Éric Rohmer: A Biography

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, a manufacturing town in central France, on March 21, 1920.¹ His father’s family came from Alsace, its main branch having earlier lived in Still, twenty kilometers west of Molsheim, in the foothills of the Vosges mountains. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the men had worked either in crafts connected with the wine trade or in armaments manufacturing. An even older family tradition among Maurice Schérer’s ancestors was blacksmithing. The secondary branch of the family was from Lorraine, and lived in Château-Salins or Lafrimbolle in the department of Moselle. After the French defeat in 1870 and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire, a considerable number of the Schérer’s compatriots, who were patriotic Catholics, resettled in France. Maurice’s grandfather, Laurent Schérer, a gunsmith, chose Tulle, where he found a job at the national armaments factory in the Souilhac quarter. He married Antoinette Vialle, a laundrywoman who came from a family that had long lived in Tulle. Her only son, Désiré Antoine Louis, born in 1877, was for many years the family’s main support; declared unfit for military service in 1914, he became a department head at the prefecture. In 1919, after the death of his mother, he met and married Jeanne Marie Monzat, nine years his junior, the youngest of four daughters who came from Corrèze. Their grandfather owned a farm in Saint-Mexant; their father, born in Tulle in 1850, was a notary’s clerk and an employee at the national treasury office. He took up residence on the street where the Schérers lived.

Schérer’s parents soon bought an old house in the style typical of the area, built in the late seventeenth century, tall and overlooking the banks of the Corrèze River. There Maurice and his brother René were born in 1920 and 1922 into a middle-class family that had risen socially, since its starting point had been lower-class on both sides; Désiré Schérer’s father had been an artisan, his mother a peasant. Désiré, whose health was fragile, was an anxious, fearful man who was almost forty-five when his eldest son was born. He worked as a minor official in charge of the office of trades and commerce at the prefecture, which allowed his wife to stop working and raise the two boys. “It was not an upper-middle-class milieu,” René Schérer noted. “But there was a little money, a house, a social status, and especially many traditions. An ordinary family, not even caught up in History.”2 The tradition combined Catholic observance with a Puritan family morality. In a city that was dominated by the moderate left and voted radical-socialist well into the 1940s, the Schérer family leaned toward conservatism, but never to excess. Its opinions, particularly in matters of politics and religion, were colored by royalist sentiments. Similarly, its culture was under Germanic influence, but its reflexes continued to be opposed to the German Empire, in memory of the humiliations suffered after the capitulation of 1870, and it quickly became anti-Hitler when dangers increased during the 1930s. That did not prevent the father, Désiré, from having to cope with rumors resulting from the foreign sound of his patronymic: he was accused of being “a Prussian” or even an “infiltrated spy” within the prefecture, as was alleged by Angèle Laval, the notorious Tulle informer and the author of a multitude of anonymous letters during the 1920s. Henri-Georges Clouzot took the inspiration for his film Le Corbeau from her.

Désiré and Jeanne Schérer were concerned about the future of their two sons and monitored their education closely. The three Monzat aunts, Jeanne’s sisters, had strong personalities: they were all teachers in private schools, the two older sisters being secondary-school teachers of French at the École Sainte-Marie-Jeanne-d’Arc, and the third a primary-school teacher at the École Sévigné. The eldest, “Aunt Mathilde,” played a role in the region as head of local associations and a columnist for the newspaper L’Écho. The youngest sister had three daughters, Régine, Geneviève, and Éliane, to whom the two Schérer sons were close during their childhood and adolescence.

This whole family group lived together in the home at 95, rue de la Barrière, a narrow lane that ran steeply uphill in front of the cathedral. The two maiden aunts occupied the two upper floors of this narrow, white, six-story building on the slope of one of the city’s hills, squeezed between two other buildings of the same kind. The two lower levels, above a cobbler’s shop that gave on the street, were occupied by the Schérers, while the intermediate fourth story opened onto a little garden located in back of the house; it had circular terraces on three levels that were covered with vegetation. On the other side of the wall surrounding the property, a path led toward the heights above the city and, a little further on, to the Lycée Edmond-Perrier, which Maurice and René attended. In the early 1940s, Maurice wrote about this path “crossing the Corrèze River by the Escurol bridge, and climbing the slope on the other side, no less steep.”3 The big house gradually filled up with the two boys’ toys and possessions. They shared a bedroom and transformed the attic into a play space. The garden, poorly maintained and wild, was another important site of this shared childhood and youth, and aroused Schérer’s early interest in nature. From the front of the house, the view extended to the Corrèze River below and to the hills across the valley, where the dense forest began. “When I was little,” Éric Rohmer wrote later, “there was almost nothing between the house and the river. There was an embankment beside the river, and along it, a site where a Jesuit school had once stood […] which was called ‘the ruins.’ In these ruins the neighborhood children went to play, especially ‘the hooligans.’ For in this city there was a subtle difference between the bourgeois and the workers: their houses were on the same streets but even as a little boy I could tell the difference between them. I knew that in the bourgeois houses the floor was waxed, and that it was not in the workers’ homes; in one group people ate in the dining room, in the other they ate in the kitchen (because there was no dining room).”⁴ Maurice and René Schérer were first of all boys from Tulle. Their attachment to the “city of seven hills,” which was the seat of the prefecture of the department of Corrèze and had a population of fourteen thousand after the First World War, was deeply rooted. The city was neither particularly attractive nor terribly seductive: a quiet small town of industries and trades that lived on lace-making, armaments manufacturing, the Maugein accordion factory, and especially the imposing departmental administration and the garrison of the 100th Infantry Regiment; it was seldom given more than three or four lines in tourist brochures. “Tulle spreads its old quarter over the slopes of the hills, extending for three kilometers in the narrow, winding valley of the Corrèze, while at its heart emerges the elegant stone spire of the Notre Dame cathedral.”⁵ The local glory was long the Tulle Sporting Club, the “blue and whites,” a good rugby club that was soon rivaled and supplanted by the neighboring “black and whites” from Brive.

