Therese Desqueyroux Read online

  And then, surprisingly, at the novel’s end she is freed. When Bernard, having abandoned her to the increasingly brutal hands of the domestic Balionte, finally sees her in her emaciated, sickly state, his heart is softened. Love doesn’t soften him—Bernard is one of those, Mauriac tells us, without love—but the more primitive emotion of fear does. He recalls an image from childhood of “the Prisoner of Poitiers”—the woman who was imprisoned by her family for twenty-five years, and whose hideous photos were in all the newspapers when Bernard was a child. As a child, Bernard may have felt some pity in contemplating that photo tacked up in the outhouse; as an adult, though, the emotion it triggers is fear—fear of scandal, the worst thing imaginable for his respectable bourgeois family. He imagines himself and his mother having to endure the humiliation and contempt that the Poitiers scandal heaped upon the Bastian family, and it is this rather than pity for the victim that changes him. But this fear, base and self-serving as it is, leads Bernard to some tenderness, as he carefully nurses Thérèse back to health and finally sets her free in Paris. It is true that he does the right thing for the wrong reason, but at least he does do the right thing, and he rises above his worst self in doing it. Again, we have the sense that even Bernard is being guided into playing his part in some larger plan.

  Our last view of Thérèse is, to use Mauriac’s metaphor, as she plunges into the river of humanity that is Paris. The archetypally isolated woman, intellectually superior to her countryside relatives, now has the chance of having everything in life that she has been so miserably lacking. As she adjusts her makeup, a little tipsy after her wine, she leaves us in a state of near exaltation. Here, she hopes, she will at last fit in and become one of the “living human forest,” no longer the solitary one listening to the moaning of the Argelouse pines. For Thérèse—and for the reader who has pitied her and empathized with her—this is in every way a happy ending beyond all expectation. Such an ending comes as something of a shock to us, as the tenor of the rest of the novel has been so bleak and foreboding. And the wish expressed in Mauriac’s preface returns to us as we read this ending—that as the author leaves her on the Paris sidewalk, he hopes she is not alone. The words hang over the novel’s conclusion like a valediction and a blessing.

  It is unfortunate, though, that Mauriac remained fascinated by the character of Thérèse and returned to her several times in later fiction; in that later fiction, the novel’s sense of blessing is entirely gone. It is as if Mauriac, after his period of religious and personal crisis and his recommitment to Catholicism,20 felt compelled to give Thérèse a more conventional moral condemnation. Jean Lacouture refers to these later Thérèse stories as “a sort of mea culpa on the part of the novelist” (316). We meet Thérèse again briefly in the novel What Was Lost, she is the main character in two short stories (“Thérèse at the Hotel” and “Thérèse at the Doctor’s”) and in the novel La Fin de la nuit (The End of the Night). And in all of these, she is depicted as an unhappy and unrepentant sinner. In What Was Lost, she is almost demonic, haunting the streets of nighttime Paris and seeming to want to seduce the innocent young country boy, Alain Forcas. There is an active malevolence about the Thérèse of these later stories that is utterly foreign to the character in Thérèse Desqueyroux. The moral judgment in these later works is so overdetermined that Jean-Paul Sartre, after reading The End of the Night, was moved to write a crushing attack on Mauriac, calling him a mere moralist and denying him the title of novelist.21 And even the most vigorous supporter of Mauriac must admit that Sartre was largely right. Mauriac himself became convinced of it, after his initial anger had faded. In 1950, he put it this way:

  If Thérèse, in the first book that bore her name, imposed herself on me, I was the one who imposed himself on her in The End of the Night; and it wasn’t just chance that Jean-Paul Sartre chose that book to mount the best attack on me.22

  In these later depictions of the character, Mauriac denied her the freedom that he had allowed her between “Conscience, the Divine Instinct” and Thérèse Desqueyroux, and these later works seem like something of a betrayal of his own artistic and theological imperatives. He had been entirely aware of this issue, of course, long before Sartre’s attack. In the 1933 essay, “Le Romancier et ses personnages” (The Novelist and His Characters), he stated that characters must be allowed the freedom to become themselves, and the novelist must not seek to turn them into examples or lessons or mouthpieces. The more truly alive a novel’s characters are, Mauriac said, the less they will tamely submit to what the novelist wants them to be or do.23 The later works make their moral points well enough, and they are not without their pleasures for the reader, but they ultimately trivialize the mysterious, profound character we meet in Thérèse Desqueyroux.

