Nureyev’s Autobiography and “Women of Japan” in Truffaut’s “Bed and Board”

Can a couple be happy if she is reading Nureyev's autobiography and he is reading "Women of Japan"? To find a reading person at all is already happiness, of course. And then, if we turn to the plot of "Bed and Board" from François Truffaut's famous pentalogy, Antoine and Christine were in the end happy after their own fashion, even despite the adultery so unambiguously played out in the scene with the books, for Antoine will indeed betray his wife with a Japanese woman, and will nonetheless return afterwards to the bosom of the family. As for the book he is reading, it is the first work of the then still young writer and public servant Élisabeth Dufourcq, who would later hold a number of important posts and write much on questions of gender history, women's communities, demography and feminism. There is hardly any hint in this of Antoine Doinel's own views, then only taking shape, but the choice of reading matter is an interesting one.