Clair de femme by Romain Gary
Translation by Allison C. Parker | |
| |Ms. Parker's translation into English of the French novel Clair de femme, by Romain Gary, charts the emotional journey of a man who loves his wife beyond reason and who|
| |must nevertheless learn to let her go--a tragicomic story of the 1970s that foreshadowed the importance of end-of-life politics in present society. |
| |In the following excerpt, protagonist Michel Folain speaks to Lydia, a near-stranger, about his dying wife's wish: that he find her replacement; that, above all, he not|
| |lose his capacity to love. |
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| |When you have loved one woman with all your heart, with your every morning, with all the forests, fields, springs, and birds, you know that you have not yet loved her |
| |enough and that the world is nothing more than the beginning of all that you have left to do. I'm not asking you to take vows with me. I know that you just wanted to |
| |help a woman, make her death more gentle. We've talked all night, but I've said almost nothing to you, because it's your lips that were speaking to me of her. And you |
| |will never know to what extent she believed in you and had confidence in you. We often went to Flot: she preferred the great forest over the sea, which is so changing. |
| |She knew she was going to die, but you can't see it in the middle of the landscape. When someone asked her what sign she was, she would answer, laughing: "Firefly." She|
| |loved to touch the black rocks that dreamed of trembling, of the ephemeral. We walked among the trees in search of