  Of course, one can hardly blame Mauriac for his fascination with the character. Like Emma Bovary, like Phaedra, she is one of those miracles of artistic creation to whom we return again and again, each time feeling that now we understand her at last, but each time feeling that sense of understanding slip away from us ultimately. She is a character who, in Simon’s words, carries her body within her soul, and she moves through a landscape that is never merely landscape but somehow intimately linked to both the human and the supernatural. Like Baudelaire’s world, the world of Thérèse Desqueyroux can seem literally godforsaken, but a more sensitive reading shows us it is a world in which God is intensely and constantly active—as when Thérèse at first sees the pine forests as ominous jailers, but later hears in them the sound of human suffering, and hears in them an innate sympathy.

  I wish to express my gratitude, first, to Jean Mauriac for his encouragement of this translation. The staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris were, as always, extremely helpful to me in my research. My specific debts to many other Mauriac scholars are indicated in the notes, but I must record my continual recourse to two magisterial works: Jacques Petit’s edition of Mauriac’s novels, and Jean Lacouture’s biography.

  Colleagues and friends who offered advice and encouragement include Don Briel, Rick Holton, Michael Mikolajczak, and David Rathbun. Dr. Richard Kyllo provided me with helpful medical advice regarding the prescriptions forged by Thérèse as well as the symptoms evinced by her husband. A sabbatical leave from my teaching at the University of St. Thomas allowed me the time to complete this translation. And Jeremy Langford at Sheed & Ward again proved himself to be the most supportive of editors.

  Finally, I am most indebted to my wife Laraine, who, like me, first fell under the spell of Thérèse Desqueyroux as an undergraduate student. The many conversations she has had with me over the years about Thérèse have been invaluable, and she again gave generously of her time in formatting the final text.

  Notes

  1. Quoted in Jean Lacouture, François Mauriac: Le Sondeur d’âbimes, 1885–1933 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), p. 220.

  2. Nicholas Hewitt, “Mauriac dans le contexte culturel des années vingt: La Tentation de la littérature mondaine,” Nouveaux Cahiers François Mauriac, 1, 1993, p. 63.

  3. Charles Du Bos, François Mauriac et le problème du romancier catholique (Paris: Éditions Corrêa, 1933), p. 57.

  4. See the discussion of this crisis period in the introduction to “God and Mammon” and “What Was Lost” (Sheed & Ward, 2003).

  5. Jean Lacouture tells the Canaby story in detail in his biography of Mauriac, pp. 294–297.

  6. Mauriac, “Le Romancier et ses personnages” [The Novelist and His Characters], in Jacques Petit, ed., François Mauriac: Oeuvres romanesques et théâtrales completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), vol. II, p. 844.

  7. Mauriac’s untitled article was printed in the Portuguese newspaper Bandarra on June 8, 1935, and is reproduced in Petit, p. 927.

  8. Eva Kushner, Mauriac (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1972), p. 95.

  9. Cecil Jenkins, Mauriac (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 75.

  10. Quoted in Lacouture, p. 321.

  11. Mauriac, “Spiritu
alité des Landes” [1936], quoted in Théodore Quoniam, François Mauriac: Du Péché à la rédemption (Paris: Tequi, 1984), pp. 46–47.

  12. Many critics have conferred the term “poetic” on Mauriac’s fiction, often using the term in a more general way to denote that his prose is intense, or evocative. These various uses of the term are surveyed by Bernard Swift in “Espace fictive, espace poétique?” in Nouveaux Cahiers François Mauriac, 8, 2000, pp. 137–145.

