always be in his debt.’

Gertrude and Jim usually finished their nights together by walking in the woods at sunrise. They took a hired carriage to fetch the handsome four-year-old, who sat on the box beside the old driver and learnt to hold the reins and put the horses to a gallop, cracking the whip and swearing, his fair hair ruffling in the wind.

Then Jim went back to spend the day sleeping and musing on the things Gertrude had told him.

Jules was kept informed by both of them. He saw as much of them as before, but not together. With each of them he talked of the other, and, as was his habit, drew a satisfaction of his own from their pleasures.

Henri-Pierre Roché

JULES ET JIM

Introduction by Agnès Catherine Poirier

Afterword by François Truffaut

Translated by Patrick Evans

Afterword translated by Katherine C. Foster

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Jules et Jim

Introduction

Part 1

JULES ET JIM

1

Jules and Jim

2

Jim in Munich

3

Three Beauties

4

Gertrude

5

Jules and Lucie