Joy

Les Ténèbres #2

by Georges Bernanos, Stephen Mirarchi (Editor), Andrew Kaethler (Introduction)

Joy is the story of Chantal de Clergerie, a young woman and visionary who lives a life defined by innocence and purity in the midst of a tangle of insanity, and Abbé Cénabre, a priest grappling with apostasy. In keeping with the other great works of award-winning author Georges Bernanos, Joy is a captivating, insightful, and profound look into the depths of the interior life. In 1929, Joy was awarded the Prix Femina, a literary prize given to what is deemed the best French novel of the year. To this new edition of Joy, Andrew T.J. Kaethler, Ph.D., has contributed an insightful Introduction and collection of Notes for the Reader that deftly describe Bernanos’s style and influences as well as unfold the nuances of the craft on display in the novel.

Genres: Fiction, France, Catholic

327 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1929

About the author

Georges Bernanos était un écrivain français, gagneur du Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française en 1936 avec Journal d'un curé de campagne.

George Bernanos was a French writer. His 1936 book, Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Le grand don de Bernanos est de savoir présenter la guerre entre Dieu et le Diable comme une suite de faces-à-faces ou duels ce qui rend le conflit très dramatique.
La protagoniste de "La Joie" est une jeune fille de vingt ans très joyeuse et très pure. Elle accepte sans réserve le sort que Dieu lui réserve. Elle défend sa foi extrêmement simple avec une lucidité remarquable. Le roman raconte quatre confrontations entre elle et quatre suppôts de Satan dont elle sort victorieuse à chaque occasion.
Le premier démon n'est nulle autre que son père, M. de Clergerie, un historien médiocre qui croit à tort qu'il est capable de chercher un fauteuil à l'Académie française. Un veuf, il veut se marier parce qu'il croit que ca aider sa cause. Il veut que Chantal rentre dans un couvent pour avoir la paix.
Le deuxième démon est La Pérouse un psychiatre. Il sort de son débat avec Chantal avec sa foie en la science ébranlée.
Le troisième suppôt de Satan est Fiodor le chauffeur de M. de Clergerie. Fiodor est russe éthéromane, et a des tendances nihilistes. Sa pensée n'est pas bien expliqué Bernanos ce qui est malheureux car Fiodor va jouer un role clé dans l'intrigue.
Le quatrième démon est l'abbé Cénabre le protagoniste "L’Imposture". Cénabre est un intellectuel célèbre du Catholicisme qui cache le fait qu'il a perdu la foi parce qu'il aime son statut à l'intérieure de l'Église et des cercles intellectuels catholiques francais. Il sort perdant de son débat avec la joyeuse Chantal.
"La Joie" a gagné le Prix Femina en 1929. C'est trop. "La Joie" est roman prometteur mais il n'est certainement pas au même niveau des grands classiques de Bernanos tel que "Le Journal d'un curé de campagne" ou "La Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette". Chantal est vraiment trop éloquente pour une jeune fille de vingt ans. Le dénouement est plutôt mélodramatique.
"La Joie" est qui plaira à ceux qui sont des grands amateurs de Bernanos mais pas à la grande majorité des lecteurs contemporains.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been quite struck by the message of advent and the prevailing thoughts of today. The advent message to wake up and stand watch strikes persistently at me. I want to, for the first time in my life, attend to it with dead seriousness. My normal condition has been to be nominally attuned, light my candles, and maybe do the advent readings with daily advent centered devotions. At advent I notice the wake up! readings at Mass. I think- yeah, I am kind of oversaturated with life stuff- the wake up always seems like a small cry that quickly gets drowned out by the immediacy of life and all of its demands that must always be done yesterday. This year though I hear an internal shout WAKE UP! I know enough to not say, “I’m not sure what this means” so I say- be the one who kept watch for the master’s return. Don’t let your heart grow weary. Do you not know that your life is not your own? These sentiments keep parading through my conscious thought and will be rattling around against the backdrop of my every day. So with that said. A book that seems appropriate.
I shifted spiritually after reading this shocking book. Funny, a book called Joy is shocking. But, I was appalled, horrified, and held transfixed by Bernanos’ story of joy. The cover art selected is adorned with soft flowers and muted pastel tones. I thought it would be a book about joy- but one of us is significantly off about what joy is and I instinctively realized it was me and not Bernanos. I also looked upon an idea that is so shocking, I can only say it’s not natural. The Chantal of this story is almost a freak, maybe freakish but sublime. Yes, it’s true. Read this if you can. This book terrified me but also, draws me near, near enough to want to embrace the darkest aspects of what could ever happen to me or in this world with an infinite well that is not my own of course, but that of something beyond what we can know except to be utterly in love…with God. The lives of saints are often perplexing it is hard to understand their perceptions, their willingness, the running forward into horror. I believe they alone know true joy (now I will think of this quality as joy and not fervency). Joy we hear a lot, is not happiness, joy is a crossroad of acceptance and peace, not a condition received by the arrangement of external set of events that are not well, God centered, really. I think joy is sometimes misunderstood to be an overflow of happiness; the ability to see beauty in all circumstances; but I think it is not those things actually, it is living in the sublime despite all circumstances. That is, seeing God in all circumstances. This, of course, is not humanly possible as I think it requires an abundance of grace to integrate it into our being. To know that one is connected to the true source of sublimity, consider Chantal. Consider our Lord, who wept all night in a garden under the stars- alone- because of me. Life, so full of horrors for some and others…they live so happily in ignorance of this. It strikes me that so many people count on their tomorrows without realizing how close we are to terror the terror of finding we have not been on the narrow road after all. I have read that Bernanos is an author who is psychologically terrifying. This was my first foray into his work, and I sure wasn’t expecting this novel about joy to be…well, what I found within its pages. Now I know, it couldn’t be anything else. I must reconsider everything now. Joy is what I’ve always considered lacking in my serious nature. It isn’t a mood and it isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t really something you can create for yourself by saying “today I’m joyful.” No…it’s not positivity. It is the visible, or invisible condition of a soul turned toward the Son. It must be Him.
Chantal will perplex me and she has taught me in a moment so much. Joy- it’s not what you think it is.

