La chair et le sang

François Mauriac began writing “Flesh and Blood” in 1914 but was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he enlisted as an ambulance driver. He resumed his novel in 1918 and finished it in 19191 after having published in the meantime a first version of another novel, “Préséances”, in the journal Les Écrits Nouveaux. This novel was inspired by the 1909 suicide of Charles Demange, nephew of Maurice Barrès, who was one of Mauriac’s literary masters in his youth, but also by his own personal questioning and “love torments.”