A Cruel Enigma Translated By Julian Cray

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (2 September 1852 - 25 December 1935) was a French poet, novelist and critic. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Paul Bourget was born in Amiens, France. Bourget is known for his psychological and moralistic novels that often portrayed the complex emotions of women and the ideas, passions, and failures of young men in France. Some of his notable works include Le Disciple (1889), a bestseller that explored the consequences of materialism and positivism, and other novels such as Cruelle Enigme (1885), André Cornelis (1886), and Mensonges (1887). He was admitted to the Académie française in 1894 and was promoted to be an officer of the Légion d'honneur in 1895.

"A Cruel Enigma," tells the story of a young man who takes a married woman for his first mistress. Excerpt: "Love," its author has said elsewhere, "has, like death, remained irreducible to human conventions. It is wild and free in spite of codes and modes. The woman who disrobes to give herself to a man lays aside her entire social personality with her garments. For him, she again becomes what he, too, becomes again for her—the natural, solitary creature to whom no protection can guarantee happiness, and from whom no decree can avert woe." These lines sum in brief the teaching of the book. Its author has, after his fashion, made an uncompromising analysis of the passion that he undertakes to describe, and, stripping from it all the adventitious grace and mysticism and sentiment with which society is wont to shroud it, have found it to consist, in the last resort, of a single and simple fact: the physical, fleshly desire of man for woman and woman for man. Hence it is that Theresa while receiving, and rejoicing exceedingly in, Hubert's loftier and more ideal affection, betrays it at the first opportunity for the sensual brutishness of a hard-living roué, and hence, too, it is that the pure-souled Hubert, even while he scorns his mistress for her treachery and loathes himself for his weakness, returns loveless and despairing to her arms."