Much Ado About Very Little

To start with, there’s this middle-aged Parisian couple, Alain and Fanny Maligrasse, who hold Monday evening soirées. Alain has fallen in love with one of the guests, a young actress, and when it becomes clear he will never advance beyond the handholding stage, he turns to drink and prostitutes. Alain’s country nephew (“there is something extraordinarily kind in his face”) makes the grade with the actress, but only temporarily. He is bumped in favor of a producer who can offer her a juicy role in a new play.

The heartbroken nephew, turning for comfort to the heartbroken aunt, absent-mindedly jumps into her bed one night; decides this is not for him and goes for consolation of another kind (platonic) to Josée, rich, attractive, promiscuous and, at the moment, mistress of a taciturn medical student. Josée, in turn, is worshipped by one Bernard (a business colleague of Maligrasse and a former lover of the actress) who, bored by his cow-like wife, has taken off to Poitiers (“of all the cities in France, the deadest”) to write a novel. Josée finds out that Bernard’s wife is pregnant and may die in childbirth and decides it is her duty to alert Bernard to his wife’s condition. Bernard, however, thinks she has come to Poitiers in response to his passionate love letter so, rather than hurt his feelings, Josée spends three days (and nights) with him before releasing her communiqué. It is only later, in Paris, on a rain-soaked bench in the Place de la Concorde that Bernard realizes that the Poitiers idyll meant nothing. Nothing.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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To start with, there’s this middle-aged Parisian couple, Alain and Fanny Maligrasse, who hold Monday evening soirées. Alain has fallen in love with one of the guests, a young actress, and when it becomes clear he will never advance beyond the handholding stage, he turns to drink and prostitutes. Alain’s country nephew (“there is something extraordinarily kind in his face”) makes the grade with the actress, but only temporarily. He is bumped in favor of a producer who can offer her a juicy role in a new play.

The heartbroken nephew, turning for comfort to the heartbroken aunt, absent-mindedly jumps into her bed one night; decides this is not for him and goes for consolation of another kind (platonic) to Josée, rich, attractive, promiscuous and, at the moment, mistress of a taciturn medical student. Josée, in turn, is worshipped by one Bernard (a business colleague of Maligrasse and a former lover of the actress) who, bored by his cow-like wife, has taken off to Poitiers (“of all the cities in France, the deadest”) to write a novel. Josée finds out that Bernard’s wife is pregnant and may die in childbirth and decides it is her duty to alert Bernard to his wife’s condition. Bernard, however, thinks she has come to Poitiers in response to his passionate love letter so, rather than hurt his feelings, Josée spends three days (and nights) with him before releasing her communiqué. It is only later, in Paris, on a rain-soaked bench in the Place de la Concorde that Bernard realizes that the Poitiers idyll meant nothing. Nothing.