TO
LOUIS ARTUS
His Admirer and Friend
F. M.
CONTENTS
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]
CHAPTER [I]
CHAPTER [II]
CHAPTER [III]
CHAPTER [IV]
CHAPTER [V]
CHAPTER [VI]
CHAPTER [VII]
CHAPTER [VIII]
CHAPTER [IX]
CHAPTER [X]
CHAPTER [XI]
CHAPTER [XII]
CHAPTER [XIII]
CHAPTER [XIV]
CHAPTER [XV]
CHAPTER [XVI]
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC published his first book in 1909. It is a collection of poems, and bears the title, Les Mains Jointes. Mauriac was then twenty-one years old, and the little volume drew forth enthusiastic praise from Maurice Barrès in L'Echo de Paris. The following year brought his second book of verse, L'Adieu à l'Adolescence; and in 1913 and 1914 his first two novels appeared, L'Enfant chargé de Chaînes and La Robe Prétexte. Soon after the war he had two more novels, La Chair et le Sang and Préséances, to his credit, and in 1922 M. Grasset published Le Baiser au Lépreux in his Cahiers Verts, that interesting series of little books which includes Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine and the French versions of Logan Pearsall Smith's Trivia and George Moore's Memoirs of My Dead Life.
Le Baiser au Lépreux achieved an immediate success, the French press being almost unanimous in its declaration that a masterpiece had been written; and Mauriac was at once accorded a place with Giraudoux, Larbaud, and Morand in the first rank of his generation.
In the wide sense, Le Baiser au Lépreux is not a masterpiece; its appeal is to a restricted public, for the theme of the story is a problem which the ordinary reader does not as a rule care to think about. The situations are often unpleasant, sometimes even repellent, but Mauriac's searching and relentless analysis of the minds of his characters has resulted in a fine piece of writing. Simplicity of language, depth of thought, and acuteness of observation are its distinguishing qualities; less skilful hands would have made little of a theme which required to be treated with the greatest reticence, but Mauriac's method is one of extreme economy and non-insistence; and, being himself a product of that bleak arid country of heather and pines, he has been able to give his tragic picture an authentic background.
Mauriac is an earnest Catholic, and he is convinced that Christianity presents extraordinary opportunities to novelists, because of the moral conflicts it creates. In this story, the flavour of which I have attempted to preserve in the version that follows, he has stated a problem and solved it in the only way possible for his characters, and the moral conflict arises out of the instinctive, unimaginative religion of his heroine. A less simple girl might have conquered physical repulsion, and, through vanity, have played the rôle of good fairy. The story exists because she is physically incapable of embracing the leper, and enough of a saint to renounce the fruits of his sacrifice.