The Bachelors     by Henry de Montherlant, Translated by T Kilmartin Original title: Les Célibataires Original language: French Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1977 Format: Hardcover, 189 pages ISBN: 0837198119 List Price: $60.00, £39.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £39.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $60.00 Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 189 pages List Price: £4.95 Not available for ordering

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First published in 1934, The Bachelors is an ironic parable of a backward-looking France’s inability to come to terms with modern reality. Léon the Count of Coantré and his uncle Elie the Baron of Coëtquidan live in a dingy rented flat, grunt their disapproval of international progress at each other over meagre meals (‘Another few useless bastards out of the way,’ snarls Elie when he reads of a disaster in the paper) and wallow in self-pity when they remember wealthy or beautiful women they’ve lost — although in Elie’s case they were perhaps only imaginary in the first place. An inversion of the traditional sequence of inheritance (all the two men inherit from Léon’s mother is her debts plus undertaker’s bills) forces Léon to sell all their furniture and look for work, a task at which he’s hopelessly inept.


Counterbalancing these two is Elie’s successful brother Octave, who decides that to keep abreast of things one must order English newspapers and so reads The Daily Mail although he doesn’t speak a word of English. Of all three Montherlant says: ‘Their prejudices and their mannerisms covered them as though with a varnish preventing all contact between them and the outside world.’


The style of The Bachelors is reminiscent of Balzac: Montherlant characterises through descriptive detail (Elie’s tattered, out-of-date clothes, the string that keeps his trousers up) and also through carefully chosen comparison — Elie hands the landlady a newspaper ‘as if he had been offering her a diamond tiara.’ Léon’s eventual death in a Normandy shack is set against a lyrical description of geese flying South: they, muses Léon, don’t have to worry about money; and they too, adds Montherlant implicitly, are deserting him.

‘Once the cook had gone, M. de Coantré experienced a kind of euphoria comparable to that of a martyr going to the stake or, better still, a man who has slit open a vein and whose life is ebbing away: the languorous pleasure of utter impotence. There was something beatific about the ease with which M. de Coantré shed his possessions. And this is clearly what the masses feel when they interpret the famous passage, referring to a certain category of beings to mean that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ p73-74