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Text originally published in 1933 under the same title.
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Publisher’s Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s 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 reader’s 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
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY
TRANSLATED BY WARRE B. WELLS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
INTRODUCTION 4
VIPERS’ TANGLE 5
PART THE FIRST 6
Chapter I 6
Chapter II 11
Chapter III 17
Chapter IV 25
Chapter V 32
Chapter VI 37
Chapter VII 41
Chapter VIII 50
Chapter IX 56
Chapter X 61
Chapter XI 66
PART THE SECOND 69
Chapter XII 69
Chapter XIII 78
Chapter XIV 83
Chapter XV 88
Chapter XVI 92
Chapter XVII 97
Chapter XVIII 110
Chapter XIX 117
Chapter XX 122
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 130
INTRODUCTION
Vipers’ Tangle is the supreme example of Mauriac’s 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 world—the 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 miser’s 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 Mauriac’s 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 surface—far beneath, down to the depths of the soul, where our deepest selves subsist, where the battle of good and evil wages, where man’s eternal destiny is decided. Subtlety of mind, clear vision, a sound philosophy of man, and unshakable honesty in the face of human frailty—these are the sources of Mauriac’s 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 dimension—a strain of hope—weaves 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.
VIPERS’ TANGLE
This enemy of his own family, this soul eaten up by hatred and avarice—I 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 afire—his 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 love—you 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
PART THE FIRST
Chapter I
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 desk—the 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 safe—an empty safe, containing nothing else but this revenge of mine which, for nearly half a century, I have kept warm.
Don’t 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, you’ll shout to the children: “The securities are there, all right.”
It is only by a hair’s 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. It’s lucky for you that I have survived my hatred. For a long time I thought that my hatred was the most alive thing in me—and 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 revenge—that delayed-action bomb was already placed in position, with an attention to detail of which I was proud—but 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 it—a man like myself, who was no monster?
It is four o’clock, 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 Geneviève 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 Geneviève 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 fo
r 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.
One can avoid seeing his distant relations; one cannot do the same thing with his children, with his wife. There are such things as united families, no doubt; but, when you think of the number of households in which two human beings exasperate one another, disgust one another, at the same table, at the same wash-basin, between the same sheets, it is astonishing how few divorces there are! They detest one another, and still there is no getting away from each other....
What is this fever for writing which has seized upon me today, the anniversary of my birth? I am entering upon my sixty-eighth year, and I am the only person who realises it. Geneviève, Hubert, their children, have always, on every anniversary, had their cake, the little candles, flowers....
If I have not given you anything on your birthday for years, it is not because I have forgotten; it is by way of revenge. It suffices....The last bunch of flowers I received on my birthday, my poor mother plucked with her deformed hands. She had dragged herself for the last time, despite her weak heart, as far as the rose-walk.
Where was I? Yes, I am asking you why this sudden frenzy for writing. “Frenzy” is the right word. You can judge it for yourself from my handwriting, from these letters all bent the same way, like pine-trees by the west wind.
Listen: I have told you already about a revenge, long meditated, which I forgo. But there is something in you, something of you, over which I want to triumph. It is your silence.
Oh, don’t misunderstand me! You have a well-oiled tongue; you can talk for hours to Cazau about the chickens or the kitchen-garden. With the children, even the smallest of them, you jabber deafeningly all day long. Oh, those meals from which I came away addle-headed, worried as I was by professional cares which I couldn’t tell to anybody!—especially after the Villenave case, when I suddenly became a great Assize lawyer, as the papers put it....
No, it is not a question of that now. It is a different kind of silence for which I want to avenge myself: the silence in which you persisted about our marriage, our utter incompatibility. How often, at the theatre, or when I was reading a novel, have I asked myself whether there really are in life mistresses and wives who make “scenes,” who explain themselves and open their hearts, who find relief in unburdening themselves?
During the forty years that we have suffered side by side, you have found the strength to avoid a single word that cut the least deep. You have always turned aside.
I thought for a long time that this was deliberate, a matter of policy whose reason escaped me, until at last I realised that, quite simply, it did not interest you. I was so far outside your thoughts that you bolted not from fright, but from boredom. You were clever at scenting my approach, you could see me coming from a distance; and, if I took you by surprise, you fobbed me off easily, or else you patted my cheek, gave me a kiss, and went away.
Perhaps I ought to be afraid that you may tear up this letter after reading the beginning of it; but I’m not, because for some months past I have been a surprise to you. I intrigue you. Little as you observe me, how could you help noticing a change in my mood? Yes, this time I am sure that you will not evade me.
I want you to know, I want you all to know, you, your son, your daughter, your son-in-law, your grandchildren, what he was like—this man who lived alone in the presence of the compact group of you, this over-driven lawyer who had to be taken care of because he held the purse-strings, but who suffered on another planet. What planet? You never chose to go there.
Don’t be alarmed—there is no question here of my funeral eulogy written by myself in advance, any more than there is of a tirade against you. The dominant feature of my character, which would have struck any other wife but you, is my frightful lucidity. That skill in deceiving oneself, which helps most men to live, has always been lacking in me. Nothing unpleasant has ever happened to me without my knowing all about it in good time....
