Mara: Alors c’est des miracles qu’elle fait?
La Femme: Y a pas de miracles, que vous êtes simple! C’est ce qu’on appelle la ‘force,’ voilà!
Y a pas de miracles. C’est seulement la ‘force’ vous comprenez? On m’a bien expliqué tout ça.
At last Mara finds the wise woman in a cavern, and blind Violaine gives to her sister’s child the gift of sight.
The fourth act brings us back to the farm. Mara, incurably jealous, has murdered Violaine, and left her for dead in a ditch. But Pierre de Craon has found her body, and brings her back to her old home, still breathing, though blind and bleeding. Jacques Hury opens to them and sees, all mangled, murdered, the broken form of the woman whose fresh youth he had loved. Violaine tells him all. She dies forgiving, reconciling, everybody—even the murderous Mara who, in her dreadful, jealous, earthly way, had after all ‘loved much.’ Mara, not Violaine, was the mother of the child! And we divine that Mara is Profane Love, and Violaine that other Love.
‘L’Amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.’
Quite recently, in 1912, Paul Claudel has made the symbol clearer in a new version of his play The Angelus (L’Annonce faite à Marie), though it is at some expense of the fresh, primitive grace, the Celtic charm of the earlier conception. There is something artificial, stiff, consciously pre-Raphaelite in L’Annonce faite à Marie, but also a rare spiritual beauty.
In the second version, place and personages remain unchanged, but the time is altered; we are no longer modern but plunged in the early Middle Ages. Anne Vercors, the master of the farm, leaves his home not on an errand of charity to America, but in order to join the Crusade. Pierre de Craon, instead of canalising rivers, builds cathedrals: he is a great master-mason, so gifted that, by a special dispensation he is allowed at large, although a secret leper. And Violaine’s kiss of compassion infects her with his disease.
This seems to me a grave artistic error, since to some extent it exculpates the faithless Jacques, the cruel Mara, who follow but the fashion of their age in driving a leper from her home. But the end: the death of Violaine, stifled under a cartload of sand, from which the treacherous Mara has drawn the back panel; and the return of Anne Vercors; and the relative repentance of the obstinate Mara; and the great mystical wind that rises and uplifts us into a region where happiness and tragedy are lost in a peace beyond understanding—all this moves us deeply in the second rendering.