Michel Butor's La Modification, first published in French in 1957, describes a single train journey. It follows the middle-aged Leon Delmont from Paris – where he leaves behind his wife Henriette and family – to Rome, where he plans to surprise his mistress Cecile with news that he will end his marriage to be with her.
In subsequent translations, the novel's title has been rendered variously as A Change of Heart (US) and Second Thoughts (UK) but it is the original French which captures most closely the emotional, gradual transition played out between the Gare de Lyon and the Stazioni Termini.
That what might have been a banal tale is strikingly not so, from the outset, is thanks in no small part to the author's use of the second person to tell the story. It is "you" who boards the train, you who carries a book with the firm intention of reading it, you who smokes a Gitane. The intimacy afforded by this simple stylistic device pervades the reader's experience. We are Leon, whether we like it or not. We take this journey with him, in the designated time and space of the train compartment, where he is neither who he was at the departure point, nor who he will be on arrival. The sensation is of a porous neutrality, of the "between" stage that permits us to be ourselves, allowing thoughts and choices to surface.
Expressed as an emotional transition, the journey (which Leon presents to Henriette in the guise of a monthly business trip to Rome) retains a focus on the physical – the smell and feel of the compartment, the folded ticket bought that morning at Paris-Lyon, the pocket in which Leon finds it, even his choice of coffee, shine a light on how rarely the minutiae of travel are shared.
Henriette and Cecile flit into and out of these accounts as shadowy figures. Cecile embodies Rome, youth and freedom where Henriette, domestic and stiff, sleeps in Paris "on the other side of the bed … separated by an uncrossable river of linen". In tandem, Leon's descriptions of his fellow passengers broaden the focus of the narrative – a priest drumming his nails on a black briefcase, a young couple lowering the window to lean and gaze at another train blurry in the hazy rain of early evening, are framed in his middle aged eyes. Against a sequence of Turin, Genoa and finally Pisa their immediacy places the images of the two women at one remove. Slowly but irreversibly, the journey comes to reverse Leon's mental picture of Cecile, bringing to his mind her expression of disdain when last they parted, rather than the "peaceful respite" he has come to find in her eyes. Henriette's image conjures her "perpetual air of criticism hanging over her every word …" but also her hold upon him.
As he sets it down, the journey itself alludes to the Classical age and its protagonist is not above self-aggrandisement. Reading the letters of Julian the Apostate, Delmont likens himself to the ancient Roman Empire's representative in Paris, both in his working role in the Italian capital and in his initial opposition to the Christian church. We learn that his first wanderings through the Roman streets with Cecile acquainted him only with her enthusiasm for pre-Christian Rome. Subsequently and in the absence of his mistress, he has discovered the churches, the Vatican and their hold upon him, a passion shared by his wife and not by Cecile. It is with this version of the city that he finds he has fallen in love. The contrasted faces of Rome (as well as those of Rome and Paris) make Leon's choice between pagan and Christian equivalent to his choice between the two women.
Fantasy has a strong presence in Butor's novel. As the route of the train passes between the forests at Fontainebleu, a ghost-like apparition of "the legendary horseman who haunts the forest" appears to Leon, bringing to mind his wife's confession of her childhood fears that the same fabled huntsman would carry her away on her evening walks in the forest. We learn too that such fears were expressed by Henriette long ago, in the intimate moments of their honeymoon.
The rhythm of the train seems to predict Leon's thought processes, the slow emergence of doubts and fears that make his ultimate change of mind inevitable: "You realise the step is taken but not the one you had thought to take on boarding the train, another step … the abandonment of the luminous aspect of your future towards which you had taken this train, a life of love and of happiness with Cecile … it is now necessary not to think of it."
The knowledge comes to Leon that the reconciliation he envisaged with Cecile would be a "thin and fragile" one, that despite his physical journey towards her, the distance is opening up between himself and his mistress. The "implacable evidence of the fragility of your love, of its attachment to the place" unravelling his initial picture, pointing him back towards Henriette.
The interplay of the two cities in relation to the two women builds as the novel (and the journey) draws to a close. Leon's love for Cecile proves so intertwined with his passion for Rome, as well as with youth and freedom, that these aspects have overtaken her. Transported to the French capital, his mistress would lose her hold on his heart. Henriette, "sleeping" in Paris, representing family and work, comes to represent his closer "self".
Monitoring the progress of his own sea change, Leon determines then to express it in his own book, "La Modification". The novel thus becomes the book of itself.
Triggering thoughts of my own journey, between my first reading of the novel as a student and my second, 20 years later, La Modification retains its power. It is differently resonant but as vivid and as evocative of the process by which, privately, we change.
