She was wiser than he, for she responded to his “twenty years” announcement by warning, “Don’t put me too high.” But he did just that—or, rather, he treated her with the same mix of submission and domination that he later ascribed to Philippe. Maurois arranged for Janine to transfer from Switzerland to a finishing school in England, where he visited her frequently. In 1912, they married, despite his family’s disapproval, mostly silent of course. Janine’s mother was rumored to have a lover, which was scandalous, and they rightly suspected that Janine would have difficulties fitting into Elbeuf society. Still, the marriage started well. They took a house near the mill; Maurois worked, and Janine poured her creativity into flower arranging and gardening. She bought vases of Venetian glass and Lalique crystal; Maurois balked at the expense but marvelled at her ability to spend hours “studying the curve of a stem or a green cloud of asparagus ferns.” She called him Minou, he called her Ginou.

But life in Elbeuf was difficult. Janine made few friends. “I don’t know whether I can live here,” she told Maurois. “It seems so sad, so sad…” The image with which their love had begun, of walking on the bottom of the sea, summed up the marriage’s combination of enchantment and oppressiveness. Janine gave birth to the first of their three children in May, 1914, but the war began and Maurois went away, leaving her more isolated than ever.

With his excellent English, Maurois was posted as liaison officer to the British Army. That experience inspired his first novel, “Les Silences du Colonel Bramble,” which was published in 1918. After the war, he returned to the mill, but was also lionized in Paris, and spent more and more time writing. The children’s nurse complained, “Instead of scribbling in the evenings, Monsieur would do better to go out with Madame, and instead of scribbling during the day Monsieur would do better to look after his business.” Janine scribbled, too, filling notebooks with records of her migraines, stomachaches, cramps, and aching legs. She wrote notes, in English, of times when she felt “moody” or “awfully bad,” and she wrote, chillingly, “Something is broken.”

Sometime in the early nineteen-twenties, Maurois began having affairs. Janine had them, too, or at least flirtations, especially on their seaside vacations in Deauville. Maurois enjoyed great success with “Ariel,” a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley—more a novelization of his life, really. (It became memorable to later English-language readers for being reprinted in 1935 as No. 1 in Penguin’s first series of paperbacks.) It recounts Shelley’s disastrous marriage to Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in the Serpentine after the poet abandoned her. Maurois put a lot of his own personality into Shelley, and wrote of Harriet as a “child-wife” made bitter by unhappiness. He could be savage: “Even when she had the air of being interested in ideas, her indifference was proved by the blankness of her gaze. Worst of all, she was coquettish, frivolous, versed in the tricks and wiles of woman.”

Both he and Janine were suffering from each other, and Janine obsessed over the portrait of herself in “Ariel.” It is heartbreaking to learn, from Maurois’s own memoir, that she read it repeatedly—the manuscript once and the printed book twice—and copied out passages. “You talk about women better than you’ve ever talked to me about them,” she said. Yet she could see that Maurois was aware of his own weaknesses, too. “Since he understands so well,” he imagined her thinking, “Why doesn’t he change?” Their relationship had begun under the sign of “The Little Russian Soldiers,” and its disintegration was similarly reflected in literature, through “Ariel.” Side by side, they looked into the book as into a double mirror, seeing each other’s faces as well as their own. In the early nineteen-twenties, Janine, like her counterpart in “Climates,” got the idea that she was destined to die soon. She was right. Becoming pregnant again in late 1922, she developed septicemia, was operated on unsuccessfully, and died on February 26, 1923. Maurois was bereaved, and free.

It was not long before he married again, to the woman who would be his lifelong companion, Simone de Caillavet. The granddaughter of Anatole France’s mistress Léontine Arman de Caillavet, Simone was highly educated, patient, and well-balanced, and she devoted herself to Maurois’s work. She typed his manuscripts and learned shorthand so as to be able to help him further by taking dictation. If it is disturbing to think of Janine’s constant reading of “Ariel,” it is at least as much so to imagine Simone working on the drafts and typescripts of “Climates,” in which she is cast, very little changed, as Isabelle de Cheverny.

What are we to make of Maurois and his love life? By his own account, he married one unsuitable young woman because of a romantic idea that had nothing to do with her true personality, and made her life miserable, as well as his own. Afterward, he married another woman who, he hints, loved him more than he loved her. Yet, as Janine saw, he was aware of his own propensity for uneven partnerships, and channelled his literary talents into exploring it in fiction and biography. He was a writer to the core, and this is one vital difference between him and Philippe in the novel. It changed everything, at least for him. Perhaps it changed it for the women in his life, too, so deeply interwoven was his work with his relationships.

There was another difference. Love makes Philippe Marcenat dull—not to the reader, but to his long-suffering beloved. He realizes only belatedly how tedious Odile must find the long evenings in which he does little but gaze adoringly at her. Working long hours at the factory, consumed by jealousy, Philippe forgets how to have an entertaining conversation. Maurois, by contrast, was energetic and vibrant. A friend, Edouard Morot-Sir, wrote of “the gentle expression of his eyes, his smile, the finesse and warmth of his voice,” and he remembered Maurois’s endless fund of stories. He was a man of infinite curiosity about human nature—a mark of a person who surely can never be boring.

“Climates” began life in the mid-nineteen-twenties, after the death of Janine, as a short story called “La Nuit Marocaine.” Set in Morocco, it was about an eminent personage who falls ill and is told he will die. He summons his friends, and confesses to them the true story of his life, which revolves around his love for three women, each of whom he has hurt in some way. Unfortunately, he then proceeds not to die. He lives on, but must adjust to the changed image that others now have of him.

Starting from this point, Maurois first realized that the middle woman, an actress named Jenny Sorbier, was less interesting, so he dumped her. He also disposed of the Moroccan setting and the framing story. The novel was easy to write, largely because, as Maurois wrote, “I was able to nourish my imaginary characters on real emotions.”

In turning short story to novel, he also introduced an elaborate literary device. In the first half, Philippe recounts his love for Odile in the form of a letter to his second wife, Isabelle—a bizarre and cruel thing to do, one might think, but something that Isabelle seems to welcome because it enables her to understand him better. In the second half, she responds by writing the story of her love for Philippe, an account meant for him to read. Because Maurois also needs to continue conveying Philippe’s emotions directly, he has Philippe write a diary, which Isabelle reads and (implausibly) quotes at length in her letter back to him. Part Two strains credulity at times, but the device is worth the trouble, for it highlights the novel’s themes of reading, writing, reflecting, reënacting, and transcribing.

Love is interwoven with these activities throughout the book. As in real life, Philippe’s love for Odile is born from literature in the form of “The Little Russian Soldiers.” Odile’s decline is measured out in her habit of reading poems about death. With Isabelle, Philippe reads constantly: Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, Stendhal, Merimée. At first, Isabelle finds Proust and the others dull, but she wills herself to adapt to Philippe’s preferences, though not before remarking, “Nothing could have been easier than understanding Philippe’s taste in books: he was one of those readers who look only for themselves in what they read.” Philippe has already admitted this at the end of the first part: trying to get over Odile, he writes, “books flung me straight back into my dark meditations; all I looked for in them was my pain and, almost in spite of myself, I chose those that would remind me of my own sad story.” This is Philippe all over—he looks for himself in every book he reads, just as he looks for his “queen” in every woman he is involved with. Isabelle has a less self-centered approach, and reads mainly to understand the man she loves. At novel’s end, she even reads his old copy of “The Little Russian Soldiers.” These are two extreme models of reading: looking in books to see oneself mirrored again and again, or reading to enter another person’s experience, and thus to enlarge oneself.