Word: roget
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Among the other originals: Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Madame Delphine Delamare, the faithless young wife of a middle-aged doctor who had studied medicine under Flaubert's father); Edgar Allan Foe's Marie Roget (Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful clerk in a tobacconist's shop Poe patronized); Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Deacon William Brodie, by day a respectable Edinburgh town councilman who at night led a notorious gang of thieves and kept two mistresses). Most of them were interesting people; some were fascinating. But they all have one thing...
Almost as soon as Father Roget reaches Indo-China as a French army chaplain, his religious certainties begin to waver. Riding through the crushing heat of the jungle to a front-line outpost, he passes a ruined pagoda, and is horrified by his sudden vision of his own God "dying in the grasp of the foul, green fungus, speckled with the disease of decay." At the front Colonel Lejeune, a magnificent soldier, tells him with cold insolence that he would have preferred reinforcements to a priest. The French are corroded by defeatism, many of the soldiers are themselves Communists...
...this point the priest hardly seems worth saving, but Novelist Hardy gives him one more chance. During a retreat from the victorious Communists, an officer is hit by machine-gun bullets and begs for the priest. Again fear seizes Roget, but this time the colonel unexpectedly helps him find his soul. Standing beside the priest, Lejeune says with great compassion: "All right. Go now. Don't crawl. Walk out to him." When Roget goes to the dying man, it is the beginning of his return to faith and self-respect...
Bennett's difficulty-and it kept him from ever fully scaling the literary heights-was his inability to feel deeply. He once said if he had to choose between the collected works of Shakespeare and Roget's Thesaurus, "I would let Billy go, upon my word." He could write perceptively, but he had to lament, while trying to write about love: "I have never been in love. Sometimes the tears start to my eyes, but they never fall...
...Today, Roget's grandson carries on the work, adding new words and phrases sent in by correspondents all over the world. After 100 years, the Thesaurus has not ended the menace Roget saw. But it has sent thousands of users to searching for the right word, has persuaded thousands more to spread their "wings for flight...