My Night at Maud's (1969)

Françoise Fabian: Maud

Photos 

Quotes 

• Maud : You do shock me.

  Jean-Louis : So you've said.

  Maud : You're the most outrageous person I've met. Religion has always left me cold. I'm neither for nor against it. But people like you prevent me from taking it seriously. All that really concerns you is your respectability. Staying in a woman's room after midnight is dreadful. It would never occur to you to stay because I'm lonely. To establish a slightly less conventional relationship even if we should never meet again. This I find stupid - very stupid and not very Christian.

  Jean-Louis : It's nothing to do with religion. I just thought you might be tired.

  Maud : Do you still think so?

• Maud : [resisting Jean-Louis approaches after she offered to sleep with him and he refused]  No. I prefer people who know what they want.

• Maud : Your lips are cold.

  Jean-Louis : So are yours. They're nice.

  Maud : Cold, like your feelings.

• Maud : [Walks out of her closet wearing only a long-sleeved sailor's shirt]  I admit they dressed more elegantly for salons.

  Vidal : You wanted to show off your legs.

  Maud : Precisely. My only means of seduction.

  Vidal : Come now, let's say your principal means.

• Jean-Louis : Mathematics distract from God. A useless, intellectual diversion - worse than other diversions.

  Maud : Why worse?

  Jean-Louis : Because its completely abstract and thus inhuman.

• Maud : I always sleep naked; nightclothes get so twisted around.

• Maud : What I have against you is your lack of spontaneity.

  Jean-Louis : I open my heart to you. What more do you want?

  Maud : I don't like your love with conditions attached.

• Maud : I'm very hard to please when it comes to men.

• Maud : A true Christian remains chaste until marriage.

  Jean-Louis : I'm not a good example.

• Jean-Louis : Women have taught me a lot, morally speaking. That sounds...

  Maud : A little vulgar.

  Jean-Louis : Yes. It would be silly to generalize about particular cases but each girl revealed a new moral problem which I had never faced up to before. It would be good for me to be shaken out of my moral lethargy.

  Maud : You could have ignored the physical aspect for the moral.

  Jean-Louis : Yes, but, the moral aspect would never have arisen if - Well, I know it's never impossible but the physical and moral are inseparable, let's face it.

  Maud : Perhaps it was the trick of the devil?

  Jean-Louis : Then I was caught. Yes, in a way, I was caught.

• Maud : Don't be childish. Lie beside me. Outside, or inside - if I'm not too repulsive.

  Jean-Louis : I'll take the armchair.

  Maud : You'll get a cramp. Are you afraid? Of yourself? Of me? I swear I won't touch you, and you I thought you had self-control.

• Maud : Do you really want my life story? Well, I had a lover and my husband had a mistress. Curiously enough, she was rather your sort: very moral, very Catholic. Not hypocritical, not calculating - very sincere. Yet I hated her like poison.

• Maud : What I don't like about you is that you always dodge the issue. You don't face up to things. A shamefaced Christian combined with a shamefaced Don Juan.

• Jean-Louis : Ideally, one should never have to leave people. One shouldn't have to forget people. There should be one love, no other - not even platonic.

  Maud : Especially not platonic.

• Maud : I'm a terrible exhibitionist. It just comes over me.

• Maud : I am nasty, too.

• Jean-Louis : Thanks to you, I've taken a step towards sainthood. As I said, women aid my moral progress.

  Maud : Even the whores of Vera Cruz?

  Jean-Louis : I've never known one there, in Valparaiso, or anywhere.

  Maud : Valparaiso, I meant. Perhaps you'd have gained physical and moral benefit.

• Maud : That's past; what's done is done.

• Maud : Don't you want to be a saint?

  Jean-Louis : Not at all.