Release date is 2026-02-14

Première disparition de Jérôme Bardini -- Stéphy -- The Kid.

Laurent Vogel

Aventures de Jérôme Bardini by Jean Giraudoux is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows a provincial civil servant, Jérôme Bardini, who resolves to vanish and reinvent himself, pitting a hunger for freedom and new identity against habit, marriage, and social duty. With wry, poetic observation, the story widens from his household to other lives, suggesting a mosaic of encounters and transformations.

The opening of the novel shows Jérôme waking to the suffocating sameness of his country life, deciding that “today” he will disappear. He prepares with ritual care, exchanges tender yet uneasy moments with his sleeping wife Renée and their baby, writes his resignation, and, after a morning of small alarms and Renée’s growing suspicions, stages his vanishing by leaving his clothes on the Seine’s bank, swimming across, and donning a new persona with hidden money and American-tinged attire. On this first day of freedom he meets Indiana, a bar girl lodged at a farm whose blasé, dangerous candor jars with his exalted idea of escape; he then slips back past the estate and the gleaming tomb of Bella, returns home at night only to be dismissed by Renée’s cold, handwritten “Va-t’en.” The narrative then pivots to Stéphy in New York’s Central Park, where, in a sudden spring, an enigmatic man approaches her, and the scene crystallizes a charged sense of fatal encounter. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1930