Ferenc Molnár

À cœur perdu

Farewell My Heart

May 22, 2025
Novel
240 pages
115 × 190 mm
13,90 €
9791039206396
979-1-0392-0639-6

“Le Domaine” collection

																Ferenc Molnár, À cœur perdu
																Ferenc Molnár, À cœur perdu

“As long as I can write, each time I take these pages, I will recall the departure: a fascist officer, at the border between Switzerland and Italy, shouts at me: ’Your religion?’… an unknown red-haired girl looks at me from her corner… had she already looked at me? Is it my imagination? Each time I evoke these memories, it seems to me that I already knew what I was jumping into with all my heart.”

So speaks the narrator, a Hungarian journalist, in the New York hospital where his days are ending. He is a hunted man, because he is Jewish, who fled Europe in 1939. An inexplicable attraction, except for anxiety and loneliness, ties his fate to that of a young dancer, Edith Gaal, who fled Hungary after her father’s suicide. Their relationship turns sour when he discovers that Edith attracts men and plays with this power. Along his path, a succession of disturbing characters shakes his certainties one by one: two nightclub owners who knew Edith in Europe, a shameless emigrant to whom she is not indifferent, the Austrian doctor who treats his sick heart with disgust, the widow Hilda whom he eventually marries without suspecting anything about her past...
A drama of old age and exile, written directly in English in New York, Farewell My Heart (À cœur perdu) is Molnár’s last novel. The French translation appeared in 1946 from Éditions de la Maison française, located at Rockefeller Center, which published exiled writers such as Raymond Aron, Saint Exupéry, and Jules Romains. Although the characters in this novel are “entirely fictional”, its autobiographical content and allusions to the war in Europe serve as metaphors for the narrator’s decline, from whom the “world of yesterday” is torn away day by day.

The author

Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952), born Ferenc Neumann, was born in Budapest into a wealthy Jewish family. He took the pseudonym Molnár (“miller”), from the name of a character in one of his first plays: he would write more than thirty, including Liliom (1909), which would triumph on Broadway, then in Hollywood (Fritz Lang, 1934). A war correspondent in 1914-1916, he was decorated by Emperor Franz Joseph. Fleeing fascism and persecution, he took refuge in Switzerland in 1939, then in New York in 1940. Only three of his ten novels have been published in French. He is best known for The Paul Street Boys (1906), often compared to La Guerre des boutons, a classic that remains popular in Hungarian literature.

Strong points

The reissue of Molnár’s last novel, a crepuscular and intriguing work written in exile in New York;

a few pages introduction presents the author and the genesis of the book;

the new translation of Les Garçons de la rue Pál (Tristram, 2024) has been unanimously acclaimed: “a visionary allegory of the perils to come” (Le Monde), “a striking double reading” (Le Canard enchaîné), “a tragic farewell to innocence” (Le Figaro)…

May 22, 2025
Novel
240 pages
115 × 190 mm
13,90 €
9791039206396
979-1-0392-0639-6

“Le Domaine” collection