  13. Pierre-Henri Simon, Mauriac par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), p. 38.

  14. Charles Baudelaire, “The Wretched Monk” [“Le Mauvais moine”], in The Flowers of Evil [1857], trans. James McGowan (London: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 29.

  15. Lacouture, p. 307.

  16. Theodore P. Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe (New York: Twayne, 1994), p. xv.

  17. André Joubert, “La Tragédie spirituelle de Thérèse Desqueyroux,” in André Seailles, ed., Mauriac devant le problème du mal (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), p. 183.

  18. Richard Griffiths, Le Singe de Dieu: François Mauriac entre le ‘roman catholique’ et la littérature contemporaine, 1913–1930 (Paris: L’Esprit du Temps, 1996), pp. 118–121.

  19. William Kidd, “Oedipal and pre-Oedipal Elements in Thérèse Desqueyroux” in John E. Flower and Bernard C. Swift, eds., François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals (Oxford: Berg, 1989), pp. 25–45.

  20. On Mauriac’s period of crisis and its resolution, see the introduction to “God and Mammon” and “What Was Lost.”

  21. Jean-Paul Sartre, “François Mauriac and Freedom,” in Literary Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), pp. 7–23.

  22. Lacouture, p. 307.

  23. “Le Romancier et ses personnages,” p. 850.

  Thérèse Desqueyroux

  Lord, have pity, have pity on the mad men and women! O Creator! Can those monsters exist in the eyes of The One who knows why they exist, how they created themselves, and how they could not have made themselves any other way.1

  Charles Baudelaire

  Thérèse, there are many who will say that you don’t exist. But I know that you do, I who for many years have caught sight of you, I who have often stopped you in your passing by, I who now unmask you.

  As an adolescent, I remember having seen you in a suffocating courtroom, surrounded by lawyers less ferocious than the plumed women observing the trial, with your small, pale face and your thin lips.

  Later, in a country living room, you appeared to me in the guise of a haggard young wife, irritated by the fussing care of aged relatives and a naïve husband. “What’s wrong with her?” they were saying. “We give her everything she could possibly want.”

  And since then, I’ve often wondered at your high, beautiful forehead, your hand just a little too large. Often, I’ve seen you in that living cage that is a family, pacing like a she-wolf, and I’ve seen your sad and malevolent eye fixed on me.

  Many will be surprised that I’ve been able to imagine a creature even more hateful than all the characters in my other novels. They will wonder why I don’t depict the sort of character who bristles with virtue and who wears his heart on his sleeve. But those with “hearts on their sleeves” don’t have a story. But those hearts that are buried, the ones deeply intermingled with the mud of the flesh—those hearts are the ones I know.

  I would have liked it, Thérèse, if your sorrow had led you to God; and I have long wished that you had been worthy of the name of Saint Locusta.2 But many would have cried out “Sacrilege!” if I had depicted you that way—including some who believe in the Fall and the redemption of our tortured souls.

  But at least I retain the hope that you, on the sidewalk where I have abandoned you, are not alone.

  I

  The lawyer opened a door. Standing in the obscure courthouse corridor, Thérèse Desqueyroux felt the fog on her face, and she breathed it in deeply. She hesitated, afraid of who might be waiting for her. A man with his collar turned up emerged from under a plane tree; she saw it was her father. The lawyer called out, “Insufficient cause,” and turned to Thérèse:

  “You can go out: there’s nobody here.”

  She descended the wet steps. Yes, the little square seemed deserted. Her father didn’t embrace her, nor even look at her; he was asking questions of Duros, the lawyer, who replied in a low voice, as if someone might be watching them. She heard them only confusedly.

  “I’ll get the official notice of insufficient cause tomorrow.”

  “There won’t be any surprises?”

  “No. The game is over, as they say.”

  “After my son-in-law’s testimony, it was all settled.”

  “Settled—well—you never know.”

  “Once he spoke up and admitted he never counted the drops . . .”

  “You know, Larroque, in these sorts of cases, the testimony of the victim . . .”

