Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

312 Pages • $12.95

Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

About the Author

François Mauriac begins his novel Vipers’ Tangle with an unusual preface. He asks the reader to find “the strength of mind, and the courage” to follow the twists of the tale being told. He hopes the reader will “feel pity and be moved” by the predicament of the man who tells his story in the novel, a man whom Mauriac nonetheless describes as “the enemy of his own flesh and blood,” whose heart was “eaten up by hatred and by avarice.” Despite this monstrous depiction, Mauriac hints that the story is not as bleak as it may seem. There is, he writes, a “radiance” to be found here.

The radiance is here, to be sure. Vipers’ Tangle is a remarkable story of redemption. Mauriac’s main character is doomed because he has made terribly bad choices. The grace that visits the main character leads to a spiritual conversion that is both dramatic and convincing. His reprieve doesn’t make everything well. And it requires him to make choices to undo some of the misery he has created for others.

Vipers’ Tangle is a novel in the form of a long letter. The writer is Monsieur Louis, a wealthy, embittered miser in declining health, estranged from his family, who compares his heart to “a nest of vipers.” He loathes his wife and children and plans to disinherit them. They will discover this after his death, along with the long letter, which he is writing in order to express his contempt for virtually everyone, including, and especially, himself.

Remarkably, the letter turns into something else. Louis expresses copious scorn and hatred at first (this is probably why Mauriac in his preface urges the reader to stick with his story). But Louis is an honest man, and he gradually recognizes the web of self-delusion that entangles him. His letter becomes the instrument of his liberation. He sees how he has become consumed by resentment, which is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die. Louis stops blaming his wife and children, his parents, the church, and his business associates for his misery and admits his own role.

Money has become the most important thing in Louis’s life. “It is my only protection,” he writes. His plot to disinherit his family is his most malicious act. Freedom comes to him when he gives up his plan and relinquishes his considerable fortune to his children. “It was borne in on me at that moment that my hatred was dead, and dead, too, my desire for reprisals,” he writes.

Louis comes to this understanding by writing his letter—the novel that the reader is reading. This makes Vipers’ Tangle something of an artistic tour de force. The lesson that Louis takes away is that redemption is always possible. “I must never stop telling myself that it is never too late,” he writes. It is never too late. This is a sentiment often expressed in self-help literature. It is also a profound spiritual truth that has seldom been explored more deeply than it is in Vipers’ Tangle.

Back to top

About the Author

François Mauriac was born in 1885 in Bordeaux, France. His father died when Mauriac was two years old, and he, his four siblings, and his mother then moved in with his grandparents. Mauriac was educated as a child by the Marianite religious order, and as a young man at the University of Bordeaux. In 1908, he was accepted for graduate studies in Paris but left after a few months to devote his life to literature.

His first published work was a book of poetry. After World War I, during which he served as a hospital orderly in the Balkans, Mauriac published his first novels, of which The Kiss to the Leper (1922) gained the most acclaim, as well as criticism from some Catholics.

Mauriac’s childhood religious formation had been strongly Jansenistic. Jansenism was a heresy that, despite being condemned by the church several times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, remained a strong presence in popular French piety. Jansenism denied humanity’s free will and was noted for its moral strictness and emphasis on religious observance.

Mauriac’s body of work reflects this formation in its frequent darkness, emphasis on sin, continual fundamental struggle between nature and grace, and sometimes critical or even satirical portrayals of the hypocrisies of the French Catholic middle class.

It is this last point that riled critics of The Kiss to the Leper, the story of a young woman whose life is ruined by her family as they seek to control whom she marries.

In subsequent novels, Mauriac took up the themes of sin, obsession, and repression and deepened his portrayals of individuals in these states, revealing the grace available at people’s fingertips—often, paradoxically, because of their sin. The Desert of Love (1925) and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) are two notable works from this period. Two of Mauriac’s finest novels from later years are Vipers’ Tangle (1932) and A Woman of the Pharisees (1941).

Mauriac’s pen produced more than fiction. He was a prolific writer of all genres, including poetry, drama, literary criticism, political and social commentary, and theological reflection (Life of Jesus, 1936). He wrote vigorously in opposition to fascism of all kinds. He opposed General Franco in Spain and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and, in his own country, stood with the Resistance against Nazism. After the war, he was a strong supporter of French decolonization in Africa and Southeast Asia. His newspaper column, “Bloc-Notes,” was his primary venue for commentary from the 1950s on and won him a wide audience.

Mauriac’s status in French letters was recognized in 1952, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee noted that he was being recognized “for the penetrating psychology and artistic intensity with which he has expressed the drama of human life in his novels.”

François Mauriac died in 1970 in Paris.

Back to top