Le Miracle des Violettes (novel)
Le Miracle des violettes (The Secret of the Violets) is a novel in French by the Swiss writer Élisabeth Burnod . It was written in France between 1944 and 1946 , was published in 1946 by Jeheber ( Geneva / Paris ) and is the first of eight novels with which the author rose to the Grandes Dames of French-speaking women authors in the 1960s .
content
During the German occupation, five artists lived in one house in Paris in 1940/44 . The 26-year-old storyteller Annie Duval, who writes poems, the 40-year-old pianist Adoni, the 30-year-old painter Martin, the painter Sévère and the 28-year-old art critic Pascal have their own apartment, only the kitchen is shared. The relationship with one another is free of conflict; the little money the artists earn is used for a common living as well as a pack of cigarettes and a glass of Armagnac for each day.
Annie had split up after a few years from her husband, who was "not brutal, but an idiot". She is now a secretary, but quits this position immediately when Adoni recommends that she become secretary to Stephen, a writer who became famous for his novel Une profession un peu de foi (A little credible job). Annie falls in love with the 40-year-old writer, whom she follows to wintry northern France, where he hopes to find new inspiration for another novel. In St. Omer she becomes his lover and falls for him completely. Stephen has her look for violets in the snow several times , which he had previously had a gardener in Cassel scatter in a nearby ravine. Annie initially thinks she sees a miracle in finding the violets, but Stephen, who never seems to sleep, increasingly becomes an overwhelming threat to her. After four months she leaves him and returns to Paris.
A little later there she receives a long letter from Stephen, who explains to her that the nature of their mutual love is very different. Annie's love is a normal, essentially sexually based affection that will soon pass. But he himself will always remember her, since she appears to him as the epitome of innocence, which - if perhaps only played by it - believes in miracles. But it was right that she left him, and she should never see him again. Otherwise she would see his bad points.
Annie is torn between her continuing love for Stephen and Martin's wooing. She can hardly think clearly and is indulging more and more of a ruinous nightlife. This seemingly hopeless situation is intensified when she is sent away by Stephen, whom she finds in a bar with prostitutes, and has to be taught by the lesbian Adoni that a short-term, emotional rebellion against social norms is pointless.
Autobiographical background
In an interview in 1976, the author Elisabeth Burnod emphasized that all of her novels have an autobiographical reference. In the present case, elements of her life in 1943/44 are clearly recognizable. From the beginning of 1944, at the age of 27, she worked in northern France for about half a year and finally became the lover of a German secret agent with the code name Alfred Lambert, who was allegedly a British secret agent but was actually a member of the Arras Abwehrstelle . Responsible for counter-espionage in the area of V-weapons , he took Elisabeth Burnod several times by car to St. Omer, where she had to track down resistance networks for him . Many of Stephen's characteristics as well as street and place names described in the novel indicate the identity of the character Stephen in the novel with the German secret agent Lambert.
interpretation
While Burnod, in her 1943 novel Florentine, described the rebellion of a 12-year-old girl against the strict bourgeois upbringing, she now deals with the failure of a young woman. Annie, like Burnod himself, had married when she was barely 20 years old, but the relationship with her husband had quickly become insubstantial. The supposed freedom of life in an artist community does not lead to a halt, and in her intense love for an older, intelligent and charming man she finds herself after a short time as completely inferior and exploited. Her refusal to give in to Martin's wooing is an expression of her aversion to reconnecting with an unloved man, her verbal commitment to the freedom of homoerotic relationships is a final call for freedom, accompanied by deathly coughing up blood.
expenditure
- First edition: Elisabeth Burnod: Le Miracle des violettes. Jehebever, Genève, Paris 1946. 229 p., Imprimé du Journal de Genève.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Elisabeth Burnod ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Bibliomedia Switzerland .
- ^ So Michelle Kuttel: Une grande Romancière n'est plus. In: Information culturelle SPS , November 26, 1979. On the work of Elisabeth Burnod cf. also Henri-Charles Dahlem: Elisabeth Burnod. In: Dictionnaire des écrivains suisses d'expression française. (Ed .: Alain Nicollier, Henri-Charles Dahlem.) Geneva 1994, ISBN 2-88115-012-8 , Vol. 1, pp. 150-151, and Cathérine Dubuis: Du roman bougeois au roman engagé. In: Histoire de la literature en Suisse romande. (Ed .: Roger Francillon.) Vol. 3: De la Seconde Guerre aux années 1970. Lausanne 1998, here p. 319.
- ↑ Several wreaths made of artificial violets are attached to the lattice of the large window of the chapel built in 1849; Autour de Cassel: Les Chapelles .
- ↑ This ravine on the southern slope of the old mountain town of Cassel in the French department of North is now called "Prince Weg" and meets the Route d'Oxelaere.
- ↑ Jaqueline Thévos: Elisabeth Burnod. In: Femmes suisses et le Mouvement féministe , Organe officiel des informations de l'Alliance de Sociétés Féminines Suisses, 64, No. 2 (February 1976). (with picture) doi : 10.5169 / seals-274442
- ↑ References to this in the article Élisabeth Burnod
