Marie (12 page)

These heightened moments can either be triggered by a tenuous link between present and past – like the flood of familiar sensations that invade Marcel while he is listening to music towards the end of the last volume of
A la Recherche du temps perdu
– or directly attributable to a specific feeling that brings with it an urgent reminder of a previous one (the madeleine dipped in tea, first at Combray and later in Paris). Like Marcel, Marie experiences both types of recovered memory. Dreams of her past sometimes invade her consciousness without her knowing why, except perhaps that she is in a mood to receive them; at other times, the link is clear, as in the scene at her parents' house in Neuilly, after she has seen Jean off on the train to Maubeuge.

She arrives earlier than usual, and is delighted to find them eating breakfast, her mother still wearing a hairnet – something
she hasn't seen for some time. In her current state of emotional turmoil she seeks reassurance in the familiar comforts of her childhood home, and she is amply rewarded. She asks for the hot chocolate that her father customarily drinks – cocoa without milk – and revels in the taste and feel of the insipid liquid as it trickles down her throat. The feelings evoked by the drink are at once vague, all-encompassing, and sharp, specific; they are essentially rooted in the familial, in a poignant remembrance of childhood that will give new meaning to the life of an adult. Marie goes on to trick her mother into mispronouncing a neighbour's name and reminisces with her about the past as they share the household tasks. She is drawing her mother out and drawing comfort from her at the same time. She is in complete control.

This control, this loftiness, sets Marie apart from other Bourdouxe heroines. She shares many qualities with Elisa of
La Femme de Gilles
– her tenderness, her strength of will and her need for silence. But unlike Elisa, Marie has intellectual resources to draw on: even at moments of special intensity (often conveyed in the present tense) she retains the capacity to analyse, to interpret her experience, to make decisions. In a fascinating inversion, possibly prompted by the hostility Bourdouxhe encountered from a few women for ‘allowing' Elisa to take her own life, in
Marie
it is the other type of woman – flirtatious, careless and talkative – who attempts suicide.

The rights and wrongs of suicide occupy much of the latter part of the novel, as though Bourdouxhe feels compelled to continue the debate, to assure her readers that she takes the issue with due seriousness. Marie has come to feel superior to her sister Claudine, and in spite of her genuine anxiety
about whether she will survive, works herself into a fury as she rushes to her sickbed: ‘It's all refusal, all along the way! When women suffer, what do they do? Cut their losses, that's what. A cowardly flight towards peace, towards annihilation … You must not desert; you must be on the side of life.' Guessing that Marie is hiding something, Claudine begs her to confess, but Marie denies her: ‘Life isn't a story to be told like that … Making the most of life is making the most of yourself.'

Marie's sense of being on a higher plane can occasionally tip over unto unsociability. At such times Bourdouxhe employs the deft narrative device of passing the ball to another character, as if to give us the chance to assess her behaviour objectively: to Jean, in Maubeuge, when Marie fails to conceal her dismay at the dingy domesticity of his parents' house – ‘God, she's difficult' – and to the Sartrean womaniser Marius Denis, when she shows contempt for his clumsy seduction technique and his pretentious plans for a woman's magazine: ‘two spoonfuls of Spinoza, one of Plato, three grams of Bergson'. She is harsh on Marius, effectively attempting to demolish his whole
raison d'être,
but instead of defending himself he is reduced to a state of silent admiration for her unusually spirited discourse; at this point we see Marie quite clearly through his eyes. It takes an author in supreme command of her characters to shift the narrative thrust so abruptly at two of the most dramatic moments in her novel.

The final word rests with Marie herself, who is by now so free and so at one with the terms of her own existence that she lives permanently in awe of Pascal's ‘infinite spaces', acutely aware of her infinitesimal part in the universe. At several moments in this novel Marie is truly alone: when she looks
up at the thunder above the mountains and imagines herself ‘rushing down those dry slopes, looking up at the flashing light, her face pitched against the cold, hard storm'; when, at the very end, she stands smiling on the corner of a Paris street – watching and being watched.

Faith Evans
January 2016

Madeleine Bourdouxhe
was born in Belgium in 1906.
La Femme de Gilles
was her first novel. The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted her writing career, and her second novel,
A la recherche de Marie,
was published by a small Brussels press in 1943. In the mid-1980s her work was rediscovered, and was translated into many languages. A volume of short stories,
A Nail, a Rose,
first appeared in English in 1989, followed by translations of
La Femme de Gilles
and
Marie
. Bourdouxhe died in 1996.

Faith Evans is an editor, translator, and literary agent based in London. She is a founder member of Women in Publishing.