THE KISS TO THE LEPER BY FRANÇOIS MAURIAC TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JAMES WHITALL LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD. _First published 1923._ TO LOUIS ARTUS His Admirer and Friend F. M. CONTENTS TRANSLATOR'S NOTE CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI TRANSLATOR'S NOTE FRANÇOIS MAURIAC published his first book in 1909. It is a collection of poems, and bears the title, _Les Mains Jointes_. Mauriac was then twenty-one years old, and the little volume drew forth enthusiastic praise from Maurice Barrès in _L'Echo de Paris_. The following year brought his second book of verse, _L'Adieu à l'Adolescence_; and in 1913 and 1914 his first two novels appeared, _L'Enfant chargé de Chaînes_ and _La Robe Prétexte_. Soon after the war he had two more novels, _La Chair et le Sang_ and _Préséances_, to his credit, and in 1922 M. Grasset published _Le Baiser au Lépreux_ in his _Cahiers Verts_, that interesting series of little books which includes Hémon's _Maria Chapdelaine_ and the French versions of Logan Pearsall Smith's _Trivia_ and George Moore's _Memoirs of My Dead Life_. _Le Baiser au Lépreux_ achieved an immediate success, the French press being almost unanimous in its declaration that a masterpiece had been written; and Mauriac was at once accorded a place with Giraudoux, Larbaud, and Morand in the first rank of his generation. In the wide sense, _Le Baiser au Lépreux_ is not a masterpiece; its appeal is to a restricted public, for the theme of the story is a problem which the ordinary reader does not as a rule care to think about. The situations are often unpleasant, sometimes even repellent, but Mauriac's searching and relentless analysis of the minds of his characters has resulted in a fine piece of writing. Simplicity of language, depth of thought, and acuteness of observation are its distinguishing qualities; less skilful hands would have made little of a theme which required to be treated with the greatest reticence, but Mauriac's method is one of extreme economy and non-insistence; and, being himself a product of that bleak arid country of heather and pines, he has been able to give his tragic picture an authentic background.