[Hannah ✨ScruffyCityReads✨]

This is one I’m going to sit with for a little bit and then read again armed with post it notes and a pencil. I did enjoy it! But there’s a depth to it that I didn’t always give myself space to consider when I was reading. It warrants a repeat in a few months.

[sch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jan 2026. Bernanos's third novel. Judging by the first page, it seems to be a sequel to THE IMPOSTOR. At the end of the earlier book, a young lady in Paris, Chantal de Clergerie, tried to "give all her joy" to her dying confessor, whom she greatly admired. She had hoped for an edifying deathbed scene but was brutally disappointed; Father Chevance felt abandoned by God and judged his life an utter failure. She left the room ashamed and apparently headed for cynicism. Even worse, her father misunderstood Chevance's dying words about another priest, Father Cénabre, taking them as an endorsement of his wisdom and spiritual leadership. But Chevance only mentioned Cénabre in a state of delirium because he knew the latter's secret: that he is an "impostor" in the Church, a man who probably never believed in God (although the poor, complicated fellow didn't realize this about himself) and pursued the priesthood for other reasons. (The most unsettling parts of IMPOSTOR are the twists and turns of Cénabre's mind, who finally admits his hypocrisy to himself. When he finally recognizes the gap in his soul where faith should be, he discovers something else down there, another impostor, a demonic personality.) If JOY is anything like Bernanos's first two books, the plot will be obscure, and psychological commentary will be the book's dominant feature.

Ten pages in: It's like a totally different author. Is this a matter of translation, or is the original different, too? The setting, characters, and dialogue of JOY are dramatically unlike IMPOSTOR, although there are resemblances to SOUS LE SOLEIL.

After 100 pages: Okay, by now I see how to reconcile the two books. It is definitely a sequel. Cénabre has yet to appear, but he is expected to arrive this evening as a visitor to the country estate of de Clergerie family. So far, the book has focused entirely on this household. Chantal, aged 18 or so, lives with a bookish, sickly, petty father and an embittered, half-mad grandmother; her mother died years ago. We meet several servants. The cook seems a decent sort, but the maid and valet are insolent, self-involved, gossipy, and headed for disaster. The older Russian chauffeur is worse, a profligate of uncertain intentions and wicked intelligence. The father sees none of this.

The conversation of the chauffeur, Fiodor, sparks two conflicts in the plot. First, several times, Fiodor has found, or snuck up on, Chantal in what he describes as a state of prayerful ecstasy; the narrator explains that the supernatural joy she gave to the dying Chevance has been replaced by something higher and better. A private and humble person, Chantal is rightly offended by Fiodor's snooping, distressed by his invasion of the locked garden of her religion. But after he leaves, the second, internal conflict arises, for Chantal also doubts her own sanity. Her mother and grandmother have reputations for neurosis and mental breakdown. Was Chantal really praying when Fiodor discovered her, or is she just sick in the head? How could three hours pass without her notice? (In THE IMPOSTOR, Cénabre, too, lost track of time in the state of possession.) The novel leaves this question open for now, but flashbacks to conversations between Chevance and Chantal suggest her holiness is real.