  Thérèse raised her voice: “There was no victim.”

  “I meant to say, victim of his own imprudence, Madame.”

  Now the two men looked at the young woman—standing motionless, wrapped tightly in her raincoat—at her pale, exprssionless face. She asked where the coach was; her father had ordered it left outside of town, on the road to Budos, so as not to attract attention.

  They walked across the square. Leaves from the plane trees were stuck to the benches wet with rain. Fortunately, the days had been getting shorter. And, to get to the Budos road, they could take streets that were among the most deserted ones in the county. Thérèse walked between the two men, who again began conversing as if she weren’t there; instead, as if inconvenienced by this woman walking between them, they jostled her with their elbows. So she began to walk a little behind them, removing her left glove to run her hand along the moss on the old stone walls. Now and then, a laborer on a bicycle or an old cart passed them; the spurting mud obliged her to stay close to the wall. But the dusk concealed Thérèse, preventing people from recognizing her. These smells, of a bakery, of the fog, were no longer simply the odors of evening in a small town: now they were the scent of life itself, the life that had been given back to her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the sleeping earth, grassy and damp, forcing herself to ignore what the man with the short legs was saying without ever once turning toward his daughter: she could have fallen into a hole, and neither he nor Duros would have noticed. Now they no longer feared to raise their voices.

  “The testimony of Monsieur Desqueyroux was excellent, yes. But he had this prescription: in short, it’s a matter of a forgery. And it was Doctor Pedemay who brought the complaint . . .”

  “He’s retracted it.”

  “Still, the explanation he gave—this unknown person who brought the prescription to him . . .”

  Thérèse, less out of fatigue than the need to escape the talk that had been deafening her for weeks, slowed her walk even more, but it was useless: she couldn’t help hearing her father’s falsetto:

  “I told her often enough: ‘Poor girl, do better than that; do better than that.’ ”

  He had indeed said it often enough, and he had done everything right. Why was he still upset? What they call the honor of the family name is safe; when the elections come around, no one will remember this story at all. So Thérèse thought, wishing she didn’t have to rejoin the two men. But in the heat of their discussion, they had stopped in the middle of the road and were gesturing at each other.

  “Listen, Larroque, go on the offensive in the Sunday Gleaner—or would you rather I do it? We need a headline, something like ‘An Infamous Rumor’ . . .”

  “No, no, my friend: what would I be responding to, anyway? It’s perfectly evident that the whole case was slapped together; they didn’t even get handwriting experts. No—silence, concealment—that’s the best. I’ll do what I must, I’ll meet the price, but for the family, we have to cover all that up—cover it all up . . .”

  Thérèse didn’t hear Duros’s reply, because
they had walked on ahead. She breathed in the rainy night, as if she were in danger of suffocation, and suddenly she imagined the face of Julie Ballade, the face she had never seen of the grandmother she had never known. The search had been in vain, both at Larroque’s and at Desqueyroux’s, for a photograph, a daguerreotype, a portrait of this mysterious woman; nothing was known of her, except that one day she had left. Thérèse imagined that she too could be erased one day, annihilated, and that later on they would keep her daughter, little Marie, from ever seeing the image of the woman who had brought her into the world. Right now, Marie would be asleep in a room in the Argelouse house, where Thérèse would arrive later tonight; then she would stand in the darkness and listen to the child sleep; she would bend down and seek out that sleeping life with her lips, as if she were seeking water.

  Beside a ditch, the lanterns on a coach with its top closed illuminated two skinny horses. Beyond, from left to right across the road stood up a somber wall of forest. From one side to the other, the tops of the first pines seemed to join in an arc, under which the road mysteriously wound ahead. The sky moved above her, a bed covered with branches. The driver gazed at Thérèse with an air of greedy fascination. When she asked if they would arrive at the Nizan station in time for the last train, he reassured her. Still, it would be best not to delay.

  “This is the last time I’ll be giving you this chore, Gardere.”

  “Madame has no further business here?”