SOURCE: "Mauriac's Thérèse: An Androgynous Heroine," in Writing in a Modern Temper: Essays on French Literature and Thought in Honor of Henri Peyre, edited by Mary Ann Caws, ANMA Libri, 1984, pp. 174-87.

[Festa-McCormick is an American educator and critic. In the following essay on Thérèse Desqueyroux, she traces Therese's motivation for murder to her unrequited passion for Anne.]

Thérèse is a strange heroine. Her story is that of a quest and the quest is, ostensibly, for a conscience, for a confrontation with a crime that defies her understanding. Although she would like to lay bare the mechanism within her that set her on the path to murder and made it urgent to eliminate an undesired presence, Thérèse does not pursue her quest to the end, her search remains unfulfilled, and her questions unanswered. What I propose to do in the following pages is to resume that search, to follow the heroine along the digressions and the labyrinthine ways of her personality, and lay bare her secret. That secret, I believe, is hidden in her androgynous nature.

Thérèse defies definition in the framework of the novel. The story is not a narrative in the manner of Genitrix, nor is it a confession in the French tradition of the "roman personnel." The reader can rely neither on an omniscient author to unravel the heroine's motives, nor on the heroine's own merciless pursuit of her identity in the manner of an Adolphe. Both author and heroine point to signs and evidences of hidden purposes; neither clearly establishes or clarifies them. It is up to the reader to undertake the detective work, to assemble all manifest clues in order to arrive at a conclusion.

Thérèse is introduced after her crime, or attempted crime. She is a spiritual prisoner of her own impenetrable urges, caught more relentlessly by them than even by the eventual chains of family life. In a brief foreword, the author announces his intention of revealing her secret to the reader, as if that secret lay in the slow resolve to which she had surrendered, unquestioningly, to poison her "foolish husband." But he then adds almost cryptically, "I know the secrets of the hearts that are deep buried in, and mingles with, the filth of the flesh." The act of poisoning, however, is not per se "filth of flesh" and we are implicitly directed to look for Thérèse's secret elsewhere. Mauriac hints at the presence of a deeper problem in her than just the temptation of evil. Yet he does not reveal what is at the source of the chasm separating his heroine from the world of those around her.

The forlorn "she wolf who will later prowl in the bleak woods of Argelouse is introduced in the opening sentence as poised between freedom and bondage. Thérèse's trip back home after the trial then emerges as a brief and sustained interlude in which the events of the past are measured against the rising consciousness of the present. A vacuum has been created where the nexus between years past and this moment remains suspended, and in that vacuum Thérèse moves hesitantly. The lawyer's words echo the uncertainty of her position. Her trial stands unresolved, her "case dismissed." She "felt the fog upon her face and took deep breaths of it." One would like to think that that avid breathing aims at dissolving the enveloping fog. But Thérèse's search never dares go beyond the boundaries of the visible. The fog is welcome, for it is the barrier she seeks against the world of man, and the mantle to which she clings against the intrusion of untenable truths. It is the symbol of her freedom, comforting and yet precarious and volatile. It is, too, the mirror of her personality, opaque and shadowy. But in the very act of deliberate breathing, Thérèse also reaches toward her nature, and the secret that lies there. Courageously, she sets out on her adventure in deciphering her actions through the invisible signs of her unavowed wishes. That she recoils at each step which could lead to a discovery only points to the impossibility of resolution in a dilemma she dares not name.

In his study of love in Mauriac's works, Emile Glénisson analyzes the sense of shame and repulsion that all physical contact with woman seems to inspire to the author's male characters [see L'Amour dans les romans de François Mauriac, 1970]. The psychological imbalance that pushes several of those men to abandon the conjugal bed in an unresolved tension of hatred and desire can only be viewed, he insists, as the unconscious transposition of the mother in the woman at their side. The same need for chastity in spite of the throbbing desire which Glénisson discerns in Mauriac's heroes exists and with greater violence in Thérèse. All that would be needed in order to make his assumption applicable here are a few exterior modifications. The "maternal substitute" seen in the victimized wives of Mauriac's novels would become a "paternal substitute," and the "near impotence" of the heroes would have to be translated into frigidity in Thérèse's case. But I would not insist with Glénisson on the author's own distaste for the assertive demands of the flesh, or yearnings for the primordial purity of the child at its mother's breast, in order to try and clarify Thérèse's behavior. It is not relevant to this study to ask whether Mauriac's tormented heroes were a mirror of his own personal bewilderment in relation to sexuality. All the same, I would not dismiss the link that he himself traced between his own person and the most perplexing of his creations. When writing prefaces for the Pléiade edition of his collected works in 1950, Mauriac confessed to an affinity with Thérèse and, implicitly, to his identification with her solitude and misery.

