Novel
Villa des Roses
Villa des roses
Willem Elsschot · 1913
Synopsis
The Villa des Roses, in Paris, calls itself a “first-rate boarding house” and is only a third-rate house, run with a firm hand by Madame Brulot, flanked by a husband who is a former village notary and by a marmoset. Staying there are a ninety-two-year-old lady who pays more than the others, a Norwegian lawyer who learns French badly, a merchant without business, three sisters from Budapest and a young German, Grünewald. Louise, a widow with a small boy, enters it as a chambermaid; the men circle around her, and Grünewald ends up winning her heart.
Context
The novel was completed in Rotterdam in September 1910 and remained without a reader for more than a year; Cyriel Buysse published it in 1913 in his review Groot Nederland, and it then appeared in book form the same year. Its author had himself lodged in a Parisian boarding house, rue d'Armaillé. His first book, it was at first little noticed; the critic Greshoff later saw in its author the first cosmopolitan of Flemish letters, and the book has been translated into English, French, German and Russian.
Who it is for
A short novel, in twenty-one chapters, whose title is in French in the original; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
First book by one of the classics of Flemish prose; adapted for the screen in 2002 by Frank Van Passel.