Maurice Schérer, a Tulle boy at heart, found other charms in his hometown—and preferred the athletic Union of Tulle-Corrèze, a basketball club, where he was a registered member. In his last years, Éric Rohmer took an interest in scholarly journals, the cartulary dating from the end of the ninth century, and archeological and historical works on the city—he was a member of the Society of Letters, Sciences, and Arts of Corrèze—and wrote two very learned works on the etymology of the city’s name and on the complex hydrographic network of the region of “Tulle, goddess of the springs.” We see in this Rohmer’s attachment to his city. He had an intimate knowledge of it, based on regular walks, a knowledge more bodily and sensual than bookish: “The Tulle area is a lovely plateau, a peneplain easy to travel through, with a temperate climate, arable lands, rich in pastures, a plateau cut by the deep gorges of the Corrèze, Montane, Céronne, Solane, and Saint-Bonnette rivers, in which there is no traffic and no habitation, except in Tulle itself. The towns that are dotted along these gorges, Corrèze, Bar, and Aubazine, are perched on the heights, disdaining the lowlands. Tulle is the only town that is built in the valley.”⁶ For Tulle, Rohmer had the love of a “pedestrian geographer.” As a boy and until late in his life, he loved to take the same walks through the leafy, steep forests to the falls at Gimel, on the Montane, and to the Moines canal, a beautiful aqueduct built near the eleventh-century Romanesque abbey, not far from the town of Aubazine. He even proposed another etymology for the name of the city: in the Limousin patois, “tuel” is supposed to translate to English as “hole.” According to Rohmer’s hypothesis, Tulle owes its name not to “tutelle” (trusteeship), as most historians of the region think, but to its unique function of providing access to the river, to its rare situation in the bottom of the valley. Thus for Rohmer, it is the topology of the terrain that makes it possible to reexamine history and its etymological assumptions.

The two Schérer boys were excellent students and already extremely cultivated for their ages. Book culture was a high value for the family, and books were physically present in the living room and the father’s study. Désiré worshipped certain authors—Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Roland Dorgelès—and meticulously clipped articles from the book section of the Figaro newspaper. For their part, the two sons venerated Jules Verne and the Countess of Ségur; they had memorized by heart many passages from these authors. In the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room stood the many volumes of the Nelson series, with white dust jackets and green bindings: Paul Claudel, Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling, and all of Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, the Alsatian duo. For the sentimental young Maurice, “the height of happiness,” as he was later to confess to an actress in one of his films, was to “read a book with the woman with whom [he had] fallen in love.”7

A familiarity with music, which also accompanied Rohmer throughout his life, came from one of his aunts, a former pianist who taught the young man to play the piano on the fifth floor of the house. When he discussed his childhood, Rohmer played down the extent of this musical education: “I learned the piano only vaguely, and with great difficulty; I didn’t get beyond the elementary stage. Even at twenty I couldn’t play with both hands! […] Moreover, I don’t have a very good ear. Nonetheless, I like music, and I like to learn how it is made.”⁸

Finally, both Maurice and René Schérer had a talent for drawing and painting. “He was very good at portraits,” René says, “at that time he had a better mastery of the techniques of watercolor and oil than I did.”9 In the house in Tulle, there are still many drawings and small paintings, most of them made by René in the garden during vacations. Rohmer later wrote that he had approached painting through “schoolbooks that reproduced the paintings in black and white. […] I enjoyed recopying in watercolors the works of Raphael and Rembrandt that I admired (on larger surfaces, and thanks to the system of gridding, which allowed relative exactitude).”¹⁰

However, the future Rohmer’s initial passion was undeniably the theater. First of all, there was the municipal theater, which was unusual with its large sculpted-wood doors, its bright colors, and its architecture in the Moorish style, which the Schérer brothers attended during the Baret tours that brought the Paris repertoire to the provinces. There were also the shows that Maurice himself produced very early on. At the Lycée Edmond-Perrier, with the help of the Latin professor, M. Margaux, he translated, adapted, produced, and acted, along with a few friends, Virgil’s first Eclogue. Maurice, wearing a tunic, played Meliboeus, already taking on “a shepherd’s air.”¹¹ Then he produced George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which he was seen smoking a pipe with his younger brother, while the latter’s first words were “We need two rooms.” Then came Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, retranslated and adapted with the German professor. In each case, these end-of-the-year shows met with a clear success, as did the recitations Maurice declaimed before an admiring audience: whole speeches from Racine, Molière, and Corneille learned by heart. With his cousins, he produced La Farce de Maître Pathelin, which he himself adapted from the octosyllabic verses of the late medieval play. At the age of fourteen, he made some of the costumes and stage settings and, according to his brother, proved to be “very punctilious regarding the production.”¹² The inspiration derived from the Middle Ages was decisive and common to the Schérer brothers; it may have been connected with the motifs of the wallpaper of the staircase in the family home, which depicted medieval knights. These theatrical productions presented in the house’s attic reached their high point the following year, 1935, with Le Neveu du Baron de Crac, adapted from the eponymous novel published by Pierre Henri Cami in 1927. All this was taken very seriously; there were many and assiduous rehearsals and strict and carefully thought-out stage directions: Maurice discovered an original vocation as a director. He adored this little theater of his own creation.

The only art that hardly influenced the young man at all was film. His parents disliked and mistrusted it. Tulle’s cinemas were few in number and attracted small or unsavory audiences, and Rohmer, much later, could remember only three films that played a role in his childhood:

At the beginning of the school year in September 1937, Maurice Schérer went to Paris to attend the Lycée Henri IV, to which he had been admitted on the basis of his record. There he prepared for the competitive examination for admission to the École normale supérieure (ENS). He was a boarder; his parents, who were worried about him, expected the school to supervise him closely. The boy from the provinces was hardworking and his life revolved almost entirely around his classes and studying for them. He worked hard in Latin and Greek, and also in German. The professors were demanding, and Maurice was not quite up to the level of the best of his fellow students, but rather right in the middle of a class that included the cream of the students in literature. Despite this heavy workload, the young man got to know Paris and the Latin Quarter. Rohmer related this revelation which made him forever loyal to the fifth arrondissement:

Another discovery made in Paris: great literature that circulated from bed to bed in the dormitory of the preparatory students at Henri IV. “At Henri IV, I began to read what might be called the ‘great authors,’ ” he recalls in an interview.

