Books: Skeleton of Sin

THE MASK OF INNOCENCE (206 pp.)—Francois Mouriac—Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Francois Mauriac’s specialty consists in creating a handful of morally diseased characters and dragging them through a couple of hundred pages reeking of sin and sensuality. The French, including many devout Roman Catholics, have an unpleasant word to describe the distinguished Catholic author’s novels. It is malsain—unhealthy. In The Mask of Innocence, a thoroughly unpleasant novel about thoroughly unpleasant people, Nobel Prizewinner Mauriac sets out to illustrate the doctrine that even moral leprosy can be cured by divine grace.

Gabriel Gradėre has corrupted young girls, lived with a prostitute on her earnings, run a ring of brothels with her, trafficked in cocaine and blackmail, and is now, at 50, being blackmailed in turn by the prostitute Aline. After a childhood friend has given birth to his son, he marries her for her money though they abhor each other. When she dies, he squanders the fortune she has left him. Some land remains to his son, however, and Gradėre tries to salvage it from the predatory grasp of Symphorien Desbats, the asthmatic husband of Gradėre’s wife’s cousin. A business marriage is arranged between Gradėre’s brutish son and Symphorien’s crafty daughter, but after title to the property passes to Symphorien, his daughter refuses the match.

It is at this point that the frustrated Gradėre, living with the others in a dismal, rainswept chateau in southwestern France, adds murder to his long catalogue of sins. As the rain pours down, he intercepts the blackmailing Aline, now plotting with Symphorien to drive him from the chateau, and “without haste or passion, [performs] that act of squeezing her throat of which he had so often dreamed.”

One man believes that Gradėre is not yet lost: the local priest to whom he confesses his sins. “No human being is damned,” the priest says. “You must realize the astonishing nature of that grace whose beneficiary you are.” At the end, sick of a mortal illness, “the murderer lay . . . with a smile of heavenly peace upon his lips,” and said, “I am dying in peace … in a peace beyond imagining.”

Novelist Mauriac has done poor service to his thesis, and little to illuminate Christian doctrine, by trying to impose it with a mechanically applied formula. His 203-page demonstration of Gradėre’s irremediable villainy is not easily erased by a few phrases on the last three pages. As a novelist, Prizewinner Mauriac has committed his own sin: he has failed to bring the flesh of dramatic substance to the skeleton of an idea.