Mauriac, the most important writer of the modern French Catholic revival and one of the half-dozen greatest European novelists of this century. Mauriac is the moral historian and chronicler of a region: the pine barrens of southwestern France called Les Landes with its regional capital at Bordeaux; of a social class, the upper bourgeoisie who live in big gloomy houses in Bordeaux but often have their wealth -- or once had it -- from the relentless harvesting of pit props and pine resin on large forest estates like Maltaverne, which they constantly plot to make larger; of the spiritual condition of this class, whose representatives are at once cruelly materialistic and deeply religious according to the rigors of the Jansenist conscience, people both clannish and selfish and yet poignantly human in the intensity of their loves and hates. They are without what is called "Gallic charm," and some of them are monsters whom only God (and Mauriac) could love, and this is surely as Mauriac intends.