Le Baiser Au Lépreux

Jean Péloueyre is rich, intelligent, and monstrous in appearance. When his family arranges his marriage to the pretty Noémie d'Artiailh, both bride and groom enter into a private hell of incompatible flesh and conscience. He loves her; she desires to be virtuous. He knows what he is; she cannot overcome what he makes her feel. In the stifling heat of a provincial summer, Mauriac dissects a marriage between a man who knows he inspires disgust and a woman who cannot reconcile her Christian ideals with her physical revulsion. The novel scandalized 1922 France not for its plot, but for its ruthless examination of how bodies betray souls, how goodness can coexist with cruelty, and how the most intimate violence happens in silence. This is the first masterpiece from the writer who would later give us Thérèse Desqueyroux: a Christian novelist who understood that the flesh is where redemption is lost and won.