She is nevertheless more alive than any other of my heroines; not truly me, except in the sense in which Flaubert said "Madame Bovary is myself"—at my antipodes in more ways than one, but built all the same of all that in myself I have had to conquer, or eschew, or ignore.

It is permissible to wonder about the traits that Mauriac felt compelled to "conquer, or eschew, or ignore," and which he lent to his heroine; it is more pertinent to look at Thérèse directly.

Thérèse steps unaware into the realm of her own unconscious. Her search begins almost casually, out of the need to mend her relation with Bernard once she reaches Argelouse. Confidently, she decides that "all that was hidden must be brought into light." She will tell it all and begin at the beginning. And there, at the very start, she finds the image of Anne. Anne is the key, she intuitively knows, not only to her predicament of the moment but to what is hidden in her very nature.

Little sister Anne, dear innocent, what an important part yours is in all this story! The really pure in heart know nothing of what goes on around them each day, each night! never realize what poisonous weeds spring up beneath their childish feet.

In her effort to uncover the truth, Thérèse evokes unhesitantly the presence of the childlike Anne, that luminous figure in the implacable summers of her adolescent years.

That Thérèse should immediately think of Anne in wanting to understand and in her desire to explain the events leading to her trial, points both to the honesty of her intentions and to an instinctive knowledge of herself. Outwardly, Anne has little bearing on what has happened; indeed, hardly any. Why then does Thérèse address her as the "pure at heart" who has played "an important part" in her story? That part was invisible, hidden within the recesses of Thérèse's wishes. Yet she must know that the beginning of her story coincides with her passionate yearnings for Anne's arrival in the torrid summers of her innocence. She calls "little sister" the slender silhouette she spied from around the bend in the heated moors, as if to conjure endowed with the rite of prayer, but the tone is one of defeat. It is to herself that she alludes in recalling the "poisonous weed" hidden behind the candor of her friend. "Each day, each night," harried by a nameless desire, Thérèse had lived the endless wait of the lover.

The ambiguity of Thérèse's determination to solve her enigma may well be due to some complicity between her and Mauriac, to what Claude-Edmonde Magny defines [in Histoire du roman français depuis 1918-1950)] as the author's participation in his heroine's dilemma, or his "illegitimate paternity," secret and somewhat shameful. Sartre noted, more pertinently, (in his well known chapter on "La Fin de la nuit" in Situations, I) that Thérèse is more in the tradition of a classical heroine of ancient Greece than in that of the modern novel. She is a tragic figure in whom reason is pitted against nature, and not a dramatic creation whose contest against bondage revolves on the pursuit of freedom in its own right. But Sartre's analysis is concerned with the philosophical and religious axioms of the author, not with investigating the heroine as such. Magny was not interested in exploring Thérèse's nature either. But Mauriac throws too many clues on the "masculinity" of that nature for it to remain thus undetected. My assumption, indeed, is that the androgynous quality in Thérèse's personality is not merely latent but obvious, though critics have been surprisingly silent on that score. I am also convinced that Mauriac intended it as such and made it, through innuendoes, the culprit for the diabolical force at the root of his heroine's actions.

Masculinity, or femininity for that matter, is a concept tied to times and social mores. It is remarkable, therefore, that a young woman's charm in that earlier part of the century and in a provincial French setting, should have been drawn not along the traditional demure and gentle stances expected by her society, but rested in her intelligence and "strong mind." Clearly, those were male prerogatives, together with a marked taste for reading (she "devoured" all she could lay hands on, from Paul de Kock's novels to the Causeries du lundi and Thiers' Histoire du Consulat) and for solitude in the vast and silent country home. Thérèse could not claim for herself the most coveted of a woman's assets, beauty; yet "it never occurs to one to wonder whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm." "Charm" is to be translated into seductive intelligence here, or that superiority of intellect that captivates despite all preconceived assumptions. For Thérèse's thin lips, enormous forehead and large hands (perennially holding a cigarette) would have stood her ill in a conventional appraisal of feminine allure. Her more noticeable traits are unmistakably "masculine," both on the intellectual and physical plane. The text recurs to those qualities, to the "devastated brow" under the weight of tormenting thoughts, to the constant cigarette in a hand that was "a little too large," and thus confirms their importance in the characterization of the heroine.

