La gangue : roman

"How to speak with the dead" by Sciens is a novel written in the early 20th century. From its opening, it reads as a psychologically rich, realist narrative about a monstrously disfigured man and the cruel fascination and rejection he provokes, set against a countercurrent of tenderness and moral beauty. A reflective physician-narrator observes this man—later named René Grandon—and a reserved woman, Madame Derive, tracing themes of inner nobility beneath outward horror, pity crossing into love, and the ways society polices beauty. The opening of this novel follows the narrator to a deserted spa town, where a man with a ravaged face silently endures a dining room’s revulsion and later watches a young family’s joy until he is driven off in shame. On the train to Paris the narrator shares a compartment with him, struck by his gentle voice and eloquent eyes. Years pass: the narrator sees him mocked by streetwalkers, then, to his astonishment, walking tenderly with an attractive, mature woman; by a lakeside she kisses his hands in a scene of wordless gratitude. Later the narrator meets this woman—Madame Derive—socially, notices her nightly lamp across the street, and observes a furtive visitor who comes at one in the morning; when she suffers a fatal heart crisis, the man waits below, unadmitted. At her civil funeral he mourns from a distance; afterward the narrator befriends him, learns his name, and, as the opening section closes, listens as he begins to tell the story of his childhood and the accident that left him disfigured. (This is an automatically generated summary.)