*The Imperfect Marriage by Edith de Born (Chapman & Hall, 1954)

 

As its title suggests, this novel is a portrait of a marriage.  Roger and Louise (nee de Castillac) Warnier are married in 1936.  Roger is the scion of a wealthy family that owns fabric mills in a provincial city north of Paris; Louise is from an aristocratic but impoverished land-owning family in the South of France.  They meet in Paris, fall quickly in love, and marry to the delight of their families, who see their combination of wealth and aristocracy as beneficial to all.  Louise moves to the estate in the ugly industrial city where the Warnier empire located, and has several children.  Everything seems fairly happy until Roger becomes a prisoner during WWII and spends several years living in a German prison camp.  When he returns to France after the war he seems changed, and is no longer sexually interested in Louise.  He finally admits that he now prefers men to women, and begins (or more likely resumes) to have a not-entirely-discreet affair with a younger Frenchman he met in the prison camp.  Louise sees no alternative other than to continue living with Roger under these disappointing circumstances, although she does have a short-lived affair with a young philosophy teacher she meets on the train to Paris.

Edith de Born (which is the pen-name of Edith Bisch, an Austrian writer born in 1901) treats this subject with sensitivity and complexity.  Both Roger and Louise are complex, interesting, and sympathetic characters, and they are surrounded by a gallery of vivid secondary characters, including two old aunts of Roger's who both loved the same man -- one as his wife and one as his mistress.  The scenes of the provincial northern city, of Paris, and of the de Castillac's estate and vineyard in the South are all nicely evoked.  

The  Imperfect Marriage is an unusual, accomplished book that I enjoyed reading very much -- I felt immersed in its world and interested in its characters, and was sad to finish it.