Word: grad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 21--High up on the south side, an old Harvard grad, he must have been Class of '14 or so, sat down and cried with joy. The declared read Visitors 13, Yale 0. Already, more youthful Harvards were swarming through the Bowl's exits singing and cheering jubilantly. A few yards to the side, John Culver and Nick Culolias, 200 pound giants, were playfully slamming each other on the back...
...Gabriel Gradėre has corrupted young girls, lived with a prostitute on her earnings, run a ring of brothels with her, trafficked in cocaine and blackmail, and is now, at 50, being blackmailed in turn by the prostitute Aline. After a childhood friend has given birth to his son, he marries her for her money though they abhor each other. When she dies, he squanders the fortune she has left him. Some land remains to his son, however, and Gradėre tries to salvage it from the predatory grasp of Symphorien Desbats, the asthmatic husband of Grad...
...this point that the frustrated Gradėre, living with the others in a dismal, rainswept chateau in southwestern France, adds murder to his long catalogue of sins. As the rain pours down, he intercepts the blackmailing Aline, now plotting with Symphorien to drive him from the chateau, and "without haste or passion, [performs] that act of squeezing her throat of which he had so often dreamed...
...believes that Gradėre is not yet lost: the local priest to whom he confesses his sins. "No human being is damned," the priest says. "You must realize the astonishing nature of that grace whose beneficiary you are." At the end, sick of a mortal illness, "the murderer lay . . . with a smile of heavenly peace upon his lips," and said, "I am dying in peace ... in a peace beyond imagining...
Novelist Mauriac has done poor service to his thesis, and little to illuminate Christian doctrine, by trying to impose it with a mechanically applied formula. His 203-page demonstration of Gradėre's irremediable villainy is not easily erased by a few phrases on the last three pages. As a novelist, Prizewinner Mauriac has committed his own sin: he has failed to bring the flesh of dramatic substance to the skeleton of an idea...