In the photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French novelist Francois Mauriac has the gaunt, tormented look of a consumptive saint. His features appear oddly elongated. A chilly light accentuates his bony nose. His eyelids are heavy and hood his gaze; but for all their apparent dreaminess, the eyes beneath them are sharp and inquisitive. His hands with their long thin fingers raised in a gesture al most of prayer are as expressive as his face. The photo is moving, not because we seem to see a distinguished man – member of the French Academy, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize – caught in an instant of complete vulnerability, but because of its subtle artifice. Mauriac emerges like some figure from El Greco, a Baroque sensibility in a well-cut Parisian suit.

Of the French Catholic novelists and poets who flourished in the first part of the last century, Mauriac, born in 1885, still seems the most contradictory. Though he possessed a Jansenist sensibility (and revered Pascal), he was rarely doctrinaire in practice, even earning a place on the “Index of Prohibited Books” for certain of his writings. He displayed an almost sulphurous grasp of the devil’s side in his fiction. His world is provincial and grim and circumscribed. He described the family as a cage, but in his novels it’s more like a marmite in which all the vices, from avarice to murder, bubble and fume. Though he had a long and apparently happy marriage and played the role of “pere de famille” with compunction, he often expressed an in tense aversion to sex, declaring in one late interview that human beings would be much happier if they would only renounce procreation!

The medieval French Cathars, or Albigensians – now enjoying an unlikely revival – had expressed such notions before being ruthlessly massacred in 1218 by Simon de Montfort, and at moments Mauriac seems a resurrected devotee of such impossible purity. But this was only one facet of this antithetical man. In one of his incomparable memoirs he discloses that his whole life was dominated not by dogma but by passion. The spiritual rigor was in proportion to the intensity of that passion. In an early novel he declares that we must “see to it that the life of the human creature whom we have chosen, or who has chosen us, remains a long siesta in the sun, an endless lassitude in which the body can enjoy an almost animal surrender.” Bizarre sentiments from an ascetic!

I’ve been re-reading his masterpiece of 1927, “Therese Desqueyroux” (Penguin Classics, 319 pages, $16.63), translated by Gerard Hopkins, and am struck anew by how subtly Mauriac resists tidy reconciliations of the disparities that afflict us. Put simply,Therese is a monster, an inexplicable anomaly in the order of divine grace, and Mauriac makes no bones about this. In her lucidity, her self-centeredness, her lack of sympathy for others, her skill at manipulation, she exhibits all the traits of a psychopathic personality. And yet, despite ourselves, we empathize with her. She is one of those rare monsters who has no illusions about her own monstrosity.

Motivated by suffocating boredom and a loathing of her milieu, Therese begins to poison her husband’s medicine, drop by evening drop. Unlike Madame Bovary, who poisons herself, Therese administers the arsenic to the boorish source of her suffering. The brilliance of the novel lies in that she almost succeeds; she has all the guilt of the intention without the satisfaction of the deed. Her almostcrime results in a long almost-life which Mauriac unravels with unsparing clarity. To keep up appearances the family rallies around her; she is acquitted; scandal, so damaging to business, has been averted. But now the family represents the hell in which she finds herself confined:

She stared before her, seeing in imagination the cage with its innumerable bars, each of which was a living person, a cage full of eyes and ears, in which she would have to spend the whole of her life, squatting motionless, her chin on her knees, her arms clasped about her legs, waiting for death.

For Therese, each possibility becomes a prison. Love and marriage, family life, even friendship show themselves as a succession of cells, each nested within the other like Chinese boxes. Immune to illusion she is also impervious to hope. In “The End of the Night,” the rather weak novel that concludes the sequence, we realize that Therese’s lucidity has been her final, and invincible, prison. As she sinks into paranoid dementia, terrifyingly depicted, she has become a monster of logic, a Cartesian grotesque.

Toward the end of his life – he died in 1970 – Mauriac insisted that he be judged as a poet. His verse isn’t much read anymore, but his prose, whether in fiction, memoir and biography, or political and cultural commentary, has the compression and lyrical exactitude of the greatest poetry. He can make the cry of a cricket in the vast pine forests of the Gironde echo on his struggling characters’ ears like the faint notes of the final trumpet. By trusting his instincts as a poet, Mauriac was also able to enter the souls of his personages; he respected them as they presented themselves to him.

Jean-Paul Sartre once dismissed him with the remark, “God isn’t an artist and neither is Monsieur Mauriac.” Sartre missed the point. Mere artistry was never the issue; truth, the truth of an individual destiny, was. Mauriac’s contemporary, the great poet Paul Claudel, adopted as the motto for one of his plays the adage, “God writes straight by crooked lines.” It was Mauriac’s distinction to inhabit that crookedness without flinching.

eormsby@nysun.com