In Paris, there was also an initiatory moment for music, even if the boy had already played the piano with his aunt in Tulle: “My discovery of music dates more or less from the year I turned nineteen, when I was at the Lycée Henri IV and had music-loving friends.”¹⁶ Phonograph records were passed around, as were musical scores and books about Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven.

But the main focus of the preparatory courses was philosophy. Maurice was intrigued by the challenge, discovered the work of the philosopher and teacher Alain, which impressed him greatly, as he noted:

As for films, Maurice, who was still only a novice in that area, discovered them at the Studio des Ursulines, a small historic theater near the Luxembourg Palace. “There I encountered what was shortly afterward called le cinéma d’auteur,” Rohmer goes on, “with René Clair and with Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Threepenny Opera, which had a strong impact on me.”¹⁸ Elsewhere in the Latin Quarter, at the Cluny, the Studio du Val-de-Grace, and the Champo, which had just opened in April 1938, Maurice saw films by Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, which he admired a great deal, some American films that interested him little, and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, “the first Hollywood comedy I liked.”¹⁹ However, though these two years of preparatory classes were intensely formative, both deepening his studies and allowing him to discover Paris and the arts, they ended with a twofold failure: in 1939 Maurice passed the examination for admission to the ENS on the rue d’Ulm, but failed the oral examination in July. The following year, which was disrupted by the war, he took the written examination in the spring, but did not receive the results until November 29: he was not accepted.

In early May 1940, immediately after he had taken the written examination, Maurice was drafted into the French army, which had been ready and waiting for the enemy for the past year. But the “phony war” turned into a blitzkrieg, and the young apprentice soldier did not have time to take part in the French campaign before it was already lost. To the great relief of his frightened parents, he was demobilized at the barracks in Valence where he had arrived on June 9, 1940 for training before joining an artillery battalion. On June 10, he wrote to them: “I’m waiting. I don’t know for what, though. I think we’ll have a lot of free time; but what I need most is space. There are a few math majors here who have not yet taken the oral examination at the [École] Polytechnique.”²⁰ Between June 1940 and January 1941, the young man and his parents corresponded frequently, writing almost fifty letters and notes that allow us to follow the itinerary of a student buffeted by the vagaries of a war that had broken out on the other side of France—but which quickly caught up with him.²¹

“Here are a few details,” he wrote the next day, June 11.

Maurice’s main concern was not really his country, which was breaking apart: he did not know that on June 10, the government had fled to Bordeaux, that Paris had been rapidly occupied by German troops, that millions of French people were engaged in an enormous exodus, that the National Assembly was soon to grant Marshal Pétain plenary powers. In his barracks in Valence, he was thinking primarily about the competitive examination for the ENS and the oral exams for which he had to prepare with what he had on hand, without knowing whether he would be accepted or even if the examinations would take place. After the French defeat and the armistice signed at Rethondes on June 22, Schérer was demobilized, but he remained in a military “youth group,” one of the disarmed battalions in which the ex-soldiers were sent from camp to camp under the surveillance of French police supervised by the Germans before they returned to civilian life.

Thus between June 23 and June 27, Maurice Schérer and his comrades from Valence were transferred by train to the Barcarès camp, twenty kilometers north of Perpignan, which had formerly been used as a concentration camp for Spanish Republicans. He remained there for three weeks, during which he was chiefly worried about receiving a few books (Montaigne, Claudel, Rilke, and Charles Morgan were the ones he wanted), a little money to buy chocolate, cookies, and fruit. He pored over his lycée history textbook (Malet and Isaac) and played lots of sports (soccer, gymnastics on the beach, daily swims in the Mediterranean). Then he was sent with his group to Bompas, covering about twenty kilometers on foot. On July 15 the young men were housed in a group of farmhouses on a hillside, surrounded by grapevines. Maurice lived in the “pistachio-colored house.” Life there was very peaceful, even pleasant in the lovely Catalan countryside drenched in summer sun. “We do anything we want here,” he wrote on July 18. “We walk all day long, eating peaches given us by the peasants.”23 It was difficult to prepare for an oral examination under such conditions, with no books or study guides and amid demobilized youths.

Maurice started drawing and painting, using materials he found at hand, and sent his parents several sketches of landscapes. During a walk in Perpignan, he made the fabulous acquisition of beautiful art books on Picasso and Matisse. For him, this initiation into modern painting was an important event: “I came to know it through reproductions: for example, in a city in the south of France where Parisians had taken refuge from the Germans. […] One might have thought that at such a time, only current events interested people! I happened to walk past a bookstore where a drawing by Jean Cocteau was displayed, and I found it amusing. […] But there was also a book with reproductions of works by an artist whose name I knew. […] It was Van Gogh, and I was thrilled! A little later, as I made the rounds of the bookstores in another provincial city, I discovered a book with reproductions of paintings by Picasso and a preface by the critic Jean Cassou. In it I read a sentence that made a great impression on me: the author said Picasso was our time’s greatest creator of forms. I re-used this sentence in my book on Hitchcock. […] Still later, in a bookstore in the same city, […] I saw reproductions of Matisse’s latest works. They also inspired an extraordinary feeling in me.”²⁴

In mid-August 1940, the former soldiers moved again: they were transferred to the barracks in Mont-Louis, higher up, and henceforth had to maintain the roads in the region: “Swinging a pickaxe half the day, playing various sports the other half, along with military exercises without weapons, since it was absolutely necessary to keep us busy. The group is becoming more and more a work camp,”25 he wrote disconsolately on September 13; he could no longer either read or paint. At the end of the month, Maurice and his group crossed Languedoc again to set up near Lodève, in the department of L’Hérault, in a stony, bare land. It was there that he remained the longest, for four months, during which earthmoving work took priority over reading and studying for examinations. “It’s not worth the trouble to send the big Racine, which is bulky and incomplete,” he wrote on November 11. “I would prefer Phèdre and Bérénice in the Petit Larousse edition. But this is not a place where I will be able to undertake serious and sustained work. I’m too tired by the pickaxes and stones. From time to time, I do a little Latin, and I see that it’s of little use. I haven’t yet forgotten enough for intermittent work to be of any benefit to me!”²⁶

Once he had learned, on November 29, that he had not been admitted to the ENS, the young man was unsure what to do, after two failed attempts: “I wonder if I will try a third time?”²⁷ He asked himself where he could pursue his studies: should he return to occupied Paris? Go to Clermont-Ferrand, near his parents, who had been living there since his father’s retirement in 1939? Or to Lyon, where the two Schérer brothers could prepare for admission to the ENS, René for the first time, Maurice for the third? On January 31, 1941, when it was snowing in the Hérault, Maurice Schérer was freed of his military obligations and left youth group number 24, along with a classmate from Henri IV, the future normalien Henri Coulet, who was to become a university professor and an excellent specialist on the novel under the ancien régime. The trip was long and complicated, but two days later he arrived in Clermont-Ferrand, where his parents and his brother met him at the train station.