The picture that emerges of Thérèse is that of a young woman who has always been at odds with her society and whose nonconformity came to be accepted as a matter of course both by the villagers of Argelouse and by herself. The former, no doubt, made concessions to her social position, and she had never known anything else. She was different, and no identification was possible between the dreams shared by other young persons of her sex and her own solitary prowlings within the vague confines of her intimate world. Only through her retrospective glance to those far away days of her immaculate youth does she understand the meaning of happiness. That past which she had attempted to hold still in the penumbra of a country room while the sun raged outside, now emerges as her only share of joy in life. Yet it was a past with no dreams, no tension toward the future, and in which each day sufficed unto itself. It was a past "unsullied, but lit by a vague and flickering happiness." There is no doubt that the "unsullied" refers to a primordial purity here, to her untouched virginity. Later, the presence of a man at her side, her marriage, would desecrate her and obliterate happiness. Mauriac's condemnation of sexuality through what amounts to religious sophistry might explain, but only on the surface, Thérèse's revolt against the intrusion of a male presence in her life. If the author's assertion that man's love for God is to be exclusive and to remain unshared with any other human being is debatable in itself (in spite of his heavy leaning upon Bossuet's and Pascal's pronouncements) that reasoning could hardly apply to a woman who lays no claim to any religious feelings or mysticism. Nor is that all. Thérèse's nostalgic evocation of long summers past does not stress exclusively the innocence of those days. The emphasis in the text is equally shared between the beauty of "that unsullied season of her past" and another kind of allure at the basis of her "vague and flickering happiness." A question naturally arises, "whence had come all that happiness?" and the answer offers itself: Anne was there, sitting by her side on the sofa, in that "darkened drawing room set in the merciless glare of summer heat."

Desire, or one's conscious yearning for something rests on a basis of experience. Recognition of one's desires cannot occur without a retrospective glance (even if it be of a vicarious kind, through hearsay) of the thrill, or anguish, or hope that accompanies them. Thérèse had no experience and no knowledge that could allow her to identify the nature of her happiness at the side of Anne and of her anguish in Anne's absence. Her imagination was thus not involved in expectation or fear, it did not feed or dash hopes. She lived the phases of her passionate longing through violent sensations alone, surrendering in turn to appeasement or to turmoil. She was never far removed from a lingering inner sense of agitation. The cool atmosphere of the drawing room is evoked, contrasted to the fierce heat of summer at Argelouse, the appeasing presence of the blond adolescent at her side acting as balm against the tumult of the senses. Anne would get up now and then and check if the sun had paled. Thérèse remembers the constant quiver of heat that threatened to invade the room, ready to splutter and to flare like fire. "But through the half-opened shutters the blinding glare would pounce like a great stream of molten metal, till it almost burned the carpet, and all must be again shut tight while human beings went once more to earth." This is the torrid nature that furnishes what O'Donnell calls "the dramatic commentary" or the key to what is most intimate in the characters' personality [see Donat O'Donnell, Maria Cross, 1952]. I do not believe that it would be driving connotations too far to see in the darkened room a desire for protection against the furor of invading heat and unnamed desires.

It could be argued that Thérèse's need for Anne's presence offers nothing unusual. Friendship between girls—or boys—was and still is often passionate in societies where diversions and social relations are curtailed. But there is a tension in the atmosphere here, there are palpitations only briefly quietened for Thérèse and unshared by her friend, that go beyond the most intense feelings of friendship. In this "land of thirst" the girl's yearning knows a momentary respite only in the other's presence. The walk to the cold stream of La Hure is strenuous along the sandy heath; but there, briefly, peace reigns. These are the images that Thérèse evokes as she sits in the carriage that brings her back to Argelouse after the trial. One must remember that these are the clues she seeks to help her unravel the confusion in her being. In those images thus evoked she relives the assuaging sensation of the icy waters in which their naked feet dipped for a moment, side by side. The girls did not speak a word; time remained suspended. But the suspension appears somewhat like the holding of one's breath, condemned soon to resume the accustomed rhythm and, for Thérèse, to heighten the pervasive anguish of the protracted wait.

To have stirred so much as a finger, so it seemed to them, would have set scurrying in fright their chaste, their formless happiness. It was Anne, always, who moved first—eager to be at the business of killing larks at sundown, and Thérèse, though she hated the sport, would follow, so hungry was she for the other's company.

