SOURCE: "Tender Conscience," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3093, June 9, 1961, p. 353.

In the following review of Young Man in Chains, the critic suggests that the questions that have intrigued Mauriac throughout his career were present in this early short novel

We all know the world of M. Francois Mauriac by now, the landes "steaming with prayer and fornication", the vile meannesses of the men of property (or, better, the women, for men seem to die like drones once they have fecundated the monstrous queen bees) in their shuttered villas round which even the pines are sensuous. Yet we have waited nearly forty years for the translation of L'Enfant Chargé de Chaînes, which was first published in 1913, when M. Mauriac was twenty-eight.

This, the last in the uniform English edition, was the novel that first revealed his sultry, tortured talent and, on reading the translation so many years...