Word: chantal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saint & Symbol. Joan of Arc, France's patron saint-who was persuaded by her inquisitors to deny her visionary powers-has long served Bernanos as a symbol of Republican France. Joy's heroine, Chantal de Clergerie, is a much-modified Joan, facing present-day inquisitors in modern dress...
Youthful, maidenly Chantal lives in a French chateau whose Second Empire shrubberies and wide, tawny avenues are described by Bernanos with vivid feeling. With her live her timid, pedantic father (who has written volumes of history but cannot stir a step without the counsel of his psychiatrist) and her psychotic grandmother (who still clutches to her bosom the keys of storage cupboards that have long ceased to exist). Of such as them, Chantal says simply: "What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline toward sadness and turn instinctively toward...
Flesh & Blood. It is Chantal's own obsession with gladness and light that is her undoing. Her moments of spiritual illumination are regarded by those around her as a nervous disorder, and, like Saint Joan, she is forced to submit to questioning. When her first inquisitor, her hysterical father, uncovers nothing but his own cowardice, a psychiatrist is called in. The psychiatrist emerges from the ordeal fit to be put in a strait jacket. Then a perspicacious Catholic abbé, who has secretly doubted the existence of God for many years, is summoned-and finds himself newly inspired with...
Unlike Saint Joan, Chantal repels her inquisitors. Like Saint Joan, she cannot protect herself against brute force, and her murder by her father's tormented chauffeur (to whom the spectacle of innocence is intolerable) brings the book to a bloody...