The love triangle portrayed in Francois Turffaut's film 'Jules et Jim' is familiar to millions of cinemagoers around the world. It is based on the novel, and indeed the life, of the writer Henri Pierre Roche. Less widely known, and in many ways more intriguing, is the earlier triangular relationship involving the 18 year-old Roche with two English sisters, Violet and Margaret Court.
The love story unfolds in Paris, where Modernism and new morality were nascent, in rural Kent where the trio was fraternally if flirtatiously blissful, and in London's Whitechapel, where Roche was engaged in social work. Captured in Roche's 'English Girls and the Continent', and in Truffant's film 'Anne and Muriel', this is an extraordinary tale of innocence and betrayal, of intellectual life and social experiment at the turn of the 20th century, in which English provincialism and Parisian Bohemianism collide with dramatic consequences.
