Word: mauriac
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Nobel Prizewinner Francois Mauriac, the Roman Catholic novelist, who is much preoccupied with sin, delivered himself last week of a pessimistic commentary on French politics. "We must conclude," he wrote on the front page of Le Figaro, "that the French people are able to secrete only a certain species of parliamentarianism, and that their bad habits are closely linked with their character. The saying that character is destiny applies to peoples as well as to individuals...
Since they disagree on almost everything else, many Frenchmen disagreed with M. Mauriac's dour outlook. What was more striking in France last week, however, was that more & more Frenchmen were beginning to agree on one of the major causes of their chronic parliamentary crises. The cause: the constitution of the Fourth Republic, which came into force in 1946 and since has spawned 15 consecutive governments ranging in health from sickly to stillborn. So long as the constitution remains unchanged, Frenchmen are beginning to realize, premiers and cabinets are bound to come & go with distressing frequency...
...morally simpleminded" standards of the legion, Kerr continues, would automatically ban the filming of much of Nobel Prizewinner François Mauriac's work, or that of English Novelist Graham Greene, both Catholics. Concludes Kerr, after recalling a maxim quoted by French Catholic Paul Claudel ("God writes straight with crooked lines"): "Art without crooked lines is unnatural art-inevitably inferior art. And in its production not only the creative mind is betrayed; the Catholic mind, in its fullness, in its scope, in its centricity, is betrayed as well . . . We are moving closer and closer to the sort of stand...
Fallen Creatures. Marie and Gilles are conventional sugar-sticks, but Agathe. straining for a love she cannot possess and Nicolas, moving from his false idolatry of Gilles to a love of God, are remarkably impressive figures, gargoyles of suffering and striving. In telling their story, Novelist Mauriac shows himself still deeply preoccupied with the fevers of the human blood; at 66, he does not pretend to a resignation he apparently cannot feel...
Such honesty has led hostile critics to hint that Mauriac is essentially a refined sensualist who, from motives of caution or guilt, takes care to renew his option with God. Mauriac, in a brief essay appended to The Loved and the Unloved, replies in a voice of deep humility: "Though, quite often, Grace does 'break in' [to his books], it has tended to do so less and less as I have grown older ... I might point out that evil is a reality in this world of ours, that the people I set out to paint are fallen creatures...