THE THRONE AND THE MIRE

An Appreciation of Mauriac’s “A Kiss for the Leper”

V. V. B. RAMA RAO

Froncois Mauriac, the French novelist and Nobel laureate, is a Catholic, a moralist and a humanist. Being a Catholic he believed in moral preaching for spiritual enrichment. Introspection may purify the mind. The deeper one looks into one’s self, the clearer would be one’s insight into the theological absolutes of God and Evil. The greater one has an understanding of the spirit, the greater would be one’s capacity to comprehend the weakness of the flesh. Being a moralist, the writer does take pains to uphold what is morally edifying and spiritually pure. As a humanist he is aware of the little kinks in human nature and he is all sympathy for the tormented sinner.

A Kiss for the Leper (Le Baiser Au Lepreux 1922) has been acclaimed Mauriac’s “first notable achievement in fiction.” The plot of the novel is surprisingly uninvolved. An ugly looking invalid Jean is married off to a robust young woman Noemie, if only to be the progenitor of a line of successors to the property which might eventually pass off into the hands of the owner’s sister should his son Jean die a bachelor The local cure’s motive for involvement in the proposal is suspect. After the marriage and great deal of mutual evasion Jean leaves Noemie out of an intense disgust for himself on the pretext of doing some research in Paris. When he wants to have her she is cold and ironically enough when she wants him it is his turn to get frozen. After his return from Paris in ill-health he wants to take himself away from her deliberately and visits regularly a consumptive, gets infected and dies. The will of his father enjoins on the daughter-in-law a life of widowhood for the rest of her life. The “iodine doctor’s” overtures are futile and he becomes a convert to Catholicism. Having given the husband the satisfaction that the last temptation of the flesh is allayed, the plump woman nearing middle-age retires to the cloister, to a life of celibacy. Jean, the horrid looking and sexually impotent young man, is the “leper” and Noemie’s realisation that “He was beautiful...” (when he lay on his death bed) is the figurative “kiss” which opens up her access to godliness.

The narrative technique employed to unfold the story is one of superb craftsmanship. The story, essentially, is about a disgusting, malformed, ill-adjusted young man and the situation of his marriage to the rosy creature is loathsome. Wretched ferrety-faced Jean “was so short that the low dressing room mirror reflected his pinched little face, with its hollow cheeks and long-pointed nose. It was red in colour and seemed to have worn away like a stick of barley-sugar as the result of prolonged sucking. His cropped hair grew to a point low on his prematurely wrinkled forehead. When he grinned he showed his gums and a set of decayed teeth. (P. 3)” We are told he is twenty-three with nothing much of formal education, no health and no pastime. He withdraws into himself more and more, loathes himself and looks furtively and greedily at the full-blown rosy maiden Noemie. The arid emptiness of his life is appalling. The situation of their marriage is revolting beyond all description. The accomplished artist that Mauriac is he uses words with deliberate precision of a master. “Le mot juste” is Mauriac’s forte and the following are the words the translator Hopkins (the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins’s nephew) uses to bring out the force of the original in describing the disgusting consummation of the Catholic union of spirits: “Long was the battle waged by Jean Peloueyre, at first with his ice-bound senses and when with the woman who was as one dead. As day was dawning a stifled groan marked the end of a struggle that had lasted six long hours. Soaked with sweat, Jean Peloueyre does not make a movement. He lay there, looking more hideous than a worm beside the corpse it has at last abandoned. (P. 25). “Worm” and “corpse” each is a superb example of le mot juste in treating the hideous consummation. So are the images in the entire Chapter V which though short revel in symbols of death.

Heroic is the battle against temptation waged by Jean who has inner strength of the spirit. In Paris a prostitute tempts him but he “takes to his heels”. For a moment he wonders: “Why not seek forgetfulness tonight in the acquiescent and submissive arms? Surely it was for men of his sort that these sellers of endearments existed” (P. 36). Shortly afterwards he finds a whore and drives with her to some place behind the Madelaine, “The sound of hairpins on marble woke Jean from lethargy. He saw a pair of arms that looked enormous where they joined the shoulders. Bows of pink ribbon adorned an expanse of quivering flesh. She called him “petit loup”, while, with infinite care, she removed her stockings of artificial silk. This eagerness to give herself, this acquiescence, this submissiveness to his will, modified by no trace of disgust, horrified Jean Peloueyre far more violently than Noemie’s shrinking fear had ever done. The woman saw him fling a note on to the table, and was struck speechless with amazement. But before she could so much as make a movement, he was out of the house, slinking along the street like a thief, (P.37)

