Les Thibault, Vol. 2: Le Pénitencier (Classic Reprint)

Les Thibault #2

by Roger Martin du Gard

Excerpt from Les Thibault, Vol. 2: Le Penitencier
Mme de Fontanin se tenait dans sa cham bre, et ses deux enfants aupres d'elle. Assise devant la cheminee, le buste droit, sous la lampe, elle lisait un livre a haute voix; Jenny, tapie au fond d'une bergere, tortillait sa natte, et, les yeux fixes sur le feu, ecou tait; Daniel, a l'ecart, les jambes croisees, un carton sur le genou, achevait un croquis de sa mere, au fusain. Sur le seuil, Antoine, une seconde arrete dans l'ombre, sentit combien sa venue etait intempestive; mais il n'etait plus temps de reculer.
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Genres: Roman

295 pages, Paperback

Published August 24, 2018

About the author

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1937 "for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life in his novel cycle Les Thibault."

Roger Martin du Gard (23 March 1881 - 22 August 1958) was a French author and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Trained as a paleographer and archivist, Martin du Gard brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for details. For his concern with documentation and with the relationship of social reality to individual development, he has been linked with the realist and naturalist traditions of the 19th century. His major work was Les Thibault, a roman fleuve about the Thibault family, originally published as a series of eight novels. The story follows the fortunes of the two Thibault brothers, Antoine and Jacques, from their prosperous bourgeois upbringing, through the First World War, to their deaths. He also wrote a novel, Jean Barois, set in the historical context of the Dreyfus Affair.

During the Second World war he resided in Nice, where he prepared a novel, which remained unfinished (Souvenirs du lieutenant-colonel de Maumort); an English-language translation of this unfinished novel was published in 2000.

Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 and was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in Cimiez, a suburb of the city of Nice, France.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Reformatory… After the runaway was caught his father – a self-righteous Pharisee and a pillar of Catholicism – sends his son to the established by him penitentiary for the juvenile delinquents… Nine months elapses and the elder brother, Antoine worried with the lot of Jacques goes to visit him in the reformatory… 

There, in the midst of a chalk-white plain, ringed round on all sides, like a new graveyard, by bare, bleak walls, rose the huge building with its tiled roof, its clock-face gleaming in the sun, and endless rows of small, barred windows. It would have been taken for an ordinary prison but for the gold lettering on the cornice over the first story: The Oscar Thibault Foundation.

He finds his younger brother apathetic and listless and in the state of the ultimate depression… 

But it’s just this – this softness, do you see? And then, having nothing to do all day, tied up like that with nothing, absolutely nothing to do. At first the hours seemed to me so, so long, you’ve no idea. But one day I broke the mainspring of my watch, and since then it’s been better, little by little I’ve got used to it. But I don’t know how to express it, it’s as if one had gone asleep deep down in oneself.

Antoine sees that his brother must be saved at any cost… But the paterfamilias, this vehicle of smugness and pride, is convinced that his decision was right and only after using all the cunning and guile Antoine manages to free his brother from captivity…
Obscurantists are ruled by dogmas and their world stands still.

[Juan Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

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