“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first novel. It’s an accurate description, but also a spoiler, for through much of the book, we only know we are eavesdropping on a conversation between Irina, Gaëtan’s Russian-born second wife, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing — a brave officer in the First World War, a successful manufacturer, a covert agent of the Resistance in the Second — is gone now just a few months, and Irina has come to Marie’s villa outside Geneva to recuperate. From the very beginning, we know that there will be little relaxation during this visit, the two women’s first meeting.
As Irina takes her seat across from Marie by the fireplace, she takes in — and condemns — the decor. “The worst were the pictures. Boring landscapes, mountains and mountain lakes, displayed a depressing lack of personalisty and meagre craftsmanship in pretentious gilt frames.” She feels herself “caught in an unnatural and translucid atmosphere through which no sound could pierce.” But neither woman is on safe ground: “They took each other’s measure, appraised their mutual impressions, and both were disappointed.”
And indeed, what follows is a pause in limbo before the final judgments are passed. Over the course of the evening, their polite dialogue provides a poor disguise for what is really an interrogation. Mostly it is Marie doing the questioning. She is clearly offended that her fine well-born cousin married this short, plump Russian émigré, even if her family stood in the nobility before the Revolution. Marie notes that Irina still speaks with an accent, and “She doesn’t look youn either.” But Irina slips in a few pointed inquiries of her own, and she makes no apologies for being willing to humble herself to survive as an otherwise penniless refugee in Paris.
Irina has spent decades toiling in the backrooms of some of the most exclusive couturiers, and she has learned to appreciate both the skill involved in creating high fashion and the sweat:
I longed to be able to get away from the atmosphere of women dressing and undressing. At times the smell of their skin, their sweat, their scent, seemed to cling to me; I couldn’t get rid of it, I was nauseated by it, it stayed in my nostrils. Day in day out I watched them pitifully cheating their own selves. I heard them deliberately deny their most obvious imperfections. I saw them go through agonies of hidden pain in their desperate fight against ugliness or age. I listened to them, endeavouring to believe in the miracle expected from the new frock. That daily routine, perpetually repeated, had begun to get me down. Oh, that monstrous procession of wretched women!
Marie, on the other hand, has spent the same decades living in peace and comfort in her solid, dull villa on the slopes above Lake Geneva. She has servants to clean, feed, and care for her and money to pay for their service. Yet, as the stock-taking continues into the night, she begins to reveal the pain she has long kept hidden under the smooth surface of her own life. “Don’t try to tell me how happy, full, rich, and so on, the life of a single, independent woman can be. It is a tune I know by heart. I used to sing it to myself at first. Later I only sang it to other people.”
Edith de Born was the pen-name of Edith Bisch, who by the time that Gaëtan was published was living with her husband, Jacques Bisch, a French banker, in Brussels. Born Edith Ausch in Vienna in 1901, she had grown up in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an experience she wrote about in a number of her novels, including a trilogy that traced her own journey: Schloss Felding (titled Felding Castle in the US) (1959); The House in Vienna (1959); and The Flat in Paris (1960). She is recorded as having played some role in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and she and her husband hosted Evelyn Waugh in their flat just around the corner from the royal palace in Brussels. I haven’t yet been able to learn why she chose to write in English or even why she began writing fiction after the war, but she went on to publish at least fifteen novels — all sadly now out of print — before her death in 1987.