The Children’s Room     by Louis René Des Forets, Translated by Jean Stewart Original language: French Published by Riverrun Press, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1997 Format: Paperback, 240 pages ISBN: 0714501654 List Price: $11.95, £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.95 Published by Calder Pub. Date: 1963 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 208 pages Not available for ordering Published by Calder Pub. Date: 1966 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 208 pages List Price: £5.95 Not available for ordering

This collection of stories won des Forets the prestigious Prix des Critiques in 1960. Here, as elsewhere, he’s concerned with language, the social contracts it imposes and the fundamental solitude that lies behind it and which it cannot ultimately overcome.


In the two most interesting stories, The Bavard and The Children’s Room, the narrator appears in the role of voyeur, but in the first one he’s made present through his incessant chattering whereas in the second he figures as an eavesdropper. Both stories contain children’s voices, a motif perhaps borrowed from Verlaine’s Parsifal. After a frenzied verbal outpouring in a dance hall has caused The Bavard’s narrator to be laughed at and beaten up, the children’s voices wafting over a nearby wall express ‘utter indifference to human suffering.’ The voices in The Children’s Room float through a doorway, the out-of-sight children merging for the listener into a single, disembodied child. They talk in vague terms of the unique and indefinable ‘rules’ observed in one of their schools and, acting them out, entertain the possibility that the ever-silent ‘Georges’ will finally speak and ‘save us all.’ ‘Georges’, it eventually turns out, is the narrator himself, the children’s voices murmurs rising from the depths of his own silence.

‘Now that the children have ceased to speak, it is as if he himself had renounced speech, but then his presence behind the door has no purpose and seems motivated solely by the imminence of some dénouement. Nevertheless, far from feeling himself frustrated by the children’s muteness, he would have considered himself, as it were, admitted to take part in their game himself, were it not that his silence, by swallowing up the very memory of their words, has only ceased to be the children’s silence in order to become his own.’ p127-128