We all know the world of M. Francois Mauriac by now, the landes "steaming with prayer and fornication", the vile meannesses of the men of property (or, better, the women, for men seem to die like drones once they have fecundated the monstrous queen bees) in their shuttered villas round which even the pines are sensuous. Yet we have waited nearly forty years for the translation of L'Enfant Chargé de Chaînes, which was first published in 1913, when M. Mauriac was twenty-eight.

This, the last in the uniform English edition, was the novel that first revealed his sultry, tortured talent and, on reading the translation so many years later, we are struck by the technical mastery the young M. Mauriac had already achieved, the clear classical lines with no loose ends. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, M. Mauriac's protagonist, Jean-Paul Johanet, is a sensitive young literary man tortured by the Beatific Vision and Hell, or, as one of his apostolic friends puts it, always "analysing his empty, complicated little mind". No one can say that Joyce's Dublin had less of that strictness and obsession with sin—especially, of course, the sins of the flesh—than the bon-dévot families of Bordeaux from which M. Mauriac stemmed.

Like Stephen, Jean-Paul wrestles to adjust his Catholicism and his life, though, unlike Stephen, Jean-Paul never really loses his faith. Joyce's work, of course, is on a far larger scale than M. Mauriac's, but M. Mauriac has more perfection of form. Moreover, M. Mauriac is not the intellectual Joyce was. Philosophy and theology have always left him cold, he has no interest in those "pamphlets in which scholarly clerics set out to prove that the activities of the Inquisition and the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew could not be laid to the charge of the Church." Divine grace is experienced almost physically; it threatens to withdraw even from fiancés such as Jean-Paul and Marthe when they "indulge in a voluptuous confusion of the senses in the highest degree equivocal."

Instead of the theological subtleties, then, Jean-Paul turns to a heartfelt moral cause, here called Amour et Foi, whose object is to inflame the ideals of democratic life with the Christian message. We cannot help linking this with those journalistic activities that M. Mauriac has pursued over the years, boldly, independently, and with a bordelais common sense underlying the passionate command of phrase. The Cause, we need hardly add, was somehow going to disentangle the grace and poetry of the gospels from that dead and bourgeois formalism in religion which M. Mauriac has always found so repulsive.

But the "sacristy spiders", normal butts of French as of other Catholic novelists, form only an unedifying background. The leader of the Amour et Foi movement, Jérome Servet himself, has vices peculiar to the chrysalis-holy. No power over others is more insidious than spiritual power and Jérome basks in the worship of his followers. In his office he looks at the photographs dedicated to him by admirers: "To Jérome my only friend", "For him who revealed the truth to me": "poor little faces whose smiles awakened no memory in his heart. . . . Jérome Servet felt within himself that exaltation from which great works may emerge. He rang the bell. His secretary came in. He began to dictate."

Such wholehearted, working-class followers naturally distrust a dilettante young bourgeois like Jean-Paul who, when pressed, admits that in the Cause he was "seeking a private happiness". Moreover what he is really doing is oscillating between his little kept woman, Liette, and the confessional: "Seven o'clock sounded. He got up in haste and hurried to the church of Saint-Francois-Xavier. In the darkness of the confessional box he cast off all his weaknesses, striking his head against the varnished wood in an excess of penitence. When he rose from his knees he felt calmer, scarcely any longer troubled by delicate scruples and sins only ill-defined."

Such a "divided consciousness" has always struck M. Mauriac's agnostic readers with a certain distaste. We find it with other Catholic novelists such as Bloy, Fogazzaro or Bernanos and it is a meaningless complication unless we grant the writer his main premise—that his faith is valid. If in M. Mauriac particularly the tension between life and faith rarely seems to allow any ease-up this is because his faith has always been that of Pascal, just as the sensuality and classical control of his art always remind us of Racine.

We see then that the problem was already stated when M. Mauriac was in his twenties and he has done no more than work it out in other ways ever since. In this early novel his religious friend Vincent Hiéron says to Jean-Paul:

As a Catholic you have found yourself immersed in a pagan society and, seated at a banquet where all the luxuries and pleasures of the world are proffered have, nevertheless, claimed for yourself the sacred heritage of a Christian childhood. But no man can serve two masters. Is it not that truth which now torments you?

It was this question that M. Mauriac later tried to answer in his essay on the dilemmas of a novelist who is also a Catholic—Dieu et Mammon; his examination of tender conscience which was also an attempt to reply to the accusation made both by André Gide and by his co-religionists that he turned his readers into accomplices. Whether on the literary side the Catholic tension adds a dimension to M. Mauriac or not is an open question, but few will deny that he is among the most gifted of all living novelists.