Désert de l'amour, Le. Novel by Mauriac, published in 1925, and one of his bleakest. It opens in a fashionable Parisian bar, with the hero, Raymond Courrèges, recognizing Maria Cross, who scandalized Bordeaux when he was an adolescent there 17 years earlier. Through a long flashback, characteristic of much of Mauriac's fiction, the novel describes the respectable bourgeois world of Bordeaux and the passion which both Raymond and his doctor father develop for the demi-mondaine, a passion which remains unexpressed and unfulfilled and which engenders in Raymond a lingering desire for revenge. The chance encounter in the bar leads to a meeting with Dr Courrèges, in Paris for a conference, which underscores the tragedy: the passion which has so dominated the lives of Raymond and his father has been unrecognized by Maria Cross herself. Maria, the challenge to bourgeois hypocrisy, is both the meeting-point between father and son and the permanent instrument of their torture, with no salvation in sight.
[Nicholas Hewitt]