The "so it seemed to them" of the quotation resembles a lover's obstinate belief in a shared experience. What makes it unconvincing that it apply to both of "them" is not merely that these are Thérèse's thoughts with not a hint of corroboration found in Anne's behavior. On the contrary, Anne is "always" the one to break the silence and so destroy the magic of the moment for Thérèse. She is quite predictably eager to move on, to kill birds with the unconscious cruelty of youth and youth's thoughtless tenderness, too. Thérèse alone is aware of the plight of those who are hunted and of their helplessness, for she has probed the dimensions of suffering. She identifies with the lark whose instant of life and "song of rapture" are already tainted by death, yet she follows her friend for she cannot do otherwise. She tries to blot away the cry of the wounded bird and her own pain at the same time, for she is "hungry for the other's company."

Those excursions in the heat of summer offer the only memory of happiness Thérèse ever experienced. But at no time did she ignore that those moments were volatile and in perpetual flight, nor was she spared the anguish of that knowledge. "Coming tomorrow?" she would ask, and the "sensible" answer would inevitably ensue, "Oh no—not every day." Thérèse recalls her dispirited walk home after her friend's silhouette had disappeared around the bend. Evening and darkness would have set in. "What was that anguish?" she asks. Why was she unable to read or do anything except wander back onto the now empty road? The hiatus of time is here evident in the use of the past tense, and with it the perspective which through distance could now afford a clearer view of events. Thérèse measures her wretchedness of those days, the morose restlessness that would bring her back to the very spot where Anne had disappeared. She asks the right question, but no sooner has she done so than she drops it. No explanation is sought for the dead silence that would suddenly engulf her when Anne was no longer visible. One cannot, however, simply ascribe Thérèse's oscillations to ignorance, let alone to innocence. It is too late for that. She wants to know, presumably, why she was seized by a pervasive anguish once her companion left. Why does she not pursue the question, the reader may ask, unless it be out of fear of finding an unbearable answer?

If Thérèse could simply be classified as a repressed lesbian, she would surely hold limited interest for us. But there exists in her, together with the unrequited need for Anne's nearness, an undeniable urgency for purity. One could argue that her attraction to a rather insipid adolescent girl who shared not a single one of her tastes is dictated by an intricate defense mechanism, which makes her yearn for somebody who must by necessity remain untouchable. This could become a circular reasoning, however, where cause and effect would be inextricably tied. "Christianity makes no allowances for the flesh; it simply abolishes it," Mauriac affirms in the famous opening words of "Souffrances du pécheur." But the turgid atmosphere in Thérèse can only be seen as a strong denial of such a precept, and thus of Christianity itself. In that case, it would of course be the absence of grace that wreaks havoc in the heroine's life. Yet that very absence would then emerge as the craving of the flesh and the stormy sensuality at the base of Thérèse's dilemma. Her nostalgia for the purity preceding her marriage is manifest, particularly in contrast to "the indelible filth" of her wedded life. But at the same time she cannot silence her doubts on her own candor as she wonders, "was I really so happy, so innocent of guile?"

Thérèse was never unaware of the need, illogical in her own sight, for being close to Anne. Bernard, on the other hand, had never set her imagination to motion. Why had she married him? "I married because..." and, irrepressibly, Anne's image comes again to the fore: "There had, of course, been the childish delight with which she had looked forward to becoming Anne's sister-in-law as a result of that marriage." She remembers the days preceding the wedding and her calm wait, not for the traditional fulfillment of her woman's role, but for Anne's presence: "Anne would be coming back from the Saint-Sebastian convent for the wedding." But what she had thought of as peace was only "half sleep, the torpor of the snake within her breast." One wonders what she means by "snake," what shape she would give to evil, if she pursued her search to the end and exacted an answer to her own inquiry. Her memory lingers on the oppressiveness that suddenly rushed upon her and the nightmarish quality of her wedding day. "She had entered this cage like a sleepwalker" and sensed with horror that she would inexorably join "the herd of those who have served." This is not the case of a girl's vague dreams of love being dashed by the brutality of a husband or the banality of family life. Thérèse suffered in anticipation of the fatal embrace of the flesh, of her contact with man. She had for the first time resented the presence of Anne whose visible joy made no allowance for the separation that would soon place them apart not merely in space "but by reason of what Thérèse was about to suffer—of that irreparable outrage to which her innocent body would have to submit." Again, it is not merely the case of a certain anxiety, perturbation, or even fear, which could be explained by a puritanical education (although Thérèse professed independence of mind and no submission to church dogma) or by inexperience. She felt outright horror, an irrepressible revulsion at the very thought of physical contact with the man she had chosen to marry—and who was the best she could have chosen, she still believed.

