FRENCH LOVE-LIVES

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 220, 17 September 1938, Page 10 (Supplement)

FRENCH LOVE-LIVES

| " the Prix Gon--IVI court novel for 1937, written in French by Charles Plisnier, and translated in English by Pamela Morris, is now published under the title "Nothing to Chance" (Boriswood). It is the ■tory of the loVe-life of three girls— Fabienne Fraigneux, her cousin, Marcelle Chardin, and their common cousin, Chrieta. Fabienne, rejected by the man she love*, deliberately marries her father's employee without love, in the hope of building a -successful marriage on a business foundation. Marcelle, having allowed her lover to depart for Africa in discouragement, marries a Jew who i* in love with her, believing that a onesided passion may prove a successful

has is for marriage. Ghrista only gives all for love, and believes the world well lost.

Fabienne and Marcelle are in turn placed in the foreground of the novel, while Christa's story is only for the shortest time allowed to take the centre of the stage. Each of the three is eympathetica 11^and artistically treated, and the novel, even in translation, is a flrstrate piece of work. What particularly strikes the English reader is the formality with which the middle-class French family still approaches the matter of marriage. Even Fabienne and Marcelle. up-to-date young misses who called their fathers '*old stick" and in all other respects lived very modern young lives, had to have their marriages arranged through their fathers, as heads of the family, with what seems to us early Victorian strictness.