Two-Sided Frenchman

THE LOVED AND THE UNLOVED (153 pp.)--Franc,ois Mauriac--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3).

As a novelist, Franc,ois Mauriac has two sides: 1) the urbane Frenchman who analyzes love with the detachment of a metaphysician, and 2) the devout Roman Catholic who wrestles with sin.

Mauriac's latest novel, The Loved and the Unloved, rehearses his usual themes: human flesh as ineradicable temptation, romantic love as a path to mutual hatred, bourgeois life as a variety of spiritual sloth, and free will as man's great burden ("Our bad actions belong wholly to us"). The book is written in a style that is almost spectacularly gaunt. In tone it resembles a medieval morality play; in shape, a modern dance confined to anguished and angular gestures.

Torture & Truth. The plot is simple.

Marie and Gilles, two young lovers in a provincial French town, are fatuously devoted to each other. All that keeps them apart is the snobbery of Marie's parvenu mother. They contrive to meet with the help of an ugly and impoverished aristocrat named Agathe, who has been reduced to working as Marie's governess.

Agathe realizes she is being used, but she has a design of her own--to snare Gilles's brooding young friend Nicolas. And Nicolas, because he worships Gilles, pretends affection for scarecrow Agathe, thus leaving the lovers to each other.

Mauriac contrasts the fortunes of the two couples. Marie and Gilles, the fortunately average characters, glide happily into marriage. Agathe and Nicolas mentally torture each other until Nicolas blurts out the truth that he has never loved her. Nicolas, shamed, leaves town to look for "somebody." This somebody, hints Mauriac, is God.

Fallen Creatures. Marie and Gilles are conventional sugar-sticks, but Agathe. straining for a love she cannot possess and Nicolas, moving from his false idolatry of Gilles to a love of God, are remarkably impressive figures, gargoyles of suffering and striving. In telling their story, Novelist Mauriac shows himself still deeply preoccupied with the fevers of the human blood; at 66, he does not pretend to a resignation he apparently cannot feel.

Such honesty has led hostile critics to hint that Mauriac is essentially a refined sensualist who, from motives of caution or guilt, takes care to renew his option with God. Mauriac, in a brief essay appended to The Loved and the Unloved, replies in a voice of deep humility: "Though, quite often, Grace does 'break in' [to his books], it has tended to do so less and less as I have grown older ... I might point out that evil is a reality in this world of ours, that the people I set out to paint are fallen creatures . . . that no artist should force his talent, and that mine does not easily breathe the air of sublimity."

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