Mauriac: The Splendor of Sin

I have tried to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous. If theologians provided an abstract idea of the sinner, I gave him flesh and blood.

FRENCH Author Franc,ois Mauriac not only supplied his characters with flesh and blood, but made the flesh ache and the blood shiver with fear as the sinner stood alone before God, smitten with a sense of guilt and remorse. In his poems and his plays, in his 23 novels and his political musings for Le Figaro and L'Express, the Nobel-prizewinning author explored the nature of human corruption perhaps more exhaustively than any other contemporary writer. When he died last week at 84, France mourned the loss not only of one of its most illustrious men of letters but also of a voice of moral assurance in an era of bitter doubt. "Mauriac," said Novelist Julien Green in a eulogy, was the latest in a line of Christian writers who have "put a great literary style quite naturally at the service of a great faith."

Landscape of Despair. Mauriac's style, as well as his faith, was shaped by the provincial Catholicism of Bordeaux, where he was born. He was bred in a particular kind of Catholicism: peculiarly French, narrowly provincial, at times almost suffocating. The influence of Jansenism, fiercely moralistic and unforgiving, was still strong. The youngest of five children, Mauriac grew up under the eye of a mother who was both domineering and dogmatically religious. He was so burdened by a sense of guilt that even his Bordeaux landscape wore the aspect of sin, as expressed in the outburst of a character in his last novel, Maltaverne: "I cannot give up this land, this stream, the sky beneath the tops of the pine trees, those beloved giants, that scent of resin and marshland, which--am I crazy?--is the very odor of my despair."

In 1906, Mauriac carried his interior landscape to Paris, where it furnished him with boundless material for his writing. After two years of writing poetry, he turned to novels. His first succes d'estime, A Kiss for the Leper, was a projection of his own youthful fears. The leading character, an ungainly, misshapen provincial lad, marries a girl who is physically repelled by him. Only on his death can she begin to love him. Into The Leper are woven the themes that run through the later books: the subtle corruption of sensuality, the deep self-loathing that accompanies love, the glimmer of salvation when all possibilities of evil are exhausted. To live, Mauriac seems to say, is to sin. Only death, with its brutal clarity, illuminates life. And that light is the one grace vouchsafed mankind.

Aroused by War. The unrelieved melancholy of his novels, which are stuffed with imagery of disease and decay, is not cheerful reading for any age. But readers were not put off; many had been brought up in the same cramped faith as Mauriac, and they had a special sympathy for the tortured characters in his books. Two of his novels, Therese Desqueyroux (1927), the story of a bored wife who tries to poison her husband, and Knot of Vipers, a study of an avaricious provincial family, have each sold about 1,000,000 copies. Therese, which was translated into 25 languages (including Catalan and Afrikaans), was also made into a film. On the strength of the novels, Mauriac was admitted to the Academic Franc,aise at the relatively young age of 47.

In the late 1930s, he switched from fiction to fact. The Spanish Civil War aroused his political passions; from then on, he became a fervent polemicist, first inveighing against Franco and later contributing to Resistance newspapers during the German occupation of France. After the war, he wrote a front-page column for Paris' moderately conservative daily, Le Figaro. His opinions ran counter to those of his readers when he opposed the French presence in both Algeria and Indochina. Mulling over the problems of German reunification, he fashioned the famed bon mot: "I love Germany so much I want to have two of her."

Secret in St. John. Later Mauriac joined Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber's left-leaning L'Express. But the two had a falling out over De Gaulle's return to power. Mauriac supported the general, Servan-Schreiber did not. So Mauriac went to work for Le Figaro Litteraire in 1961. When Jean-Paul Sartre, posturing as a revolutionist, hoped the police would arrest him, Mauriac scoffed in a column last June: "Sartre will have to resign himself to being inoffensive.'' For De Gaulle he had far kinder words. To Mauriac, the general seemed to embody a resistance to moral corruption that overtook lesser mortals. "De Gaulle is one man who is sure of his eternity," he wrote. De Gaulle returned the compliment by calling Mauriac the "greatest living French writer."

When Mauriac went to vote for his hero in the national referendum last year, he slipped and fractured his right arm. On top of that blow, De Gaulle lost and retired from power. "I felt an inexpressible chagrin," said Mauriac. "Two falls in one day is too much." He never recovered and entered the hospital last month. Last week, when it was obvious that he was dying, he was taken to his Paris apartment, where his wife Jeanne, their two sons and two daughters joined in the death watch. A solemn Requiem Mass was sung for him at Notre Dame Cathedral.

Mauriac provided his own eulogy in a recording he made 20 years ago to be released after his death. It reflected a lifelong preoccupation with the possibilities of grace that he had explored in his essays, if not in his other work. "I believe," he said, "as I did as a child, that life has meaning, a direction, a value; that no suffering is lost, that every tear counts, each drop of blood, that the secret of the world is to be found in St. John's 'Deus caritas est'--'God is Love.' "

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