A Balzacian novel about a scandalous woman from the 1920s

– A Balzacian novel about a “scandalous” woman from the 1920s

In “A Season in Montparnasse”, the Franco-Swiss Colin Thibert tells the story of a tidy provincial woman who discovers freedom and her penchant for women in Paris.

Posted today at 1:46 p.m.

Among the works he has read or reread, the Franco-Swiss novelist Colin Thibert, whose real name is Léon Noël, does not cite a single book by Honoré de Balzac at the end of his novel. However, his latest novel, “A Season in Montparnasse”, is Balzacian in more than one way. Judge for yourself: the story is that of Gabrielle Bertholon, daughter of a family of silk workers from Lyon, who enjoys the pleasures of the capital, far from bourgeois provincial conventions and sets out to become a painter.

This feminine Lucien de Rubempré experiences a rise, fall and resurrection. With her, the author paints the portrait of a free woman, who discovers her penchant for homosexual love, confronts the difference in social background by loving Marcelle, of modest origin and willingly rebellious. Very Balzacian, again. Colin Thibert accurately sketches some of the characters in this Human Comedy, sparing his reader the long descriptions of the author of Lost Illusions.

A family search in Neuchâtel

The concierge Madame Ernest, Abbé Migeaud, the advisor of the Bertholon brothers, the notary, the drawing teacher, the detective, the admirers of the beauty: this Areopagus is, like Balzac, obsessed by morality and transgression, interested in money and sometimes victims of their greed (the crash of 1929), ambitious and hampered by their origins or narrow-minded.

Born in Neuchâtel, the author found material for his novel by focusing on his maternal grandfather, who was director of the Préfargier asylum (canton of Neuchâtel) in the 1920s, precisely those in the book. He also thought of the psychiatrist’s younger sister, who remained an old maid, as they said at the time. However, part of the book is set in a nursing home in the canton of Neuchâtel, supposed to cure Gabrielle of her sapphism.

Painting of morals, of Montparnasse in the 1920s and incursions into Switzerland, intrigue with twists and turns concerning the fate of the scandalous woman, “A Season in Montparnasse” can be read with pleasure, mixing a contemporary theme with rather classic writing which is allows for some more contemporary language deviations.

“A season in Montparnasse”, Colin Thibert, Ed. Héloïse d’Ormesson, 269 p. March 2024, from 27 fr. 99 to 31 fr. 10.

Olivier Bot has been deputy editor-in-chief since 2017, head of the World section between 2011 and 2017. Alexandre de Varennes Press Prize. Author of “Search and investigate with the internet” at Presses universitaire de Grenoble.More informations