"Sur le bord de la tombe": James and the Shadow of Musset

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In La Chambre verte (1978), Francois Truffaut's tenebrous hommage to Henry James, the director-author of the film makes a forceful point about a presiding concern of the older writer. La Chambre verte is adapted, according to the credits, themes of Henry James. Most obviously the source for the film is Altar of the Dead (1895), but Truffaut also borrows freely from other late Jamesean stories that trace related obsessions-The Friends of the Friends, Maude-Evelyn, and, in the classic plot of experience denied, Beast in the Jungle. The badly damaged protagonist, Julien Davenne (played by Truffaut himself), is clearly based on the haunted figure of George Stransom, who conceives an altar for the ghosts from his shadowy past. Truffaut reveals more of his character's motives and past through the introduction of a confidente, Cecilia Mandel, who in her frustrated courtship of Davenne corresponds to James's infinitely patient May Bartram in Beast in the Jungle.1 In his narrative of obsession and deferral Truffaut reserves his formal dedication to James until late in the film, where he embeds it in the scene when Davenne finally admits C6cilia to the abandoned chapel that he has converted into a shrine for his personal dead. There, in a forest of candles, he leads her through a gallery of photographs of those commemorated in his project. (Before she enters, he hangs the death-bed photograph of Marcel Proust.) After pausing before images of several fictional departed friends, he turns to a familiar late portrait of HenryJames. Celui etait un am6ricain; il tellement aimait l'Europe qu'il a fini par adopter la nationalite