The Marquise Who Wasn't a Lady

...A few years ago, the Rumanian-bom essayist E. M. Cioran published a widely discussed piece, La Fin du roman in the Nouvelle Revue Fran?§aise, where he developed more systematically some of Val?©ry's strictures against fiction...

...Because the Marquise's sallying forth is dictated by no special accident in her daily life, there is little plot in the novel...

...One of Mauriac's passersby thus suddenly offers us a veritable gem of misinformation...

...Yet the world of The Marquise Went Out at Five is purely French, and happens to be my own stampingground...

...It is the basic honesty and humanity of Claude Mauriac, who seems to have inherited these traits from his often wrong-headed but righthearted father, that saves him as a writer...

...The publisher's blurb, on the dust-jacket, quickly poses a problem: "Could it be that the Marquise is no lady after all, but only our comical old friend Zerbanian," the "fat, fashionable, frustrated and aging homosexual" who had excused himself from the gathering in Mauriac's first novel, The Dinner Party...

...and he is concerned, above all, with the irrelevant or ephemeral accidents which constitute the very substance of the daily life of most people...

...At the same time, the action is haunted with memories of my quartier's past as one of the oldest sections of Paris, probably urban already in Roman times...

...Parisian as she may be, the Marquise is in this respect more closely related to old Doctor O'Connor than to the Baron de Charlus...

...But the careful reader had already been led to expect as much in the very first paragraph of the novel, where the Marquise talks to herself about herself as might a female impersonator, in terms that are familiar to admirers of the Doctor's interior monologues in Djuna Barnes' Nighlwood...

...In his First Surrealist Manifesto, Andr?© Breton relates that Paul Val?©ry once stated he would never permit himself to write, as fiction requires, any statement as bald as "The Marquise went out at five...

...It is to Mauriac's credit that his crowd, "so much the same from one day to the other, from year to year so little changed, yet imperceptibly, ineluctably, indefinably renewed" (one thinks here inevitably of Eliot's Four Quartets), also concerns itself, though but fleetingly and fitfully, with some of the major moral problems of living in Paris in our year of grace...

...contributor, "Commentary," "Arts" Claude Mauriac's second novel is an ideal exercise for adepts of Mortimer Adler's courses on how to read a book...

...Then he suddenly feels "as if all these old crimes, just as numerous and atrocious, also perpetrated in the name of law, of justice, sometimes even in the name of God (I've never had any religion, but I have a certain idea of God all the same), as if all those tortures and murders had lost in perspective whatever makes them unendurable today, when they're committed in Algeria or elsewhere...

...Cioran proclaimed that the contemporary French novel utterly lacked any deep human meaning...

...He treats us to a kind of collective "stream of consciousness" portrait of a whole busy quarter of Paris...

...Mauriac appears to have picked up my suggestion, but his Marquise happens to be no Marquise at all and to have gone out that day at five for no other reason except to take the air or cruise...

...Mauriac rambles or jumps from one character to another-rather like the wandering eye of his cruising Marquise-overhears remarks made in the crowd or eavesdrops on thoughts like a psychoanalytically minded Asmodaeus in a new-fangled Diable boiteux...

...Curiously Anglo-Saxon in his literary allegiances, Mauriac writes as if Ulysses, Mrs...

...The Marquise Went Out at Five may fail to be a great novel, but in many respects it is a fine one, an interesting experiment in new techniques of fiction and, at the same time, an honest and compassionate exploration of human follies and aberrations, always tenderly humorous...

...that it concerns itself only with the accidents of individual experience, and never with its substance...

...Again and again in Mauriac's strangely esthetic if not always poetic rigmarole of a novel, we are thus reminded of the underlying scandal and horror of La Torture and La Gangr??ne in contemporary French life-and indeed in contemporary life in general...

...The members of the French Academy, "under that funny dome" that emerges above the roofs of the Rue Mazarine, busy themselves only with "writing the Petit Larousse...

...While the Marquise is up to her old tricks, "Monsieur Zerbanian out cruising again," one of his many neighbors, a bookish fellow obsessed with tiny details of local history, reflects on the gibbets that once stood in this section of Paris, on executions and tortures inflicted at one time or another within view of his own window...

...Interviewing Cioran for the Swiss magazine Du, I suggested to him that he write a novel, if only as a wager, in order to explain why the Marquise went out precisely at five, and not at a quarter-to-five, which seemed to me certainly good enough for a plot...

...Dalloway and Nightwood were more familiar to him than any of the works of Proust or of his own illustrious father...

...As a matter of fact, we are told fairly clearly, about two-thirds of the way through the book, that the Marquise is old Zerbanian...

...The novel's whole action takes place within a stone's throw of my window on the Rue Gr?©goire de Tours, between five and six o'clock on a hot summer's day...