"The narrator of VILLA TRISTE, an anxious, roving, stateless young man of eighteen, comes to a little French provincial lakeside town near Switzerland. He is escaping from the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. Fear of war? Of imminent catastrophe? Of others? Whatever it may be, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to flee at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. It is early July. He is safely hidden among the other summer visitors when he meets a girl, Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, RenU Meinthe, to whom he clings like a drowning soul. But they are as cut off from real life as he is himself, in spite of the part they play in a social scene across which figures tinged with shades of ridicule or melancholy flit like fireflies. In a separate plot thread that takes place fifteen years in the future, the narrator looks back on this summer and tries to rescue from oblivion the faces and the fleeting moments, already long distant. But it all eddies and fades, as if seen through the window of a train, and all that remains is the memory of a dream and a cardboard setting. This haunting novel is a record of a wande
