Woman of the Pharisees by François Mauriac

First published:La Pharisienne, 1941 (English translation, 1946)

Type of work: Social and psychological realism

Time of work: From the early 1900’s to World War I

Locale: Bordeaux

Principal Characters:

• Louis Pian, the elderly narrator of the story, which begins when he is thirteen years old
• Jean de Mirbel, his school friend
• Abbe Calou, a parish priest who lives a few miles from the Pian country estate
• Brigitte Pian, Louis’ stepmother

The Novel

Woman of the Pharisees is a complex weave of troubled and fallible characters, of suffering and redemption, both secular and spiritual. Above all, Louis Pian’s story is a study of his self-righteously religious stepmother, Brigitte Pian, and those whom she victimizes and destroys before she finally faces the truth of her loveless, vindictive “piety.”

The story opens at Louis’ school, at the end of the term and the beginning of his friendship with Jean de Mirbel. Jean’s brutal uncle has decreed that Jean, because of his poor performance at school, may not spend the summer holiday with his mother. Instead, he is to be sent to live and study with the Abbe Calou at Baluzac, a few miles from the Pian country estate at Larjuzon. Louis is excited that his friend will be so near, though when Jean and Louis’ sister, Michele, meet and fall in love, Louis becomes angry and jealous, inadvertently causing disastrous repercussions later for the young lovers.

Also staying at Larjuzon during the summer is M. Puybaraud, a teacher at Louis’ school. He has been invited by Louis’ stepmother supposedly to tutor Louis during the holiday; in fact, Brigitte wishes to break up an attachment Puybaraud has formed with Octavia Tronche, a delicate young woman who teaches at a Free School sponsored by Brigitte. She has learned of the love between Octavia and Puybaraud because of Louis’ betrayal of his teacher’s trust: He has told his stepmother of a letter to Octavia that Puybaraud asked him to post privately.

Brigitte fails to persuade either Octavia or Puybaraud to give each other up for what she sees as a higher calling to God in the convent and priesthood. When they marry, Brigitte punishes them by using her influence to deny them any employment, thus forcing them to live in poverty on her charity. Octavia later dies in childbirth, lacking even the basic comforts and the help that might have saved her child.

Meanwhile, Jean, living with the Abbe Calou, falls into difficulties of his own. His mother, the Comtesse de Mirbel, whom he adores, comes to visit him at Baluzac but firmly refuses to allow her son to spend the night with her at her hotel in Vallandraut. Undaunted, Jean slips out at night, borrows the priest’s bicycle, and rides to the hotel, only to discover eventually that his mother is really at a different hotel in Balauze, a few miles away, and that she is with a lover. After Jean catches a glimpse of the two of them at their hotel window, he turns back in despair to Baluzac, falls ill along the way, and loses consciousness. He is later found by the Abbe Calou, returned to the kindly priest’s house, and nursed back to health.

Brigitte, however, has learned about Jean and Michele’s love and their secret meetings—she has been led to the discovery by Louis’ indiscretion during a jealous outburst—and, in a rage, she forbids Louis and Michele to visit Jean while he recovers. For good measure, she gets her husband to agree to send Michele to a girls’ school, away from any contact with Jean. The Abbe Calou, attempting to help Jean, has the girl secretly send him news of herself which is to be passed on to Jean. The correspondence is discovered and cut off, however, and Brigitte moves to destroy the priest by complaining of him to the archbishop. When Jean, in desperation, briefly elopes with the local chemist’s wife (a woman who has deliberately seduced the boy in order to settle a grudge against the priest), Jean’s mother also complains, ultimately causing the Abbe to lose his parish.

When the school term begins, Brigitte separates from her husband, taking Louis to live with her in town. It is at this point that the disasters begin to accumulate which force Brigitte to see herself for what she is. The first to occur is the death of her husband, Louis’ father. Left alone at Larjuzon, he discovers a letter that Brigitte had found and “accidentally” left behind proving his first wife’s unfaithfulness, and he drinks himself to death. Octavia’s death during childbirth and Jean’s elopement, two incidents which arouse both Louis’ and Michele’s hostility toward their stepmother, follow. Brigitte begins to suffer intensely, as her conscience condemns her for her heartless actions in the name of piety. In an effort to atone, she encourages Jean and Michele’s engagement and begins visiting the Abbe Calou, who is living in disgrace with relatives. It is the priest who gives to Brigitte the absolution that she craves, and when he dies, it is in her arms.

Brigitte’s new spiritual awakening culminates in an intense, loving relationship with her Protestant doctor, over the objections of his family. Though he is killed in an accident, Brigitte’s love transcends his death, leaving her quietly serene. In contrast, Jean and Michele, who have married, live troubled lives marked by bickering and reconciliations. Louis, the observer-narrator, never marries.

