Éric Rohmer's novel 'Élisabeth', written under a pen name, published in English for the first time

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My edition of Élisabeth was written by a man called Gilbert Cordier and published by Gallimard in 1946. The novel didn’t go far and eventually disappeared from circulation. Sixty years later Gallimard reissued it under the altered title of La maison d’Élisabeth . Now, almost eighty years after its initial publication in France, it has been translated into English by Aaron Kerner for McNally Editions under its original title of Élisabeth .

Its author, however, was never Gilbert Cordier. Cordier never existed. Cordier is the pen name for Éric Rohmer (1920-2010), the famous French film director who gave us My Night at Maud’s , Claire’s Knee , The Green Ray , A Summer’s Tale , Pauline at the Beach , A Good Marriage , Chloé in the Afternoon , and so many other classics of the Nouvelle Vague. Indeed, Éric Rohmer, once the editor of the Cahiers du cinéma and frequently eclipsed by notable directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle, and Jacques Rivette, is now perhaps the most visible of them all, and his films are regularly shown, sometimes independently, sometimes in assorted compilations with other Éric Rohmer films. Many, but not all of his films, are grouped: Six Moral Tales , Comedies and Proverbs , and Tales of the Four Seasons . He wrote all of them.

What is surprising is that Éric Rohmer was never his real name. The sometimes-scrupulous Wikipedia is unable to determine whether his real name is Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer or Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, the surname in either case derived most probably from the German Schärer or Scherrer , meaning a shearer of cloth or sheep. His pseudonym turns out to be the combination of two names: the actor-director Erich von Stroheim, of Grand Illusion and Sunset Boulevard fame, and the writer Sax Rohmer, who created Dr. Fu Manchu.

Ironically, Stroheim was born Erich Oswald Stroheim (the “von,” an aristocratic designation, was entirely fictitious); and as for Sax Rohmer, his real name was Arthur Ward. Éric Rohmer’s name is therefore none other than a pseudonym forged on two pseudonyms. If that were not enough, Rohmer sometimes gave different dates for his birth, and it is still unclear whether he was born in Tulle or in Nancy. Thus, we don’t know his birthplace, his date of birth, or his full real name. What we do know is that he was a very observant Catholic.

That the Second World War is merely a month away is the furthest thing from their thoughts. This is their summer idyll; they’re on time off and they mean to enjoy it.

Full disclosure, Rohmer’s daughter-in-law is my second cousin. Éric Rohmer always kept to himself and was so thoroughly private that even his parents never knew he was a famed filmmaker. He also made a point of distancing himself from the life immediately surrounding him. As he writes in his staged interview to Élisabeth published in this volume, “while the bullets were still flying…right past my window” in 1944 Paris and as skirmishes raged throughout the city, young Rohmer was busily writing his novel Élisabeth . As he goes on to ask a few words later, “’Is it even possible to write about what’s unfolding at present?’ My answer was: ‘No, it’s not—you need to take a step back.’ And on that point, my opinions haven’t changed at all.”

Indeed, his opinion never wavered. If one can isolate a feature of Élisabeth later inscribed in so many of Rohmer’s films, it is that everyone has been put on time-out . Unlike children who’ve misbehaved, his characters have not crossed the line, and may never do so, but the desire to misbehave has crossed their mind, and it sits there with nothing to allay it. We watch them struggle, not with others, but with themselves. We watch them come up with justifications, but we are not taken in, and neither are they. They want someone but it’s never sufficiently clear whether it is their body or just their mischievous mind that craves that other person. They don’t know. We don’t know.

Rohmer’s world is real enough, but those he portrays are always somehow detached and distanced from day-to-day concerns. Most, but not all, do not have monetary or professional cares. They are well-established and anything that might have troubled them turns out to be incidental, except, perhaps, for their quixotic drives. We get the overall ambiance of their lives but we never get their lived-in, domestic lives. The same holds true of the towns or cities they inhabit. We get the pervasive ambiance of the setting, but the place itself is seldom more than a backdrop.

In Paris, people take trains, run into each other, walk along parks, ride buses, enter or leave buildings, sit in cafés, buy things, and lead thoroughly uneventful lives, but nothing external impinges on them. In Élisabeth , people drive cars, ride bicycles, and nearly get into collisions or bicycle accidents; and because of the heat, they may even collapse momentarily. But as in so many of Rohmer’s films, his characters are young and on holiday, free to enjoy the beach or the countryside. As Huguette, a character in the novel, remarks, it’s a world where “everything just devolves into flirtation.” That the Second World War is merely a month away is the furthest thing from their thoughts. This is their summer idyll; they’re on time off and they mean to enjoy it. The closing scene of the book shows us Claire lounging in her folding chair in the garden, next to a linden tree, totally absorbed by the book she is reading while trying to avoid too much sun. World War II never happened, will never happen, and despite Rohmer’s claim, bullets won’t ever fly past their window.

