That Which Was Lost and The Dark Angels by Francois Mauriac. Translated by J.H.F McEwan and Gerard Hopkins (444)

Published 1951: First UK Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition

Original green cloth with gilt titles on the spine and original dust jacket. 352 very clean and bright pages, mild speckled edges, previous owners details on the first free page. Slight shelf wear on dust jacket and slightly rubbed with time consistent with age.

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What Was Lost, first published in French in 1930, sets the stage for Mauriac’s masterful novel The Dark Angels. Mauriac sketches the characters of Alain Forcas and his sister, Tota, against the backdrop of the disintegrating marriage of the duplicitous Hervé and the ailing Irène. Confronted with dysfunctional family dynamics, frustrated careers, and the persistent, anxious search for the presence of God in the modern world, the men and women in What Was Lost strive for meaning and happiness even as they vie against one another in selfishness and deceit. Fraught with tension and melancholy, What Was Lost marks an early, excellent effort of the Nobel Prize-winning Mauriac to bring his artistic philosophy to life in fiction.

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The Dark Angels, published in English on the eve of Mauriac winning the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature, develops the characters of his 1930 novel What Was Lost—Alain Forcas and his sister, Tota—within a vicious web of family and extra-marital relationships. Now curé of the village, Alain is presented with the confession of Gabriel Gradère, whose life of dissipation has chained him to his mistress, Aline. Gabriel has returned to his boyhood home to cheat Desbats, his rival for the love of Mathilde. Yet Mathilde loves Gabriel’s son Andrès, who is infatuated with Tota. Emotional manipulation and the distortion of desire hangs the threat of violence over the village, and Alain is left to confront the full, perilous scope of his priestly duty.

“A sense of solitude, such as he had never known before, weighed him down. He was alone now. What had become of the hot fire within him?”

Superbly executed, The Dark Angels follows the progression of an obsession with revenge to its ultimate fate of self-destruction.

François Mauriac (1885–1970) was a French, Roman Catholic novelist, poet, critic, and journalist. Critically acclaimed and respected, Mauriac received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for his novel The Desert of Love; was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur; and named laureate of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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