Désiré and Jeanne Schérer had moved into a gloomy apartment in the old city, at 20, rue du Général Delzons. But their elder son learned to love this city, seduced by its austerity and roughness, the black color of the volcanic stone from which it was built, and the mountains that surround it. It was there that he was to make, almost thirty years later, Ma nuit chez Maud, a film that testifies to the topographical and sentimental interest Rohmer took in the capital of the Massif Central. The two brothers chose to lodge together in a small house near the place de Jaude, in the rue Rameau and pursued their studies there. René was doing his initial year of preparation at the city’s lycée, while Maurice was working on his licence-ès-lettres classiques at the university, where he had a few very good professors who had come from Strasbourg (whose university had moved to Clermont-Ferrand after the German invasion), particularly Pierre Boutang, a young royalist philosopher who was then a fervent supporter of Marshal Pétain and who was to have an enduring influence on Maurice by his energy, his taste for arts and letters, his ferocious writing, and his metaphysics. Music was equally important: “I’d rented an apartment in Clermont,” Rohmer later wrote, “where there was a radio, and I listened to lectures on musicology. It was also on the radio […] that I listened to a program broadcast every morning: Jean Witold’s ‘The Great Musicians.’ I also listened to others, those of the music critic Émile Vuillermoz and the composer Roland-Manuel.”²⁸ Maurice’s musical culture was becoming deeper.

The following year, the Schérer brothers took up residence, again together, near Lyon, in a small attic room in Villeurbanne. René was preparing at the Lycée du Parc for the ENS admission examination, and Maurice was preparing to take the agrégation examination while at the same time earning a little money as a monitor at the Lycée Ampère, where he could also live, and in a warm place to boot. Their life was difficult and impoverished, but intellectually stimulating because they were in contact with a group that had a strong influence on them. This group was composed of disciples of the philosopher Alain—the Hellenist Maurice Lacroix, the Rousseau specialist Jean Thomas, the latinist Marcel Bizos, the philosopher Michel Alexandre and his wife Madeleine, and the writer Jean Guéhenno (the latter two men had been Maurice’s teachers at Henri IV). The two students also participated in a small group of dissidents close to the Resistance, of which Lyon was then the heart: the people associated with the magazine Confluences, the philosopher Jean-François Revel, the future historian specializing in Jean Jaurès, Madeleine Rebérioux, the illustrator Jean Paldacci, and others. In the spring of 1943, after a year of intensive study, René Schérer was admitted to the ENS, while his elder brother passed the written examination for the agrégation in classics, but once again failed the oral examination, which was a dreadful trial for the anxious boy whose shyness was sometimes crippling. On the other hand, he succeeded in passing the CAPES examination in classics, which enabled him to teach in secondary schools.

In the fall of 1943 the Schérer brothers went to study in Paris. René, who was now twenty-one, became a boarder at the ENS rue d’Ulm; Maurice, who was twenty-three, found a furnished room at the Hôtel de Lutèce, at 4, rue Victor-Cousin, which he kept for about fifteen years. The hotel was run by a colorful tenant, Mlle Cordier, to whom he paid his rent regularly each month and who became fond of him. Small, austere, furnished with a single bed, a small desk, and a large armoire, the room lacked charm, but at least its occupant was once again living where he wanted to, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Maurice often joined his younger brother at the rue d’Ulm, where they encountered or re-encountered a brilliant intellectual milieu that greatly impressed them: Pierre Boutang, who had come from Clermont-Ferrand to teach at the ENS; Maurice Clave; Jean-François Revel; Jean-Louis Bory; and Jean-Toussaint Desanti, who entered the ENS the same year as René, and whom Maurice had known at Henri IV. Through Revel, they also became acquainted with Marc Zuorro, who taught at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and whom Revel describes as a “very handsome dandy, quite brilliant, provocative, and homosexual”;29 for a time, he absolutely fascinated the Schérers.

Financially, life was not easy; it was full of everyday privations, loneliness, lack of privacy, and work. There were a few small pleasures—several French films that influenced the young man, including Jean Delannoy’s L’Éternel Retour and Jacques Becker’s Falbalas; the books the brothers exchanged or that were circulating in their little group, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Proust, Malraux, Sartre, Alain; and a radio playing classical music and programs on music. There were also sports; with the Sorbonne literature students’ athletic association, the tall and slender Maurice Schérer regularly engaged in running, high-jumping, and especially basketball at the stadium in Montparnasse. Everything else was beyond his means: no restaurants, parties, cafés, theaters, or concerts; all that was too expensive. This life in a garret, more mean than romantic, more well-behaved than Bohemian, resembles the one that Rohmer was to portray from time to time in his films, such as La Boulangère de Monceau, La Carrière de Suzanne, and Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui, or short films such as Rendez-vous de Paris and Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle. It was a Spartan existence oscillating between student poverty and artistic mysticism: “With the magnificent naïveté of my youth,” the filmmaker later confessed, “I had taken it into my head to practice a kind of asceticism as rigorous as that of the cubist painters whom I was getting to know through pale black-and-white reproductions, a rigor that was at that time also practiced by the twelve-tone composers of the Vienna school, who I didn’t even know existed.”³⁰

