Georges Bernanos's life of sixty years was no less paradoxical than his work. His first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan (1926; translated as The Star of Satan, 1927), was an immediate best-seller when he was thirty-eight; his third novel, La Joie (1929; translated as Joy, 1946), received the Prix Fémina when he was forty; and his famed Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936; translated as The Diary of a Country Priest, 1937) won the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française when he was forty-eight. Yet in 1926, 1937, 1940, and 1946 he refused the Légion d'Honneur. The last time the offer came from Charles de Gaulle, he who once called Journal d'un curé de campagne "le plus grand roman français" (the greatest French novel). Similarly, in March 1946, when François Mauriac let Bernanos know that the Académie was ready to...