Perhaps the most revelatory signs of a certain abnormality in Thérèse's nature are to be found in her musings about her nights in Bernard's arms. She had mastered the art of feigning a pleasure she did not in fact experience. Yet her husband's embraces had made her wonder about the happiness of complete abandon: "Much as when looking at a landscape shrouded in mist, we fancy what it must be like in sunshine, so did Thérèse discover the delights of the flesh." Her sensuality was awakened but remained shrouded in the mist of her own resistance. She never considered the possibility of surrender and joy in her nuptial bed, but now found herself trying to envisage their wondrous beauty, the "sunshine" that remained elusive. She submitted to the laws of matrimony and, possibly, her body involuntarily responded to the pressures of the male at her side. Yet her vagaries pushed her toward an unknown realm of voluptuous experience where she too might discover the total fulfillment of desire. So her honeymoon passed, her "teeth clenched" as the "little pig" at her side sought pleasure in his trough: "and I was the trough" she reflects. Her only comfort during that time: a letter from Anne which she read over and over again. The girl complained that she no longer went to Vilméja so as not to run into the owner of the premises. Young Azévédo had come back and she abhorred consumptives.

For a woman who ignores or chooses to ignore all peremptory calls of the flesh, the imperatives of love must remain empty words in the dictionary of the inane. Thus it is that Anne's subsequent letters with their message of burning passion for Azévédo are found shocking. Thérèse's violent and cruel reaction against the girl who had made her own heart throb is unmistakably that of a jilted lover and not of a friend. How could it be that the foolish adolescent girl she had left behind, so lacking in imagination, should have discovered the lyrical beauty of sentiment and desire? Thérèse knew only too well how incapable of responding to the fervent longing of the heart, how indifferent to the dashed hopes of those who live in helpless wait Anne had been: "How could this song of songs have burst from the dry little heart she had known?—for it was dry, as she knew only too well. ... " How else could she have known, if not through the impassiveness that had made her suffer, Anne's irresponsiveness to her tacit entreaties, the casual and repeated "Oh no—not every day" given in answer to her anxious question, "coming tomorrow?" A passion such as Thérèse nourished relies for continuity on ignorance. She must never acknowledge the nature of her desires in a world that would find them inadmissible. The key to their being rests on the secrecy that shrouds them from everybody and makes them seemingly impervious to her own investigating efforts. If ever they were allowed to the surface those desires would be condemned to perish in shame. Her anguish would have a name, her yearnings an aim. But Thérèse comes here quite close to recognizing the character of her trepidation in the hot summer afternoons at Argelouse, of the wretchedness that always seized her when Anne went away.

What follows is startling only if one refuses to see in Thérèse a would-be lover rather than a friend. She herself does not even try to explain an act performed as an ancient ritual and aiming at bending fate to will: "Two years ago, in the hotel bedroom" she reflects, "I took the pin, and I pierced the photograph of that young man just where the heart should be—not in a fit of temper, but quite calmly, as though I were doing a perfectly ordinary thing." The fact is that that kind of black magic performed with determination has from time immemorial been a last recourse from shattered hopes and unrequited passions. In that context, it is indeed "a perfectly ordinary thing" that Thérèse should yield to superstition in her bid for vengeance. She turns against the rival who had known how to inspire fiery emotions and desire in the cool adolescent she had left behind. Everything in herself revolts against that act of betrayal. Her teeth clenched, she "was surprised at her own appearance in the glass." The presence of Bernard now becomes intolerable: "She felt no hatred for him, but simply a wild desire to be alone with her pain, to discover where it was that the blow had struck her!" The language is quite explicit here. Thérèse lives the tragedy of a woman condemned to give vent neither to love nor to pain. Where was the hurt, she asks herself? Does she also wonder what the hurt was? Her questions seek no answers at any rate, except thatshe must have solitude, to dress her wounds and contemplate undisturbed the extent of her misery.