The Characters

Initially, Louis is not a very attractive character, shallow and self-centered as he is. At times, his behavior with his stepmother is annoyingly close to toadyism, at least until Octavia’s death; yet he lacks any real feeling for Brigitte, or indeed for anyone except his sister and his friend. Since Michele and Jean’s love for each other relegates Louis to the background of their lives, the dominant emotions of his youth become jealousy and loneliness. His main role is that of observer and analyzer, rather than participant, in the dramas and heartbreaks around him. He is the character to whom secrets are confided, even though he cannot really empathize. He is the reader of diaries and letters, the onlooker at others’ actions. Louis grows up to be a rather bloodless figure, never really touched by the passions which move the characters about him.

Brigitte, on the other hand, is a truly formidable creation. Secure and sincere in her belief in her own moral perfection, she manages to clothe every vindictive act she commits with the robe of pious concern for her victim’s salvation. She is the cousin of her husband’s first wife, and she cannot suppress her jealousy of the dead woman. She attempts to efface her predecessor from M. Pian’s memory by looking for, and finding, evidence of the first Mme Pian’s adultery. Though Brigitte manages to resist revealing her knowledge for some time, as soon as she senses that her control over her husband has weakened, she apparently arranges for him to make the discovery that kills him. Her treatment of the other two couples in the story reveals her puritanical distaste for sexual love; her destruction of the Abbe Calou is the act of a woman determined to violate that which she cannot dominate, as she has done with her husband. At times, she is uneasily aware of the sterility of her faith, but it takes several tragedies—all directly or indirectly her fault—to turn her toward that love and humility which are the basis of true spirituality. Even then, she retains a vestige of her Pharisaical nature: She is quite proud of her ability to recognize the error of her ways so late in life.

Jean and Michele are two characters whom Brigitte does not manage to harm permanently. Jean, brutalized by his uncle and ignored by his mother, first finds love and then acceptance with the kindly Abbe Calou, but an older priest’s fatherly affection is not enough to turn Jean away from the recklessness and immorality for which he seems destined. Only Michele’s love genuinely moves him—but even that has its limitations, since Jean confesses to Louis later in life that he hates being loved. Jean is also the focus of Louis’ adolescent admiration and then of his jealousy when Jean falls in love. Jean is a cautionary example of impulses allowed to run unchecked; as the object of the Abbe Calou’s unconditional love, he serves as a foil for the priest, whose kindness rarely fails him, even though his love is not returned.

The Abbe Calou, indeed, is arguably the most loving and lovable character in the novel. He is the embodiment of the highest form of love, which gives endlessly, asking and expecting nothing in return. His genuine spiritual perfection contrasts dramatically with Brigitte’s arrogant religiosity. Ironically, the priest suffers for his love, sacrificed as he finally is, like a modern Christ figure, to others’ petty vengeance. Also Christ-like, he forgives his greatest tormentor, bringing her to an understanding of true Christian love.

Critical Context

Woman of the Pharisees is considered to be the last of François Mauriac’s great novels. Set in Bordeaux, Mauriac’s birthplace (and the setting for his other novels), it concentrates on Mauriac’s own social class—the bourgeoisie—as indeed all of his novels do. Wallace Fowlie has written that Mauriac’s world is one “of three major characteristics: provincial, bourgeois and Christian.” Within this confined world, Mauriac, deeply influenced by the philosopher Blaise Pascal, explored themes of personal anguish and social corruption from a Christian perspective. In Woman of the Pharisees, Mauriac also focused on the spiritual corruption of hypocrisy.

In addition to his many novels, Mauriac also wrote poetry, plays, biographies, and literary criticism. He was also a journalist during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1933, Mauriac was elected to the French Academy, and in 1952, he was received as a member of the Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts of Bordeaux. It was also in 1952 that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Sources for Further Study

Bracher, Nathan. Through the Past Darkly: History and Memory in François Mauriac’s Bloc-Notes. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Discusses Mauriac’s thoughts as a Christian humanist on subjects of social justice, war, and human rights as he expressed them in his editorials in the1950’s and 1960’s.

Fowlie, Wallace. “The Art of François Mauriac,” in A Mauriac Reader, 1968.

Iyengar, K.R. Sprinivasa. François Mauriac, 1963.

Jarrett-Kerr, Martin. François Mauriac. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954. Discusses the influence of Mauriac’s religious upbringing on his writing. Also reviews his novelistic talent.

O’Connell, David. François Mauriac Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1995. Good for a general introduction to Mauriac as a writer and to his work.

Smith, Maxwell. François Mauriac, 1970.

Speaight, Robert. François Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man, 1976.

Turnell, Martin. The Art of French Fiction: Prévost, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, Gide, Mauriac, Proust. New York: New Directions, 1959. One of the best critics on nineteenth and twentieth century novelists. Presents Mauriac as a French Catholic novelist.