Mauriac - Vipers Tangle

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Text originally published in 1933 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

VIPERS TANGLE

BY

FRANOIS MAURIAC

OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY

TRANSLATED BY WARRE B. WELLS

Contents

Vipers Tangle is the supreme example of Mauriacs art. In all of literature there can be few more appalling studies of a soul devoured by pride and avarice, corroded by hatred. The theme of this remarkable novel is the most exciting in the worldthe battle for a human soul.

Louis, the central figure, all but personifies evil. He is a millionaire many times over, yet wretchedly unhappy. Toward the end of his life, seeking to uncover the cause of his unhappiness, he commits to paper his whole bitter story: a childhood smothered with indulgence by his mother but starved of any other affection...his love for Isa, and how it thawed his frozen heart... the trivial misunderstanding that festered until it poisoned their entire married life and the lives of their children...the old misers struggle to disinherit his family...and the final powerful climax, with divine grace vying to the very end to pierce the evil encrusting Louis soul.

The fascination of this book lies in Mauriacs extraordinary talent for making people live. Probing to the inmost core of human character, he literally gets inside his subjects. His genius consists in seeing beneath the surfacefar beneath, down to the depths of the soul, where our deepest selves subsist, where the battle of good and evil wages, where mans eternal destiny is decided. Subtlety of mind, clear vision, a sound philosophy of man, and unshakable honesty in the face of human frailtythese are the sources of Mauriacs astonishing gift for laying bare the human heart. Stripping his characters of pretense and mere appearance, he exposes motives mercilessly, yet justly.

Yet this is no picture of unrelieved horror; a deeper, Catholic dimensiona strain of hopeweaves all through the story: even Louis can be saved. For what made Louis soul a wasteland was lack of love; and Love Himself pursues Louis to the last.

This enemy of his own family, this soul eaten up by hatred and avariceI would have you, despite his vileness, hold him in pity; I would have him touch your heart. All through his sombre life, dark passions hide from him the light quite near at hand, of which a gleam, sometimes, falls upon him and is on the point of setting him afirehis own passions...but, first of all, the indifferent Christians who lie in wait for him, and whom in his turn he tortures. How many of us thus throw the sinner back upon himself, turning him away from a truth which, through our medium, sheds its rays no more!

No, it was not gold that this miser cherished; it was not revenge for which this madman hungered. The real object of his loveyou will know it if you have the strength and the courage to bear with this man, even to the moment of his last avowal, cut short by death....

... Lord , consider that we do not understand ourselves and that we do not know what we would, and that we go infinitely far astray from that which we desire

SAINT THERESA OF AVILA

YOU will be surprised to find this letter in my safe, lying on top of a packet of securities. It might have been better for me to entrust it to my lawyer, who would have handed it over to you after my death, or else put it in the drawer of my deskthe first drawer that my children will break open before I am even getting cold.

But the fact is that I have gone over this letter in my mind for years and years, and that, when I lie awake, I have always imagined it, all by itself, on the shelf of my safean empty safe, containing nothing else but this revenge of mine which, for nearly half a century, I have kept warm.

Dont be afraid. As a matter of fact you are already reassured. The securities are there, all right. It seems to me as though I hear that shout of yours, as soon as you are inside the hall, on your return from the bank. Yes, youll shout to the children: The securities are there, all right.

It is only by a hairs breadth that they are there. I had laid my plans. If I had chosen, today you would be left with nothing except the house and the land. Its lucky for you that I have survived my hatred. For a long time I thought that my hatred was the most alive thing in meand here I am today, at any rate, not even feeling it any longer.

The old man I have become finds it hard to imagine the raging invalid I used to be, who spent his nights, not indeed in plotting his revengethat delayed-action bomb was already placed in position, with an attention to detail of which I was proudbut in seeking a way of being able to enjoy it. I wanted to live long enough to see all your faces when you came back from the bank. It was a question of not giving you my authority to open the safe too soon, of giving it to you just late enough for me to have the last joy of hearing you asking in desperation: Where are the securities? It seemed to me that then even the most frightful pangs of death could not spoil that pleasure for me.

Yes, I was a man capable of calculating like that. How was I brought to ita man like myself, who was no monster?

It is four oclock, and my lunch tray and dirty plates still litter the table, attracting the flies. I have rung in vain; bells never ring in the country. I wait, without impatience, in this room where I slept as a child and where, no doubt, I shall die. The moment I do, the first thought of our daughter Genevive will be to claim it for the children.

I occupy, all by myself, the largest room, with the best view. Do me the justice of recognising that I offered Genevive to give it up to her, and that I would have done so, if Doctor Lacaze had not been afraid that the damp of the ground floor would be bad for my bronchitis. Otherwise, no doubt, I should have agreed, but with such resentment that it is lucky I was prevented. (I have spent my whole life making sacrifices whose memory poisoned me, while it fed and fattened those kinds of grudges that time strengthens.)

The taste for squabbling is a family heritage. My father, so I often heard my mother say, quarrelled with his parents, and they died themselves without ever seeing their daughter again since they turned her out thirty years earlier (she founded the family of those Marseilles cousins whom we do not know). We have never known the reason for all this dissension, but we took the hatred of our progenitors on trust; and to this very day I should turn my back on any of those little Marseilles cousins whom I met.