Word: hagridden
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Domenikos Theotokopoulos didn't like the Inquisition. But he was a devout Catholic, and Toledo's faded, invalid nobles, Quixotic bishops and hagridden monks were pigments for his palette. Himself a mystic, he painted the tortured, visionary aspirations of his subjects, seared the flesh further from their hollow cheeks, elongated their bodies till they looked like trembling candle flames, lit like flickering shadows in the glow of the Inquisition. The best painter in all Spain, Theotokopoulos became wealthy, got himself a 24-room palace, a beautiful wife named Doña Jerónima de las Cuevas...
...prove to his opponents that he too can be sophisticated, Georges Bernanos opens his novel with a few venomously comic, ugly chapters in which a little 16-year-old wild beast of a girl murders the rural marquis who has seduced her, makes an abject jackass of a hagridden local doctor. That done, Bernanos settles down to his own business...