Customer Reviews

Une Vieille Maitresse (French Edition)

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I am not fluent in French, so I did not understand every word. Still, I could not put the book down, reading until late hours and getting up groggy the next morning. It is the story of love between a young French dandy, Ryno de Marigny, and a somewhat older Spanish woman from Malaga. Like many other people, Ryno at first sight thinks Vellini is ugly, but when he gets closer, she gets under his skin in a way that is irreversible for him. He pursues her relentlessly until she leaves her husband and moves in with him. They spend years living, loving, traveling and suffering together.

After 10 years, their relationship seemingly long over, he falls in love and wins a divine looking young aristocrat - blue blood, old money, angelic personality - and persuades her grandmother to let him marry her. Once married and ensconsed in his wife's country estate, he thinks he is in paradise.

But the supersticious Malagegna believes, and rightfully so it turns out, that they have unbreakable bonds between them.....She can't just let him walk out of her life.

It is one of the most fascinating relationship stories I have read in a long time and Barbey d'Aurevilly is a master of disecting the complexity and nuances of human needs and feeelings. Ryno says he is torn between Love for his angelic wife and Memories that he shares with Vellini. It would seem to me that he is torn between the idea of what love should be and what it really is. His first infatuation for Vellini was naturally exhausted after about six years. They went through a rough spot from which he thought they would never recover and he wanted separate lives. But while living separately, the relationship continued to develop without him noticing it. He thought he was seeing Vellini out of habit, or as an old friend not to be forsaken.

Vellini also claims she stopped loving Ryno, but insists they are tied by destiny and some other causes produced by her superstitious mind. But their love leaps off every page of the book. It just is not the same kind of impetuous young love they had when they first began their relationship. In such a mature, deeply intimate relationships, superficial attributes such as physical beauty, wealth, education and social standing of the partners matter little.

Vellini and Ryno may not recognize their love, but they follow their instincts, and that's just great. While this is the basic story line, the novel is much more xomplex. Barbey's writing is subtle, atmospheric and suspenseful. In adddition to the love triangle, there are observers: the noble marquise, her friend and the friend's friend. Their theorizing and their different views about relationships and marriage round up and give different aspects to the main storyline.

Highly recommended, especially if you are fluent in French.