"I could have wished, Thérèse, for sorrow to have turned your heart to God," Mauriac says in his brief foreword. But creations have a way of voicing their own truth and of asserting their own inner laws, heedless of all preconceived ideas. The author, no doubt, intended the slow germination of a conscience and the coming to grips with her evil deed or his heroine. Yet Thérèse remains to the end the free spirit initially delineated in the story, unconcerned with her soul and the dimensions of evil. Her redemption would have exacted "a cry of sacrilege" from the best intentioned of readers, the author concedes. I suggest that the reason for it is that Thérèse's depravity was not in the temptation of murder as such, and the author indirectly alludes to that. Her rebellion, in fact, probably "commanded her creator's not altogether unconscious sympathy," as O'Donnell points out. Mauriac was all too aware of the wearing down of dreams and the enslaving tyranny exercised relentlessly within a home in the name of kinship and love. Murder was not the cause of Thérèse's dilemma but its result. It was the "necessary" step she had to take in order to reassert her right to her own wilderness and to the nonconformity of her desires. But she appears so caught behind "the living bars" of family life that readers may fall into the trap of believing that it was only against them that she chafed. The author manipulates us into assuming that Thérèse's unconscious if violent rebellion was against the mounting and stifling monotony and the empty rituals within the entrapping walls of her country house. But she had not been in the dark before, and her revolt had started long before those walls began to close about her. It was during her honeymoon, when she had not yet lived in the La Trave household but had already received the jolt of Anne's betrayal, that she looked dispassionately at the "country-bred fellow" she had married and yearned, with a mind all too clear:

If only she had not got to make such an effort to eat her lunch and smile, to compose her features and to keep her eyes from blazing. If only she could fix her mind freely upon the mysterious despair which seemed to have seized upon her.

The English translation is faithful to the original. Thérèse talks quite literally of the mysterious despair ("désespoir mystérieux") that had got hold of her, as her mind went over the fiery words in Anne's letters. Bernard is no longer merely the male who had violated the sanctity of her body, he is the intruder into the passionate world of her feelings and emotions. The only way she finds of converting him into a bearable presence is to make of him a sounding board for a name she needs to mention: "she had to talk about Anne." Like those of all lovers, Thérèse's words, too, coverage to the object of her desires. She needed to evoke the only name and face that had for so long filled the realm of her reveries.

The crime of Mauriac's heroine is presented like a living organism with a volition of its own, a germ that, once implanted, matures irrespective of will or consciousness. It does not become evident until the night of the forest fire, when Thérèse watches, mute and fascinated, Bernard taking, unaware, a second dose of his Fowler prescription. But murder was by then within her, an unrecognized yet germinating embryo. Its stirring was merely a confirmation of the life that had already been infused in it. If one could trace that life at its inception one would have to go back to the far away days of Thérèse's honeymoon. There was first the revulsion inspired by the cumbersome body that shared her bed and which she forcefully pushed away as it sought her warmth during sleep. And then there was the prospect of squalor and emptiness, as the loss of the only love she had ever nourished took for her the shape of a "mysterious despair." All that followedness now lay forever beyond the boundaries of the possible for her, is a manifest-ation of that awareness. Without hope there could only be destruction for a nature without docility. Lacking the resignation of the meek, Thérèse could only strike back with the weapons at her disposal: her charm and her intelligence at the service now of vengeance and her thirst for freedom.

Nelly Cormeau whose study is somewhat too deferential to Mauriac and to what is perhaps his technique of deception (to what I see as the author's effort to depict seething and passionate natures under the guise of religious innuendoes) refers nevertheless to Thérèse as a creature branded by a terrible passion and an ineluctable fate [see Nelly Cormeau, L'Art de François Mauriac (1951)]. I have chosen to call Thérèse's passion by its name, and to answer her ill-fated search with words and thoughts shaped in her own mind, dictated by her emotions, and yet left unacknowledged. She goes meticulously over the events that followed her return to Argelouse after the honeymoon, her meetings with Azévédo and her cruel duplicity against the girl she had so intensely wanted close to her. But she knows now that she could not allow Anne to realize a dream from which she was herself excluded. As for the arsenic she poured drop by drop into the glass of the man who was her avowed master, that was an act similar in its nature to the one of pushing him away from her nupital bed. Her vengeance, however, was not directed against that man, for whom she had little consideration but hardly any animosity. Had she been able to isolate herself from his presence, from his touch above all, he would have played a negligible role in her life. But Anne and the desire, which that blond adolescent had unconsciously culled from her heart, had ineluctably shaped her existence and condemned it to a frightening solitude. If Mauriac leaves Thérèse at the end on a Parisian sidewalk deprived of redemption, it is because no redemption is possible from the imperatives of nature and the assertive demands of the heart.