Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort by Roger Martin du Gard, Luc Brébion (Translator), Timothy Crouse (Translator); 1983/1999. Hardcover.

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is Roger Martin du Gard's magnum opus, the crowning achievement of a career that included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937. Written over the final eighteen years of his life and intended to be read only posthumously, this tremendous creation sprang from the writer's unflinching examination of the conundrum of our moral ambivalence: why, knowing what is right, do people do wrong? Martin du Gard's complex response constitutes one of the most devastating critiques of human behavior ever produced.

The author casts his reflections in the form of a memoir written by Bertrand de Maumort, an aristocrat, a soldier, an intellectual -- ostensibly the very flower of European culture at its zenith. Born in 1870, Maumort grows up in a chateau where a series of enlightened tutors tend to his education. Later, while preparing to enter the French military academy, he lives with his Uncle Eric, a powerful academic whose Sunday at-homes attract such luminaries as Renan, Turgenev, Daudet, and Pasteur. Keenly aware of his advantages, Maumort aspires to self-knowledge and a transcendent objectivity in his relations with the world. But as he describes his progress through life -- his early childhood, his experiences in the sexual hothouse of a Catholic boarding school, his affair with the beautiful Creole Doudou, his failed marriage to a sweet but adamantly conventional bourgeoise, his service in Morocco under the legendary colonialist General Lyautey, his participation in the First World War, and the occupation of his beloved chateau by German troops in the Second -- he unwittingly betrays an underside: his prejudices, self-deceptions, and moral lapses.

Through his portrayal of Maumort and a fascinating array of secondary characters, Martin du Gard dissects mankind in general, and calls into question whether true civilization, much less human progress, exists at all. The result is a work of extraordinary honesty, combining the sweep of his acknowledged master Tolstoy, the penetrating analysis of Proust, and the speculative profundity of Montaigne.