GEORGES BERNANOS was born in Paris, France, in 1888 and spent most of his childhood in the little village of Fressin, which would provide the pastoral backdrop for nearly all his novels. He started out as a Royalist journalist before joining the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1926, following years of financial hardship, Bernanos published his first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan, bringing him instant fame as a writer and thinker. Yet he would say: ‘I am no author. The sight alone of a blank sheet wearies my spirit, and the sheer physical isolation imposed by such work is so distasteful to me that I avoid it as much as I can.’ Despite this admission, he wrote determinedly about the struggles of the soul in the modern world. His following novel, Journal d’un curé de campagne, is a profound meditation on saintliness and self-sacrifice, winning him the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française in 1936. Bernanos’s writing draws its strength from his passionate commitment to Catholicism, most acutely demonstrated in his last important novel, M. Ouine. Despising Fascism and disillusioned with the state of Europe in 1938, he went into self-imposed exile in Brazil with his wife and six children. He died back in Paris in 1948.