SOURCE: "Thérèse Rediviva," in François Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man, Chatto and Windus, 1976, pp. 116-29.

Speaight was a noted English actor and theater scholar. In the following excerpt, he discusses the composition of La fin de la nuit—a novel featuring the character Thérèse from Thérèse Desqueyroux—and the criticisms levelled against it by Jean-Paul Sartre.

[In 1933] Mauriac lifted the curtain on the creative process of the novelist in an essay, Le Romancier et ses Personnages. With the deliberate exception of Le Mystère Frontenac, he had proved that 'the novelist begins to take shape in us at the same time as we begin to detach ourselves from our own feelings.' In that conventional family of Frontenacs, he had been the spy—the traitor unconscious of his treachery—who captured, registered, and retained unawares the obscure...