“I didn’t hang out with female students, or with many male students, for that matter. I didn’t see a lot of people,” he later admitted. “It was a rather dreary life, rather dull, rather lonely, in which studying was the most important thing.”31 However, he did have a young woman friend, Odette Sennedot, whom René Schérer describes as “very tall and beautiful.”³² Between 1943 and the early 1950s, she regularly came to rue Victor-Cousin to talk or have tea at 5 P.M., a ritual that was already established in Maurice Schérer’s life. He met her at a dinner at the home of Marc Zuorro, whose student she had been at Janson-de-Sailly. Right after the war, she became a stewardess for Air France, an occupation and a position that was very prestigious at the time. A photograph taken in July 1948 shows her in her dress uniform, helping Golda Meir, who was in New York collecting funds for the new state of Israel, to get on a plane leaving for Paris. Elegant, slender, brunette, impeccably turned out, she seems to incarnate a very French kind of feminine distinction. The young man was greatly infatuated with her, but it was a platonic love: long letters to Odette Sennedot, from 1943 to the end of the war, testify to this infatuation whose most fervent expression seems to have taken the form of reading together the novel Maurice was writing, which was largely inspired by this affectionate but inaccessible muse.³³

Oddly, the war and the Occupation have little place in Éric Rohmer’s memories, or even in his work. It has to be assumed that he passed through them without wanting to look at them too much, and especially without getting involved in them. The young man may have cultivated close relations with the Resistance during the few months he spent in Lyon, and in Paris he may have associated with people who were attracted by collaboration, but he always refused to abandon a reserve probably inherited from his father, Désiré Schérer, a loyal government official, Catholic and conservative, a patriot of Alsatian origin who harbored anti-German feelings while at the same time laying claim to his German heritage. The Schérers were always wary of Pétainism, but they never showed any adherence to Gaullism. Neither Resistance nor collaboration.

However, a few events of the war shook up the young Maurice Schérer and strengthened his rejection of commitment, which he considered an excessive, partisan, and not very reasonable stance. During the night of June 8, 1944, the SS division Das Reich, which was moving north under the command of General Lammerding, entered Tulle, which had been liberated the day before. The repression was ferocious: ninety-nine people were hanged from the city’s balconies, and one hundred forty-one others were deported, a hundred and one of whom would never return. Désiré and Jeanne Schérer, who had moved into their home in Tulle shortly before, told their son about this tragedy they had witnessed. The young man was deeply shocked,³⁴ just as he was terrified a few weeks later by the reprisals taken against collaborators in the city. Violence, no matter what kind—physical, psychological, political, ideological—or where it came from, was unbearable for him: he always remained absolutely nonviolent.

On two occasions during the summer of 1944 in Paris and its surroundings, he was more directly confronted by this brutality of history. These experiences are more limited, even cowardly, but they are also more personal, and they left their mark on Maurice Schérer. Relying on tips provided by one of René’s classmates in philosophy, in mid-June the brothers set out on bicycles to buy eggs in Les Andelys. On the way, at Château-Gaillard, they encountered machine-gun fire and were then arrested by a German patrol because without knowing it they had entered a forbidden, dangerous zone. They spent the night under surveillance in the offices of the Milice (French collaborationist militia) in Évreux, the neighboring town, because they were suspected of espionage at a time when, the landing in Normandy having already taken place, the occupying forces were constantly on edge.35 Two months later, Allied troops were in Paris, and Maurice Schérer wanted to forget the fighting so that he could complete his novel, Élisabeth, in peace: “That book was written under fire,” he recalled with a certain irony regarding his general lack of involvement in the present, even when it was historical and at its most exhilarating. “Bullets were whistling past my window. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, I was living in a hotel in the Latin Quarter, near the rue Soufflot, where several skirmishes occurred. It was at precisely that point that I was writing Élisabeth, stuck in my room, not daring to look out the window. At the same time, I was asking myself: ‘Is it possible to write about present events?’ My answer was: ‘No, it isn’t; you have to have some distance on them.’ And my opinion on that point hasn’t changed much.”³⁶

Maurice and René Schérer, born two years apart, were very close. There are a dozen photographs of them taken during their childhood:37 both boys are long-limbed, delicate and slender, classy, with almost feminine features marked by a certain haughtiness despite their smiles for the camera. But whereas René is small and was to remain so, with a miniature body, Maurice grew to be tall, with long, thin legs generally covered by cotton trousers and spindly arms emerging from a light-colored short-sleeved shirt, the whole making an impression of well-groomed elegance that suggests neither the endurance nor the athletic ability that less obviously characterized his powerful body. These middle-class children cultivated the appearance of the upper middle-class, and at least aspired to an aristocratic way of life and culture. What is also striking in these photographs is Maurice’s concern for his younger brother: his arm is wrapped protectively around the boy, his hand on his shoulder or back: these gestures indicate the gentle care and attentive love also expressed in the way he passed books, objects, and knowledge to René. The two boys are often dressed in the same way, but the smaller one is always in front, in the first row, the orchestra seat, whereas the elder boy is behind, keeping watch over him. In a drawing bearing the inscription “René Schérer, 1942,”³⁸ Maurice gave his brother a delicate, angelic face, and we can see in this the same concern for him, an idealizing kindness. Was little René the better of the two Schérer boys? Some photos taken during their adolescence might suggest that, since the relationship between the two seems to be reversed: René becomes the protector. At that time their relation changed, the younger brother teaching, training, transmitting to the elder abilities he did not have.

The better of the two Schérer boys? That was what their parents thought, especially the mother, who was so fearful and protective. It was clear to the family that René was intellectually superior: he rapidly became the brains of the family, the one who succeeded and was destined to go far, the one who added new rungs to the revered ladder of professorial ascension. A Schérer began as a schoolteacher, a low-level official, a department head, and became a professor in a private lycée and then a public lycée—that was the level Maurice reached, and that was not bad—but René was to pursue the dream as far as the prestige of a university professorship. Their test scores corroborated this family romance: Maurice Schérer was a very good student, but René was better, that was all there was to it. René entered the ENS at the age of twenty-one, whereas his elder brother failed three times in a row, at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-two; René launched a brilliant career in philosophical research while Maurice twice failed the examination for the Agrégration in classics, first in 1943 and then again in 1947, and this wounded him deeply. He failed all the important oral examinations he took between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven, a sign indicating a lack of charisma combined with a great shyness and, on top of that, a halting way of speaking, an uneven, unclear delivery that sometimes verged on stammering. Everything considered, Maurice’s performance as a student was far from shameful, to be sure: he earned a licence-ès-lettres, qualified as a teacher, and was twice allowed to take the examination for the agrégation in classics. But he was left frustrated, doomed to hold the laborious position of a certified teacher of Latin and Greek in a secondary school.

