PARTISAN REVIEW
autobiographical, less unrelievedly gloomy, and more skilful than
Le
Desespere.
Its digressions are more pertinent and at the same time
more quotable. The first part of the book displays even a sense of
humor, and a moral situation of the kind later developed by Fr.anc;ois
Mauriac is clearly present. Marchenoir, who died at the end of
Le
Desespere,
reappears (and dies again) in
The Woman. Who Was
Poor,
but he is not the central figure. His place is taken by a new
avatar of A1me-Marie Roulet, this time given the name of Clotilde
Marechal. Only at the begilming of the book is she placed in a
setting resembling that of the real-life Anne-Marie. She does not
go mad. She does not live in
concubinage celeste
with Marchenoir.
On the contrary she marries a friend of Marchenoir, a book–
illustrator and man of action, Leopold (Bloy himself had begun
his career as an illuminator). It is as though Bloy, himself now
married to Jeanne Molbech, daughter of a Danish poet, and in a
sunnier phase of his own life, were reviving Anne-Marie in order
to inquire how she would have fared if she had known men less
bitterly uncompromising than himself and
if
she had had
.a
chance
of happiness. At the same time, extreme poverty is still the climate,
and there is still a good deal of railing (but in a more detached fU1d
satirical vein) against the successful literary figures of the time.
Leopold is killed rescuing victims of the great fire at the Opera
Comique, over which, when it occurred in
1887,
Bloy had expressed
jubilation because so many of the four hundred victims were rich.
It was to him a sign of the wrath to come,
uun Ieger souffle de la
respiration de ton Dieu."
God he now saw not only as "The Poor
Man" but also as "He who burns," and he records with infinite
satisfaction that
((l'asphyxie ou la cremation des bourgeois immondes"
should have supervened upon
uz'abjecte musique de M. Ambroise
Thomas."
Clotilde survives and prays, a little like the widow in
Mauriac's
Le Baiser au lepreux.
The opening of the book could have been written by Zola .and
would have done credit to Celine, Louis Guilloux, or any contemp–
orary
mistfrabiliste.
It is perhaps the only occasion on which Bloy
truly envisages an objective situation, and it makes quite plain that
Bloy's comparative failure as a novelist was not due to lack of the
specific gift, but simply to obsession and temperamental overcharge.
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