In the dog days of the second world war, 24-year-old Maurice Schérer wrote a tale of young lovers in prewar small-town France. He described lazy August swims in the Marne River east of Paris. He wrote about age-gap affairs and semi-incestuous flirtations. Schérer gallantly used a nom de plume, Gilbert Cordier, to shield his Catholic family from scandal, but he needn’t have bothered as his concerns were unfounded. The finished novel, Élisabeth, barely made a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Undeterred, Scherer adopted a second pseudonym – Éric Rohmer – and decided to try his luck as a film-maker instead.
Now – eight decades on from its first publication, 16 years on from its author’s death – Élisabeth belatedly returns from the cold. Republished in an English-language translation by Aaron Kerner, Rohmer’s book has been greeted with glowing reviews, hailed as a lost modernist classic and a crucial origin story for the award-winning director of Claire’s Knee, The Green Ray and My Night at Maud’s. “It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar,” wrote Richard Brody in the New Yorker. The fact that it’s by Rohmer? That’s the icing on the cake.
