Aimée by Jacques Rivière
"Aimée" by Jacques Rivière is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows a hypersensitive young narrator who marries the steady, moral Marthe yet becomes emotionally entangled with his friend Georges Bourguignon and Georges’s intense, enigmatic bride, Aimée Laval. The book probes desire, marriage, and the conflict between tranquil happiness and the seductive pull of inner turmoil. The opening of the novel charts the narrator’s childhood worship of women, his
timidity, and his later marriage to Marthe, whose quiet strength steadies him but cannot still his craving for “ordeal” in love. He befriends the pleasure-seeking Georges, whose easy worldliness loosens the narrator’s restraints. Urged to advise Georges, he rashly champions Georges’s marriage to Aimée, then meets her and is disarmed by her calm authority and penetrating gaze. When the couple declare a pact of absolute freedom, he is scandalized, yet he drifts back toward Aimée, sensing Georges’s evasions and her stoic self-sufficiency. Georges increasingly flees the intensity Aimée inspires, while the narrator tries to help her but finds his pity politely barred. This strains his candor with Marthe and opens a silent distance with Georges. A casual, wounding remark by Georges finally ignites the narrator’s full, secret love for Aimée, plunging him into sleeplessness, feverish agitation, and an “ennui” that makes work impossible. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Rivière, Jacques, 1886-1925 |
|---|---|
| Title | Aimée |
| Original Publication | Paris: Gallimard, 1922, copyright 1923. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | French fiction -- 20th century |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78207 |
| Release Date | Mar 14, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 198 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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