Extreme cases often show clearly an obscured everyday reality. The outrageous story of Séverine, the errant wife who, although she plays the role of devoted young spouse for her darling husband every evening, spends the afternoons working on her back at the local whore establishment, remains outrageous thirty-odd years after first publication.


However Kessel tells his story with subtlety as well as sensation, so that, amongst other things, this is a very good essay on married love, showing how the close tenderness of marriage can be as infantilising and unerotic as it is charming and warming.


The basic theme of the novel is an interesting one; the two faces of love; the affectionate and the passionate — that sometimes join but are probably essentially opposed... Séverine, from an impeccably bourgeois background and sent off to an English boarding school starts off hopelessly frigid, which her husband sees as making her ‘incredibly pure’. But an illness makes her withdraw into herself and, sparked by the friendship of two more worldly types, Séverine, defenceless against passion as only the purely passionless can be, is swept into prostitution as a way of experiencing her sexuality in all its raw energy.


Belle de Jour is convincingly enough narrated for us to share her delirium, the fatal weakness of will and reason that wild sexuality can reduce us to. This book was filmed, rather decorously, with Catherine Deneuve in the title role by the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel.

‘Séverine was brought in to him one evening when, soiled and disappointed again, she was about to leave Mme Anaïs’. The bell stopped her just as she was reaching for her hat. The girls could tell that something unpleasant was in store by the way the madame called them. And they were right.

The man waiting for them was drunk. Wearing the short canvas coat of a market labourer, he alternately stared at his muddy shoes and around the room — which obviously pleased him. Two strong hands rested on his knees.

‘That one,’ he said, nodding towards Belle de Jour, ‘and a shot of rum.’

She undressed while he drank. He watched her without a word. Then, without a word he took her. His body was heavy. Everything about him, even the rheum in his eyes, seemed thicker than in an ordinary man. And Séverine, suddenly recognising his coarse fury and bestial sensuality, groaned from the depths of her being. The desire slaking itself on her body was no careful, refined thing: it was an aspect of that trinity which had led her to this bed. The man in the blind-alley, the man with the obscene neck, the bargeman: they were all three satisfying themselves on her body in the person of this man whose weight crushed her, whose knotty limbs quartered her. An undefinable flood of feeling coursed through her. Both surprise and fear appeared on her face. She ground her teeth; then suddenly, her expression became so relaxed, so happy and young, that anyone but the man whose prey she was would have been amazed. He put a folded bill on the bedside table and left.’ p72-73