Jeanne Moreau in Francois Truffaut's 1962 film version of Jules et Jim. Photograph: The Ronald Grant ArchiveA shadowy figure amid the 20th-century beau monde – friend to Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and buyer for the American art collector John Quinn – Henri-Pierre Roche waited until his 70s to publish his teasingly semi-autobiographical debut novel, which became one of the 20th century's most famous depictions of a menage-a-trois.
Jules and Jim are best friends – perhaps soulmates – who together pursue a charmed life of bohemian indulgence in turn-of-the-century Paris. Drifting from liaison to liaison they share their women as easily as wine, without jealousy or regret – and then they meet Kate. With her "archaic" smile and lips made for "milk – and blood", Kate is obedient only to the diktat: "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword." Marrying first Jules and then Jim, Kate draws all three into an ecstatic cycle of intimacy and betrayal, unleashing a seemingly limitless capacity for tenderness, forgiveness and revenge until their passions eventually burn out.
Roche's guileless prose lends the quality of a parable to his story, which is startling in its erotic candour and its visionary pursuit of love. Kate owes much – perhaps too much – to the figure of the eternal feminine: cruel, beautiful and volatile, she is more archetype than actuality. But that is not really Roche's concern – instead he probes the "essential quality of our intimate emotions", laying bare the complex and paradoxical dynamics of desire.
Today the novel is eclipsed by Francois Truffaut's celebrated nouvelle vague film starring Jeanne Moreau, and Truffaut contributes a valuable afterword to this edition. Reflecting on the film in 2000, Moreau described it as "the dreamed image of amorous life"; in its exuberant rejection of conventional morality, Roche's novel describes an emotional logic that is both inscrutable and compelling.
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