Monsieur de Clergerie is a third source of conflict in the book. Bernanos takes us deep inside this little man's psyche. At first, ambition seems to be the driving force of his life. As a historian with many published books (like Cénabre), M. de Clergerie's adulthood has been a persistent search for social recognition, symbolized in his mind by election to a French Academy. But ambition is only a foretaste of his much greater sin, a deep-seated envy of his daughter's goodness, happiness, intelligence, and whole way of life. (In an aside, the narrator reveals that he felt much the same way about her mother, which probably contributed to her early death.) Around page 90, de Clergerie tells his daughter of his plans to marry a certain aristocratic widow, frankly admitting that it is not a matter of love or personal need -- she just controls a few votes in the Academy's upcoming membership election. Over the course of this tête-à-tête, Bernanos begins to work his magic. Clergerie first suggests, timidly and hesitantly, that Chantal might be happier in a convent than a home managed by a countess. But Chantal has zero interest in a formal religious life, knowing it a vocation, not a career path or escape hatch. She controls her temper and gently refuses. Once his wishes are thwarted, de Clergerie's attitude turns suddenly abusive. He spews all his inner vitriol, revealing his intense and multi-layered selfishness through elaborate and obviously false rationalizations. (Unlike Cénabre, the father does not see the truth about himself.) Chantal flees the room and the chapter ends.

Unlike the first two novels, most of the scenes in the first hundred pages are heavy in dialogue, relying little on editorial narration to achieve their effects. This Dostoevskyan feature is my strongest memory of Bernanos's DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (published eight years after JOY), which I hope to reread this year.

After 150 pages (end of Part One): Interpretation confirmed. Chantal's holiness is real but mutable. After an insane moment of temptation to run away from home, she confront and apparently converts her grandmother, who finally admits how much she hated (and even connived at the death of) Chantal's mother. What will happen when Cénabre joins this troubled household?

After 250 pages (about 50 to go): Several guests, each even more disturbing than the normal residents, have arrived along with Cénabre. They swarm around Chantal, fascinated and disturbed by her, always self-interested. But (as with her grandmother) when they actually speak to her, they are baffled. The result is remarkably free of hagiography; unlike the tortured heroes of a Graham Greene novel, Bernanos's saints do not prove their humanity by wallowing in rank sin or despair. For some 20 pages, we are taken inside one of Chantal's ecstasies, a phantasmagorical palimpsest of Christ's agony in Gethsemane and Judas's suicide tree; she wakes to find Cénabre in front of her. This sequence is the hardest sort of thing to read in Bernanos, and perhaps his trademark.

Finished. The last five pages surprised me. It is a story of God's relentless grace, but it is not a very comforting story. God's patience is outrageous and his methods are not ours. At one point, the narrator himself refers to "this vague conversation" between two minor characters; it's a description that does justice to Bernanos's first three novels. JOY is much clearer, and (thank God) more hopeful than UNDER THE SUN and IMPOSTOR, but it too is obscure at the fringes. I'll move on to DIARY; Ignatius published a new translation by Michael Tobin in 2025, billing it as the first unabridged translation in English.

[Andrew Weitzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel ran a similar path of the other two Bernanos novels I have read ("Diary of a Country Priest" and "Under the Sun of Satan") in that it starts slow, builds up some sort of weird religious mystical pressure, and then explodes into unexpected craziness. The story in "Joy" follows a young girl with a saint-like purity and simplicity who lives with her neurotic father, her demented yet shrewd grandmother, and a host of weird servants including a vaguely criminal Russia chauffeur. The already confused atmosphere of the house is thrown into further turmoil with a looming marriage and visits from a cynical psychologist and a priest with a secret he fears was betrayed. Can't really talk about it beyond that without giving away major spoilers, so I'll conclude with a recommendation that you read it, since it was pretty good. Kind of Dostoevsky-sh.

[Mélanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une réflexion audacieuse et résolument moderne sur l'amour à l'âge mur. La lystérieuse C. Magnani tisse un joli court roman qui incite à aimer à tout âge en réinventant le concept de la vie de couple.

[Alain · Rating 4 out of 5]

les amours adultères d'un couple vieillissant, pied de nez aux conventions racontés en trois parties, par la fille qui trouve l'écrit de son père après sa mort, puis l'homme et la femme. A la limite, mais jamais dans le banal et des clichés il reste une forme de lumière joyeuse et émouvante.

[Maman à Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book . Once I got into it, couldn't let go! And yet I'm absolutely against affairs of any kind but the caracters are very lovable and of course Italy is a fine setting.