However, he never complained. He was neither jealous of his brother nor resentful of his parents, and he was not bitter against the system. No doubt that was a sign of pride: there is no room for bemoaning one’s fate when one will accept nothing less than success. Confronted by his younger brother’s success, he felt nothing but affection, protectiveness, and even pride. “He had great admiration for study, for knowledge,” René Schérer writes. Teaching suited him, but his two failures on the agrégation examination left him scarred. I think that if he had succeeded, he might not have had a career as a writer, and still less as a filmmaker. The most traditional kind of success would have amply satisfied him. Right up to the end, he regretted not having had a university career. He did not dream of being a Bohemian, or have a firm vocation as an artist or writer. On the other hand, after his relative academic failure, he had to shift much of his ambition to literature and cinema. Becoming a writer, being a filmmaker, represented a kind of revenge.”39 The two brothers never quarreled, and their bond remained extremely solid and perceptible: “We didn’t agree about everything,” René Schérer goes on. “We sometimes argued. I was more open, progressive, left-leaning, prepared to take risks; he was more conservative, prudent, traditional. I recognized my homosexuality quite early on, whereas he could not even utter the word, so foreign did all that seem to him—he spoke of ‘esthetes.’ All this could have divided us as early as the 1940s. But I believe that until I was twenty-five I never went a month without seeing him. We shared a sensibility: a love of beauty, the capacity to be moved by artworks, a common expression of what we felt at that time.”⁴⁰

The Schérer brothers’ closeness was based on an ongoing communication: readings, writings, discussions, viewing and talking about art, a kind of fraternal maieutics, a philosophical friendship. A few fragments of this communication remain, letters dated from 1940 and 1941, during the few weeks the two brothers were separated, the younger writing a paper on Rousseau’s novel, La Nouvelle Héloise at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, the elder being drafted into the army and then discharged in southern France. On August 3, 1940, Maurice commented on the drawings René had sent him: “There’s a certain style, an original style, and that’s what matters. I think you should continue along this line.”41 Their conversation continued, regarding the masters that the two brothers discovered at that time, especially Picasso. The elder brother concluded, referring to his own case: “I’ve never yet painted anything except an atrocious gouache. You have to travel at least three kilometers to find anything interesting. I await your comments on the smallest sketches. As for myself, I’ve found a few new ideas.”⁴² Ten days later, Maurice reacted to his brother’s remarks and initiated a philosophical discussion of art: “I also believe that the idea can be grasped only in contact with the real. The value of a work of art does not derive from its metaphysical ambitions: there is no being without appearance, in painting any more than elsewhere. The work of art is self-sufficient, that is the great lesson taught us by Picasso. We arrive at a pure art (the true art for art’s sake) in which it is no longer a matter of depicting but of painting. And that is how we return to classicism.”⁴³ In these letters we find, in addition to Rohmer’s notion of a cyclical return of modern art toward its own classicism, a theme that is found in most of his writings on cinema, a touching consideration for his brother’s ideas and works. “You’ve shown me,” he wrote in November 1940, that what I wrote on my examination last year was incomplete and stupid in many respects. It’s through these letters that I feel I am making progress and am not confronting hostilities all alone. I’m deeply grateful to you for that.”⁴⁴

A few weeks later, when they were back in Clermont-Ferrand and had decided to live together, this collaboration grew still more intense. Together, they wrote little essays on aesthetics and short fictional narratives arising from their conversations about literature and the novels they were rapidly going through, inventing a system of shared marginal annotations, a kind of “roped reading” that René calls “our common writings.”⁴⁵ The authors they confronted in this way belonged to them and were to influence Maurice in his literary ventures—particularly the British author George Meredith and the Americans John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Here we see the profoundly creative aspect of this close fraternal relationship. This core of deep friendship was inalterable. Even when they were far away from each other, as they were in the 1950s when René Schérer was teaching in Algeria, and even though they took completely separate, contradictory paths—René as the spokesperson for a libertarian philosophy, a defender of homosexuality as a mode of thought as much as a way of life, professor at the University of Paris-Vincennes, which was the center of an academic counterculture—or when confronting adversity—for example, in 1982, when René Schérer was indicted in a child sex abuse case on the charge of “inciting minors to debauchery”—their bonds were never broken.

The two brothers continued to read each other’s writings, to see each other, and to follow each other’s careers. They supported, helped, and promoted one another when that seemed called for. They remained brothers for life. They also remained sons, each taking care of their parents, whom they knew were more fragile than they: “My dear Maurice,” René wrote from Algiers in December 1950, “could you send me a razor, a couple of shirts, and ties? I am living very frugally here. Are you going to Tulle for Christmas? I beg you, my dear brother, be as kind as you can to Papa and Mama, and reassure them regarding my fate. Affectionately,…”⁴⁶

The most substantial signs of artistic ability were pictorial. Between 1940 and 1942, Maurice Schérer made a number of sketches, drawings, and small-format paintings in oils or watercolors. He made “copies,” of a few Picassos reproduced in color, for example, La Femme au chat, and a Matisse-like Le Carnaval des femmes, as well as experiments in the manner of Gauguin, Cézanne, or Van Gogh that allowed him to become familiar with the masters. This work was accompanied by a historical and theoretical investigation; he wrote critical studies such as the one on Jean Dubuffet in 1944, as is shown by a letter from the poet Francis Ponge, the editor of the weekly Action dated November 29 of that year, thanking him for his article. It was “accepted by our editorial committee,” but “we do not yet know in which issue it will appear.”47 Never, it seems, and no further trace of this article has been found.

Maurice’s favorite kind of painting was the portrait, and especially sketches of women in pencil, pastel, felt pen, and even ballpoint. About twenty of them still exist:⁴⁸ studies of faces, legs, or breasts, with titles such as Desire, Seduction, Innocence, Envy, and Avarice, dating from 1945, portraits of his brother René, landscapes in the cubist style, and a few overtly erotic works drawn in violet-colored ink. All this testifies to a certain graphic ease in a young artist who did not hesitate, either then or later on, to sketch out his characters, ideas, and situations on a sheet of paper.

