The Kiss to the Leper

What is this book about?

An ugly young man from a wealthy family marries a poor and beautiful woman. The match is arranged by their families and each side gets something: respectability for one, money for the other. What follows is a kind of torment neither can name — no love, and no grounds for complaint either, only day after day of moral obligation. Mauriac avoids open conflict and writes instead about a quiet, continuous psychological drain.

Why read it?

Mauriac is a master of French realist fiction and a Nobel laureate. He is not making the broad judgment that this is a bad marriage; he shows how people are slowly deformed inside a respectable institution — nobody does anything wrong, and everyone suffers. For the parts of marriage that cannot be said out loud, his knife is precise.

Core Ideas

• A marriage without love or any meeting of souls is a double torment of body and mind, and a silent slaughter.
• In an arranged marriage each side usually gets something it wanted, which leaves neither with standing to complain.
• Traditional society uses respectability and moral obligation to lock individuals into a position they cannot resist.
• Behind the outward appearance of a happy family there is often an individual tragedy no one is allowed to see.
• Mauriac writes not about a villain but about how an institution slowly twists people.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• What kind of disaster does arranged marriage and moral coercion in a traditional society actually inflict on an individual?
• When nobody has done anything wrong and everyone is suffering, whose problem is it really?
• If all that is left of a marriage is respectability and duty, what way out can there be for the people inside it?

Who should read it?

For readers of serious fiction and anyone interested in the institution of marriage and the conflicts it produces. It is short but heavy, better read quietly than as a diversion.

How to Read It

Written in French and published in 1922; Chinese editions appear as《给麻风病人的吻》. The title's image already states the cruelty of the book: one person's approach is, to the other, like contagion. Mauriac gives us no villain — everyone is a victim of a respectable institution — and it is worth watching how he lets the surface of the happy family crack, a little at a time.