I have had to interrupt myself....They did not bring me a lamp; they did not come to close the shutters. I looked at the roof of the wine-vaults, whose tiles have the vivid tints of flowers or birds’ breasts. I listened to the thrushes in the ivy and the Carolina poplar, the noise of a cask being rolled.
It is good fortune to await death in the one place in the world where everything remains the same as in my memories. Only the fussing of the motor replaces the creaking of the draw-well which the donkey used to work. (There is also that horrible postal airplane which announces tea-time and defiles the sky.) It does not happen to many men to rediscover in reality, within their range of vision, that world which most find only in themselves, when they have the courage and the patience to remember.
I put my hand to my breast and feel my heart. I look at the glass-fronted cupboard where, in a corner, are the Pravaz syringe, the vial of nitrate of starch—everything that would be necessary in case of a heart attack. Would they hear me if I called? They will have it that it is false angina pectoris. They are much less concerned about convincing me than believing it themselves, so that they can sleep undisturbed.
I can breathe better now. One would think it was a hand laid on my left shoulder, holding it cramped and rigid, as someone might do who did not want me to forget. So far as I am concerned, death will not steal upon me like a thief. It has been prowling around me for years. I hear it, I feel its breath. It is patient with me, because I do not defy it, but submit myself to the discipline which its approach imposes.
I contrive to go on living, in a dressing-gown, in the setting of patients suffering from incurable diseases, sunk in the padded arm-chair where my mother awaited her end; sitting, like her, beside a table covered with potions, ill-shaven, ill-smelling, a slave to disgusting habits.
But do not depend on all this. In between my attacks, I get back into my hide. Lawyer Bourru, who thought me dead, sees me rise again; and I have the strength to go on for hours, in the vaults of safe-deposits, tearing off dividend-warrants for myself.
I must keep alive long enough to finish this confession, so that at last I may make you understand me—you who, during the years when I shared your bed, never failed to tell me at night, the moment I got in: “I’m dropping with sleep, I’m almost asleep already, almost asleep....” What you put aside like this was not nearly so much my caresses as my words.
It is true that our unhappiness had its birth in those endless conversations in which, when we were first married, we delighted to indulge. Two children—I was twenty-three, you eighteen; and perhaps love itself was less of a pleasure to us than these confidences, these intimacies. As children do when they make friends, we had taken a vow to tell each other everything. I, who had so little to confess to you that I had to embellish my poor little adventures, never doubted that you were as badly off as myself. I did not even think that you had ever had another man’s name on your lips before mine. I never imagined it, until that night....
It was in this room where I am writing today. The wallpaper has been changed; but the mahogany furniture is still in the same position. There was the opaline water-glass on the table and that tea-service won in a lottery. The moonlight flooded the matting. The south wind, coming across the Landes, wafted the scent of a forest fire to our very bed.
That friend of yours, Rodolphe, whom you had often mentioned to me before, and always in the dark in our bedroom, as though his phantom must be present between us at the moments of our deepest union—you spoke his name again that night, do you remember? But that was not enough for you any more.
“There are things I should have told you, my dear, before we became engaged. I feel re
morseful because I didn’t confess to you....Oh, nothing serious, don’t be afraid!...”
I was not afraid, and I did nothing to encourage your confession. But you lavished it upon me with a complacency which at first embarrassed me. You were not responding to any prick of conscience. You were not acting in obedience to any sense of what was due to me, as you told me, and as, for that matter, you believed.
No, you were revelling in a delightful memory; you could not hold yourself in any longer. Perhaps you sensed a threat to our happiness in this; but it was, as they say, too much for you. It did not depend upon your will that the shade of that Rodolphe should hover over our bed.
Do not, above all, run away with the belief that our unhappiness had its source in jealousy. I, who was later to become furiously jealous, felt nothing resembling that passion in the course of that summer night about which I am speaking, one night in the year ‘85, when you confessed to me that at Aix, during the holidays, you had been engaged to that unknown young man.
When I think that only forty-five years later is it given to me to explain myself about this! But will you even read my letter? All this interests you so little! Anything that has to do with me bores you. The children by themselves prevented you from seeing me and understanding me; but after the grandchildren came...
No matter: I take this last chance. Perhaps I shall have more authority over you dead than alive—at least during the first few days. For a week or two I shall take a place in your life again. Even if it is only as a matter of duty, you will read these pages to the end. I need to believe that. I do believe it.
Chapter II
NO, I did not feel any jealousy during your confession. How am I to make your understand what it destroyed in me?
I was the only son of that widow whom you knew, or, rather, beside whom you lived for years and years without knowing her. No doubt, even if it had interested you, you would have found it hard to understand what it meant, that union of those two human beings, of that mother and that son—you, a cell in a prosperous, prolific family, of gentle birth, hierarchic, organised. No, you could not conceive what the widow of a modest official, head clerk at the Préfecture, could devote in the way of care to the son who was all that was left to her in the world.
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