Marcel Crespil

Does God Protect the Innocent? Marcel Crespil

In the mid-sixties, Charleston, S. C. is steeped in the colonial atmosphere of the South. In this picturesque city where one can still listen to 'gullah', the language spoken by the blacks of 'Porgy and Bess', a dangerous relationship is going to blossom. However, in a very spectacular fashion, that relationship will destroy a man and a woman whose personalities are diametrically opposed. A French instructor at the Military college of The Citadel, Marc is responsible for the training of cadets, a few of whom will go, after graduation, to wage a detestable war in Vietnam... and will not come back. At the same time his gorgeous wife Lilian is a whimsical and unstable person. Throughout the novel, the beatings of quintessential pulsation of a world in turmoil can easily be felt. In that world, husband and wife are condemned to live together; yet later they tear each other apart. An unqualified anguish created by solitude frightens Marc, who knows he will be left alone if he files for divorce. Thus, he tries desperately to cling to a marriage which has been doomed from its beginning. Very quickly, indeed, he realizes that the physical beauty of his spouse is not at all the reflection of a beautiful soul, but what can he do?He is madly in love with the diabolical body of that woman, whose caresses can calm him down as would a drug, but a drug without an antidote. As for Lilian, she dissimulates her intellectual mediocrity by wielding her power of seduction over her husband. Thus, the central theme in the novel focuses on the weakness of a man obsessed with the evils of the flesh and on a woman of strong character whose questionable virtue reminds us of Bess in George Gershwin's opera. For five years, Marc will ride an emotional roller coaster, vacillating between love and hatred for his wife. When he finally wakes up from his nightmare, he decides to escape from his world of lost illusions by kidnapping his two young children, who have been born into this unhappy union. It se