Noemie’s struggle is more herioc. While her husband is a physical invalid, she is full-blown, healthy and energetic. The youthful doctor’s single peep into the window from down the road haunts her for days. Temptation hammers at her obsessively. But purity wins: “Bundle of instincts though she was, she had been trained to keep a watchful eye upon her conscience. Consequently, as she was at once on her guard. The first warning came when, as she was saying her prayers, she realized that she had to start each one of them over again because a smiling sunburnt face stood between her and God. Lying in bed, she was obsessed by the thought of him, and when she got up next morning, still only half-awake and haunted by the memory of her dreams, she found that her first thought was that she should soon be seeing him again. During that morning’s Mass she kept her hands over her face. At siesta time, when the trap moved down the house all the ground floor shutters were heremetically sealed.” (P. 42) The battle did not end in a victory here, at this point. Temptation dies hard. After Jean’s death the widow sees him again from a distance and retreats. The author puts in: “Why did Noemie retreat? Some power keeps her from running to meet the man who was coming in her direction, and dragged her backwards. She plunged into the heather that met above her head. The brambles tore at her hands. For a moment she paused, listening to the sound of wheels upon the road she could not see.” (P 60)

Thus the couple individually wage a fierce fight against temptation and come out victorious owing to their built-in moral sense, an outcome of their Catholic upbringing, and a capacity to ward off evil, thereby exhibiting superhuman religious strength. What is more striking is that the “iodine doctor” and the cure too are not what they are at the beginning of the novel. The naive sensualist who believes that youthful Catholic widows are easy prey to adulterous anglers described in images of a birdshooter eventually becomes a convert to Catholicism. The cure whose motives, as pointed out earlier, in proposing the marriage are suspect, becomes humble. He questions with “relentless rigour” the motives which led him to act as had done. Finally, we are told: “He felt humbled, and less and less, now did he attempt to assume airs of priestly infallibility. When celebrating daily Mass he no longer let the train of his cassock hang free, and he had given up wearing the three-cornered beretta which distinguished him from his brethren of the cloth. One by one, all his petty vanities fell from him. He felt no pleasure at the news that, though he was not senior priest, the Bishop had bestowed on him the right to wear a hood over his surplice. How came it that he, a guardian of souls, should ever have cared about such trivialities? The only thing that mattered to him now was to get clear in his mind the part he had played in this drama. Had he really been an obedient servant of the Lord, or was the real truth that a poor parish priest had usurped the functions of the Eternal God?” (p. 42)

A kiss for the leper is a morally edifying tale of virtue, morality and religious sense triumphing over carnality, leudness and temptation. Mauriac held that “if there is a reason for the existence of the novelist on earth it is this: to show the element which holds out against God in the highest and noblest characters–the innermost evils and dissimulations; and also to light up the secret source of sanctity in creatures who seem to us to have failed.” Rounding off the character of Noemie the author says: “Small she might have been as a human being, but she was condemned to greatness. Born a slave, she had been called to a throne and must exercise regal powers” (P. 60) The word “condemned” is the key word and is archetypal in its application. Saints are condemned in the sense that their flesh is martyred and so was Noemie. The bodies of the saints are condemned so that their soul might shine. By the metaphorical kiss for the leper Noemie attained sanctification.

A comparison of Francois Mauriac and Graham Greene, both Catholic Writers, is relevant here. Where Greene, in his The Power and the glory, portrays the whiskey-priest in the predicament of sin and then the power and the glory of Divine Grace for him, Mauriac, in his A Kiss for the Leper, presents Jean and Noemie emerging victorious to the throne. Moral rectitude attained after an engrossing struggle leads the way to a throne of happiness – the happiness of justifying one’s self to God. Sin is a mire. Both Mauriac and Greene picture the throne and the mire. If Greene shows the mire with vividness so does Mauriac the throne. While atomizing sin, Greene goes very near the scabrous and the scatological with the result that he lays himself open to the criticism that he revels in them. Where Greene shows his verve in depicting evil, Mauriac displays his talent in laying bare the innermost workings of the mind in getting stimulated to do good. If Greene hopes for Divine Grace for Pinkie after his death in Brighton Rock (his first explicitly Catholic novel), Mauriac shows that Noemie has activated Grace while alive as a result of her own choice and commitment. She is condemned, we are told, to greatness for every path but the path of renunciation was closed to her.

A word about the artifice of the great master. The narrative is packed with a sense of urgent suspense. The contemporary sensibility (or on second thoughts, lack of it), makes the reader anticipate with dry-lipped animation sordid and so attractive, scenes of fornication and adultery. The writer appears to leaping towards such scenes He makes us suspect that Noemie is about to fall now with that grandson of Cadette’s, now with the doctor; but the sin is always forestalled what with the introspection of the married Catholic woman. As with the woman so with the man. There are moments when the reader almost expects that Mauriac would lose control but the artist stays the master. He does not allow the character to sin nor does he allow the reader to put down the book. Such is the alchemy of his art.

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