The archives of Maurice Schérer’s youth also contain many poems, mainly love poems devoted to the various parts of the female body. Generally dated from late 1942 and 1943, these verses correspond to the time he spent studying in Lyon and seem to have been in part the result of a collective composition or competition among young poets, since we also find texts signed by René Schérer or Jean-François Revel, who was Maurice’s schoolmate at the Lycée du Parc. Taken together, all this resembles a lover’s breviary, with precepts (“To love, one has to know how to keep quiet”49), slightly misogynist remarks (“I cease here the tedious enumeration of the qualities necessary in any woman”⁵⁰), and particular dedications (“You are the joyous ardor of victory”⁵¹). Finally, a few amorous embraces add spice to these youthful verses, such as those in “Vers toi me voici maintenant porté,” (1943) or “Aimer de ton corps et de l’ardeur”: “Dont tes yeux mis à part et l’éclat de tes lèvres / Ton ventre et ta joue et tes jambes / Lisses et plates comme une surface d’eau / Comme une petite partie de vague montante / Porter hisser dans l’air durci / La perfection immédiate de ta beauté.”⁵² The other poetic inspiration is death, the author lingering with melancholy over his own dying body in “Une ombre sur ma jambe a dessiné des veines”: “Les fleurs qui germeront de mon sang sont livides / Je vis, je vis encor mais vivrai-je demain? / Mon coeur est noir de sang mes artères sont vides / Et les rayons de mai s’étreignent dans mes mains.”⁵³ Éric Rohmer was never to give up these poetic exercises, but he later practiced them in a more playful, even juvenile way, or in the form of refrains and ritornellos, abandoning the romantic, dark, erotic, somewhat conventional inspiration of his youth.

In early 1939, when he was eighteen, Maurice Schérer signed his first plans, notes, and manuscript notes describing fictional characters and situations, thus testifying to his taste for writing, and indeed to his ambition to become a novelist. On the back of one of his Latin compositions dated February 13, 1939, he wrote a summary of a story entitled “Le Glorieux,” subtitled “Trois mois de vacances” (The glorious one: Three months’ vacation), and sketched in a few lines the portraits of three characters: Simone, Maud, and Max.⁵⁴

Another text, undated but probably written a few months later, summarizes a more disturbing, even perverse plot and atmosphere under the Sadian title “The Misfortunes of Virtue”: “That evening, chance had brought together the three characters in this story. Wanda, Franz, and Gertrud did not yet know each other. They soon acquired the habit of luxury and desire. Franz savored both his solitude and his power. Insensitive to scorn, Wanda loved Franz but patiently awaited his defeat. Too aware of her beauty to expect anything from chance, Gertrud was intoxicated by his indifference. But in the case of Gertrud, humiliation turned an evening’s desire into a passion that daily grew more demanding. For her, the very purity of their love was the cruelest of offenses.”⁵⁵ After many twists and turns in desire, the story concludes with these two abrupt but sentimental lines: “‘Kiss me,’ Gertrud said to Franz. Dazzled by their happiness, they contemplated each other for a moment, unmoving. And this was their first kiss.”⁵⁶

Soon thereafter came three densely written short stories of eight, nineteen, and twenty-five handwritten pages, dating from July or December 1943. “Carrelage” (Tiling), the first, relates in a long monologue Gim’s confession to Rolande regarding a young blonde woman he had admired near a pond, and whose whole existence he imagined on the basis of the way in which she entered the water—her poses, her manners, her airs, the straps and folds of her white swimsuit.57 The second story, “Fin de journée” (End of the day),⁵⁸ is also connected with water and the friendly and amorous games played in the water. The action takes place on the banks of a river in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, above Perpignan, in an enchanting setting bathed in summer heat, and brings together “kids” who come for the most part from Toulouse or Narbonne. A young duo lives secluded in a beautiful house deeper in the mountains. The group’s plan is to go visit them. The play of glances, sentimental dialogues, convoluted and nebulous intrigues, swims, walks, and dances, shy caresses and flaunted haughtiness, sudden explosions of storms and the violence of feelings, even brutal and inappropriate acts, but especially detailed descriptions of attitudes, appearances, actions (eating a plum and spitting out the pit, smoking a cigarette on a seaside terrace, preparing for and attending a ball)—all this creates a universe signed with the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier—which appeared a few months later on the cover of Schérer’s first novel, which included a number of elements from this short story, though the setting had been moved to the banks of the Marne, near Paris. “Une journéee (A day),⁵⁹ the third, somewhat more developed tale, recounts the story of Gérard and Annie, an independent couple whose misadventures and dialogues oddly anticipate Rohmer’s film The Aviator’s Wife.

Then come the first publications signed “Maurice Schérer”: two further short stories, “La Demande en mariage” (The marriage proposal) in Espale, a review published in Clermont-Ferrand, in early 1945, and “Le Savon” (The bar of soap), a minimalist chronicle of a flirtation that appeared in La Nef in September 1948. The first of these stories, set in a humble milieu of farmers, milliners, and café waiters, has as its subject the pathological timidity of a man named Roger Mathias, who dares not declare his love to Janine, the young woman he is seeing. He watches her, spies on her, breaks into her apartment when she is at the movies, is literally obsessed with her, until finally it is she who, by chance and abruptly, in the course of a anodyne conversation, proposes marriage.⁶⁰ This thirty-page narrative in dialogue can also be seen as a distant origin of The Aviator’s Wife.

A last short story, “Rue Monge,”61 a manuscript of forty-two pages dated August 1944, was to have a cinematic sequel as well. By chance, the narrator, a lonely young man wandering around Paris during the summer of 1943, meets in rue Monge a woman he does not know. He is immediately certain that she will become his wife. He courts her insistently, but in the meantime he spends a night at the home of Maud, a seductive woman who is elegant, cultivated, and libertine. However, he continues to see the other woman, whom he ends up marrying. My Night at Maud’s is already there, situated in the Latin Quarter in Paris and not in Clermont-Ferrand, twenty-five years before it was made.