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Élisabeth addresses two main characters. One is Michel, who is basically debating whether to end his relation with the older and widowed Irène. Things are tense and more than once Irène will break down and cry. She gives Michel leave to do as he pleases, and her attitude toward him is one of complete surrender and manumission. She won’t fight him. Meanwhile, he grows to suspect that he absolutely hates her. She does not know that he would prefer to break with her, though her tears suggest that she is plenty aware that their relation is at a crossroad.

He may hate her but he also loves her. “I know her too well to be able to see her, I love her too much…” “Love is a habit you stumble into, never something you choose.” Irène, on the other hand, “hate[s] him, too, and c[an’t] bring herself to tell him, because at bottom she still want[s] to love him, even if she no longer really believe[s] in it.”

These edgy insights into the contradictory nature of the human psyche may sound a touch unleavened, if not breezy, but then this is what makes them unmistakably Rohmerian. Rohmer is still very young, to be sure, maybe somewhat callow, but these highly discerning insights into conflicting emotions and human psychology will end up appearing in all of his films.

In another scene, Michel pretends to be his cousin Bernard. Indeed, he says he is Bernard in so devious and insistent a manner to Jacqueline that it is clear to the reader that he cannot be Bernard. Michel is grabbing Jacqueline in his car but she struggles and succeeds in freeing herself. Immediately following Bernard’s failed attempt, she tells him that he might prefer an older woman—which reminds us that he is very possibly not Bernard, but Michel, still wondering whether to end his relationship with Irène.

This identity swap between the two men, who are cousins, is not entirely clear; indeed, it is mentioned so tacitly that one should be reminded that Rohmer was writing his novel at a time when the famed nouveau roman was already being born in the hands of writers like Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Rohmer’s novel is frequently elliptical and enigmatic, especially when he is reluctant to tell us who some of the characters are with respect to the others. As a result, many readers may be confused. But who is not confused by the very last scene of My Night at Maud’s , when Jean-Louis Trintignant finally intuits—and he simply intuits with no proof to the contrary—that the woman he married was the one who caused Maud’s separation from her husband?

Despite their embarrassment, they retain a touch of eloquence in their speech….In that sense, formality does not vitiate desire; it forces it to spell itself out.

Then comes another character, Bernard, also young and who, while bathing one day, swims into a girl called Huguette. He might still have a warm spot for Claire, his cousin, but Huguette knows exactly what he is after and gets out of his car in time, though, unlike Michel, Bernard is not about to misbehave with her. When it starts to rain, a conversation starts as both Bernard and Huguette take shelter under trees. The scene is only too reminiscent of Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee , when both Claire and Jérôme are compelled to find a shelter from a sudden downpour. In the closeness of the moment, their seeming friendship allows Jérôme to tell Claire that her boyfriend might be cheating on her. On hearing the news, Claire starts sobbing and, to soothe her, Jérôme rubs her knee, once, twice, which, in his own words, is all he ever wanted from her: her knee. The knee, of course, is a metaphor for sex. She may know what he is doing as he rubs her knee or she is totally unaware of it. The scene is a touch theatrical, almost farcical, but it is not without suspense. Jérôme may speak about his growing desire for her, or he may let silence do the talking for him. For Rohmer, sleeping together is always a far simpler maneuver than confiding one’s desires verbally. Which is why the delivery of a frank but highly articulate speech about desire, especially to the very person one desires, proves unbearably intense. Nothing in Rohmer is more telling than those moments when two individuals stare at each other.

They know, or think they know, what the other thinks, and the smile that unavoidably flits through their features reminds us—reader and viewer alike—that silence is seldom ever a dumb moment between two individuals.

Rohmer’s dialogues are never short, they are frequently literary and highly seasoned, and yet they allow his characters to out themselves to the very person they have every reason to be cagey with. It is their candor that disarms, just as it is their candor that keeps drawing us to Rohmer. His characters are always x-raying themselves, and they do so with one another so very artfully that many have qualified Rohmer’s films as overanalytical, unrealistic, or too slow. But is realism and down-to-earth speech any more realistic? I don’t think so. And I’m not alone.

Rohmer’s people can be embarrassingly intimate. Yet, despite their embarrassment, they retain a touch of eloquence in their speech that leaves them highly formal and at the same time highly vulnerable. In that sense, formality does not vitiate desire; it forces it to spell itself out. It’s also how intimacy turns into art.

Rohmer’s characters may be on vacation, and they may speak in bookish terms, and their values may be the farthest from our own and seem entirely artificial; they could all be on time-out and exist on an entirely different planet where there are no world wars and where no bullets ever fly past windows. But be under no illusion; it is still our world, just a touch oblique and more opaque.

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From Élisabeth by Eric Rohmer, translated from the French by Aaron Kerner. Introduction copyright © 2026 by André Aciman. Available from McNally Editions.