The Look of Angels

LINES OF LIFE (153 pp.)--Franc,ois Mauriac-- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

Robert Lagave's angelic face was his misfortune. Men and women alike seemed unable to keep their hands or affections off him. His rule of life was never to resist an impulse, and he grew up to be nothing but "a pet animal trained to eat from many hands." He was only 23, but since his 18th birthday "had been agonizingly aware that he was growing older." When he fell ill in Paris, a princess offered her villa in Cannes for his convalescence. Instead, Robert chose to go back to his ancestral home in tiny Viridis in the somnolent wine country of the Garonne, where he hoped to marry relatively unsophisticated Paula de la Sesque. "Only with Paula beside him could he have accepted with equanimity the threat of advancing age."

Crisis of Hate. At this crisis point, Robert falls in with his religious neighbors, the Gornacs. Widowed Elisabeth Gornac emerges from a cocoon of pale respectability to mother Robert and even to further his love affair with Paula. Her grown son, Pierre, a devout Roman Catholic of a gloomy Jansenite cast, hates all that Robert stands for. Though he is pietistically given to "searching his heart, calling God to witness," and laboriously examining his motives, he nonetheless tattles to Paula about Robert's past.

Losing Paula snaps the little coherence remaining in Robert: he knocks Pierre down; he drunkenly invites the shocked Elisabeth to share his bed; he speeds away from Viridis with a gaggle of his Paris friends. Both the Gornacs thank God--Elisabeth for having been freed of "an evil presence," Pierre for having sufficient humility not to resent having been punched. Then, days later, they learn that Robert has been killed in an auto accident.

Crossing of Destinies. This is the emotional crux of Mauriac's story. He warns: "The marks left by one individual on another are eternal, and not with impunity can some other's destiny cross our own." Elisabeth, in despair, recognizes that her maternal love for Robert had concealed the extravagant sexuality of a starved woman. Even self-righteous Pierre has a brief moment of horror at what his retailing of gossip has caused, but he quickly comforts himself with the thought that there had been time for Robert to make a confession and receive the last sacraments.

Franc,ois Mauriac, France's most famed living Catholic novelist, can say more in 150 pages than can most writers in twice that number. Mauriac seems to hold that the sins of a Robert Lagave are venial because he is the sort of mindless pagan who could scarcely recognize God if he met Him in a blaze of light on the road to Damascus. The real sinners are those who know God but love only themselves or their illusions. The killing of Robert Lagave brings with it a moment of shocked awareness that soon fades: Paula weeps and then marries a neighboring landowner; Pierre sighs and goes on to the priesthood, confident of his heavenly credentials; Elisabeth remembers longest, but she, too, slides back into the equable round of days in which even God is little more than "numbness and sleep." These, says Mauriac, are the real dead--not Robert Lagave.

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