At the age of twenty-four, in June and July 1944, Maurice Schérer put the finishing touches on the manuscript of a three-hundred-page novel entitled Élisabeth. He had begun it five years earlier, even before the war began, because the first traces of “Début de rupture” (The beginning of a breakup)⁶² and “Pluie d’été” (Summer rain),⁶³ the two original titles, date from March 15, 1939, and consist of a manuscript summary with seven rubrics.⁶⁴ In addition, there are notes on the characters of Élisabeth, Michel, Claire, and Irène, as well as a few words on specific situations and lines of dialogue written down on paper. If Schérer labored for more than five years on this first novel, that is probably because it was for him a kind of revenge, as he himself suggests in a later interview.⁶⁵ His ambition to be a writer, even if it usually remains unacknowledged—his brother René mentions that he never heard his elder brother openly declare his literary vocation⁶⁶—remained the only thing that allowed him to overcome the disappointments and humiliations of having failed his examinations and to cope with the pain of seeing others—his friends, his younger brother—succeed where he had not. It was the novel and literature in general that played this role, not cinema. It is noteworthy that at this point in his life Maurice Schérer had not produced a single film project, outline of a scenario, or stage direction. He was not a movie lover, because at the age of twenty-five he had seen only a few dozen films in all—and the ones he liked and remembered could be counted on the fingers of his two hands. Cinema was not a major factor in his youth, as it was for his future companions in the New Wave. At the same age, in the middle of the 1950s, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, and Godard had probably seen thousands of films, organized film clubs, and written dozens of articles on cinema.

Élisabeth is a “novel of manners”67 whose plot amounts to almost nothing: Dr. Roby lives with his wife Élisabeth, the caretaker of a lovely estate in Percy, near Meaux. In the summer of 1939 (the date is scarcely mentioned) their son Bernard, who is studying medicine in Lyon, comes home for vacation. He finds there his younger sister, Marité, his cousin, Claire, and two girls of her age, Huguette and Jacqueline, who are fickle and like to dance and flirt, as well as a family friend, Michel, who is supposed to marry Irène, an older widow. Organized in three parts, the text revolves around these characters, avoiding transitions and traditional connections, advancing through short scenes of dialogue or description that are deliberately flat, and ends by weaving an indirect chronicle of the appearances and feelings of these summertime quadrilles. On two occasions, the anodyne turns into an uneasy abruptness, as when a character is seized by a fit of fury and almost rapes a young girl, or when Michel is gripped by hatred and scorn with regard to his mistress Irène, saying to himself over and over: “I hate her.” Every character thus seems to have his own version of a group portrait on vacation and of the depiction of a place, Élisabeth’s big house, of which we see only fragments in a complex and fragmented mirror.

Sensitivity to light, to temperature variations, to the caprices of climate and souls, reinforces this impressionism, this pointillism of tone and style. This is shown by the titles of certain chapters, (“Late Afternoon,” “During the Rain,” “Morning Thoughts”), descriptions (“The swimsuit she had been wearing three days ago in the meadow made her hips look fat, but dressed, she retained that somewhat rangy light-footedness that made her look like a small, jumping animal”), droll remarks (“If you’re here to flirt, you’re wasting your time!”), or a few sarcastic assertions (“Resembling a little girl doesn’t make a woman look any younger”). Maurice Schérer took his time planning, writing, and rewriting this delicate ballistics of amorous approaches, these sentimental shimmerings, this gravity in writing about things that are nonetheless lightweight. The work is not entirely convincing because it smells of the lamp. The influences and readings of his youth sometimes make themselves felt too explicitly. For example, echoes of the Countess of Ségur can be heard in the dialogues and the situations of these children playing at being adults. But that makes the book extremely revealing. We glimpse Colette in the descriptions of nature and summer ambience, the gardens at the waterside, the flowers and fruits that open up and imprint their tastes, their colors, their smells. And the André Gide of The Counterfeiters, in the multiplication of the various characters’ points of view, casting doubt on reality and linear narration. Finally and above all, the young man’s initial attempt is deeply colored by the new American novel in the style of John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer and certain passages in The Big Money) or William Faulkner (the beginning of Sanctuary): the dry transparency of the narrative resulting from the disappearance of an omniscient point of view and the objectivity of the description of behavior and actions, characters being sometimes almost transformed into objects. Rohmer later acknowledged his debt: “The clearest influence is the American novelists I had just discovered, in particular Dos Passos, on whom Jean-Paul Sartre had published an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française that I found impressive. These authors interested me not only by their content but also by their form, by their behaviorist way of describing things.”68

In this sense, Élisabeth is a contemporary novel, which is paradoxical for a work that was written in the middle of the war but never mentions it, a work that avoids the very imperious reality of its troubled time. The contemporary context of Élisabeth is more stylistic and intellectual, it is the literary world of a postwar period full of novels that dared to experiment with new, less traditional, more descriptive ways of writing. A pre-Nouveau Roman context to which Rohmer was to lay claim: “In a certain way, I think Élisabeth was situated in a trend that anticipated the Nouveau Roman, though it remained very far from it on many points.”⁶⁹ So that it can be said that of all the “new novels” of 1945 and 1946 to which it is related—Jean-Paul Sartre’s Âge de la raison, Roger Vailland’s Drôle de jeu, Raymond Queneau’s Loin de Rueil, Julien Gracq’s Un beau ténébreux, Claude Simon’s Le Tricheur, and Jean-Louis Bory’s Mon village à l’heure allemande—the one to which Élisabeth is the closest is Marguérite Duras’s La Vie tranquille.⁷⁰

“Claire’s knee formed, beyond the sharp line of the dress, a small dark brilliant triangle,” writes the author of Élisabeth (p. 131). This simple fetish suffices to indicate the Rohmerian posterity of a first novel that cannot be considered either decisive or important, but which occupies an interesting place in the genesis of the work to come. In the meantime, the young man concludes his novel with these lines: “Today Claire has put on a very flared pleated royal blue skirt that comes down just as far as her knee. She uncrosses her legs, holds out her hand, and violently drums the tips of her fingers on her skirt and rubs the fabric, pinching it. She withdraws her hand, puts the book on her belly, leans forward and lifts her skirt up to her thigh: she looks and scratches with a fingernail. She pulls down her skirt, crosses her legs, and begins to read.”⁷¹ Then, on the first of the three school notebooks⁷² that comprise this manuscript, Maurice Schérer used a black pen to draw the NRF’s logo. His dream of being a writer was thus written in capital letters.