GLR November-December 2023

The French Lieutenant-Colonel’s Men ARTMEMO

D ALE B OYER R ECENTLY, while on vacation in Sa vannah and browsing in a wonderful little bookstore, I came across a thick volume by Roger Martin du Gard ti tled Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort . I had never heard of either the book or the writer but later learned that du Gard won the Nobel Prize in 1937 and that this translation was published with great fanfare by Knopf in 1999. Intrigued, I purchased it, and then the surprises began. Maumort is not so much a novel as a fic tionalized memoir—at least in its present state. Du Gard changed his mind several times while writing it regarding how exactly to tell the story; more on that later. What surprised me the most was a) how little known it is today, and b) how incredibly frank and nonjudgmental it is on sexual matters in general and on homosexuality in particular. Indeed, du Gard, who was a close friend of André Gide (in fact, the work is dedicated to him), spends a lot of time con templating why the Lieutenant-Colonel did not turn out to be homosexual, despite the fact that many of his early sexual for ays—one could even argue, his most signif icant ones—were with men. The recollections begin, conventionally enough, with the 77-year-old Maumort re membering how, at age ten, he saw a group of naked girls bathing in a pond. He experi ences a feeling of “absurd guilt” as he sud denly grows conscious of the physical differences between himself and the girls. He also experiences strange pangs of shame as he ponders the existence of what his old servant Zelie, upon washing him, had once referred to as his “li’l gentleman.” The young Maumort becomes obsessed with the girls, but just as quickly this obsession is supplanted by the arrival of a cousin named

Guy who comes to live with him and his family at their estate. In Maumort’s words: “my first impulse towards Guy was not one of camaraderie but of love. How to call by any other name that obsessive attraction, that fascination, to which in those first days I surrendered my self with delight?” The young Maumort fol lows Guy from room to room “like a dog. ... I did not tire of touching his clothes, his toi letries; everything that belonged to him was

stands right in front of him. What’s more, it soon becomes apparent that Guy is having an affair with their childhood tutor, Xavier (more on this later as well). As if anticipating the reader’s reaction, du Gard writes: “I feel no embarrassment at elaborating on all these psycho-sexual de tails; I even mean to linger over them at leisure, with a total candor and an assiduous accuracy. When one approaches the domain of sexuality, one must not be stingy with personal confidences. ... Tell me what your puberty was like, and I will tell you who you are.” And make no mistake: these early encounters are fully and vividly delineated. Upon entering boarding school, Maumort meets a fellow student named Luzac, and they begin the frequent habit of masturbat ing each other in secret in German class, protected from view by a shielding desk: One day I felt his hand hunting for the opening of my pocket and sliding be tween my thigh and the cloth of my trousers. ... I felt his fingers come near and take hold of me. From then on, this more direct fondling became a new habit, and I let it happen without attempting to defend myself. ... I had his bare and moist hand on my belly. ... He ran his ca ressing hand over me softly, tenderly, taking a slow, passionate and meticulous inventory of my most intimate treasures, and the expert gentleness with which he handled me produced a sudden spasm. Before long, Maumort begins to recipro cate, and “From then on, I got used to turn ing my eyes stealthily towards him at the moment I was watching for his spasm, and I would revel in the sight of his ravished, somber, almost pained face.” Considering the frequency and intensity of these experiences, it comes as something of a shock when, some time later, Maumort

Cover of the 1999 edition.

endowed with magical virtues. I watched him come, go, get up, sit down, with inex haustible rapture.” Even granting that the prose here may be overwrought, du Gard makes it clear that what fascinates the young Maumort so much about Guy is that he’s completely unashamed about his body, even to the point of performing naked hand

Passages

nists might form a “throuple.” By then we have witnessed sep arate scenes of sexual intimacy—one between Tomas and Agathe, another between Tomas and Martin—of a stunning frankness barely imaginable in a commercial product from Hol lywood. Rogowski, in the 2021 Austro-German film Great Freedom , playing a “criminal” gay recidivist in post-World War II Germany (see my G&LR review in the May-June 2022 issue), displayed a masterful palette of emotional colors. In these scenes in Passages , he and Whishaw and Exarchopoulos dig deep into the erotic human essence. Although the film’s final scenes offer no clear resolution, we still feel we have seen something true and perplexing about the hazards of contempo rary love and sex. Like the three characters, we are sadder but wiser. Maybe.

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bels are breaking down. Is Tomas’ switch to heterosexual ardor credible? How can Agathe trust the prospective commitment of this man who has walked away from an apparently stable gay marriage? We may be forgiven if we feel that none of Sachs’ characters is really all that nice. However, as in his opening shots of Tomas working as a director, Sachs allows us brief glimpses into Agathe and Martin’s professional lives. We find that Martin, a successful commercial printmaker, in that guise behaves collegially in a cooperative environment. Meanwhile, Agathe, a full-time grade schoolteacher, reliably leads a class of young students, encouraging discipline and self-reliance. A moment arrives when it appears that the three protago

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