It is equally clear that this same Christ is also the Master of all who revolt against him and that no one has the competence or the possibility to know in advance what the final verdict of the Crucified over his executioners will be, that is, to affirm how far the grace of redemption will extend. Christ is as much the Lord of hell as he had been the Lord of Hades; he is this not only by virtue of his divinity but equally by virtue of his humanity—of his vicarious suffering for all and his descent into godforsakenness, which, being a case of God forsaking God, far surpasses all possible forms of godforsakenness in sinners. The Christian sets his hope on this fact: that the Cross surpasses all possible hells; the hope of the Christian, therefore, is by its very nature unlimited. It is of this hope that Bernanos speaks when, following the path of the mystics, he too undertakes a descent into the hell of those who do not want to love. In this sphere man has even lost the right to distinguish between different kinds of hell: for here what is involved is the victory of Christ over—and his thoroughgoing elimination of—all that is lost in creation.

Bernanos says the essential in a 1927 conference entitled “Satan and Us”:

This little Mouchette emerged (from what nook in my conscience?), and immediately she gestured to me with her eager and anxious look. . . . I saw the mysterious young girl between her beer-brewing father and her mother. Little by little I spun her story. I walked right behind her, letting her go where she would. I felt she had a daring heart. . . . She was free. But with what sort of freedom? You see, I couldn’t help it: one by one, all familial and social bonds were shattering behind her—those that make each of us some kind of disciplined animal even at the penultimate degree of abasement. And I felt that, as this was happening, my pitiable heroine was plunging more and more deeply into a lie that was a thousand times fiercer and stricter than any discipline whatever. Around the wretched child in revolt no avenue was open, no possible escape could be found. The crazed impetus that drove her toward an illusory liberation could lead nowhere but to death or to nothingness.

Let us be clear. The Catholic dogma of original sin and redemption came up here [in the novel], not out of a text, but as a result of the concrete facts, circumstances, and junctures. Once the problem was stated, no other solution but this was possible. At the extremity of certain kinds of humiliation and certain ways of squandering the human soul sacrilegiously, the idea of redemption suggests itself to the mind: I say the idea, not of reform or of turning hack, but of redemption. Thus, the Abbé Donissan did not suddenly appear on the scene haphazardly: he was called there by Mouchette’s savage cry of despair, which made him indispensable. This is what Paul Claudel expressed in one of his magnificent formulations’. “Your book sets everything in motion”, he wrote to me, “just to come to the aid of this little crushed soul.” 

 Mouchette’s character is so offensive to the need fools have of security that a great number of pious critics have asked me to get rid of her. However, not only is she necessary to the interior balance of the novel; she is this very balance! I don’t give a hoot whether or not she has ‘Verisimilitude’; but she must be true, otherwise the work loses all meaning, and the terrible atonement carried out by the Curé de Lumbres is reduced to an atrocious and insane episode. Once the passions reach their climax. . . , do they or do they not attain a sort of lucid madness, the willful and deliberate search of evil—evil loved for its own sake—and finally total, absolute revolt, for which no maneuver of our reason could give a satisfying definition? Such revolt, however, is far from being unknown to human experience, since all men have for millennia had a clear consciousness, or at least a presentiment, of hell—of its traps, its mirages—in a word, of the Sun of Satan!398

It is therefore hell that generates the idea of mankind’s “buying back” or redemption. It is also hell that kindles, in God, the idea of the need for a redeemer and, in the writer’s head, the idea of an atoner who makes manifest the here-and-now of redemption: the sacramental and mystical, but also the poetic, re-presentation (literally, “the making present”) of the event of redemption, the redemption in fieri (that is, even as it is happening), and this redemption cannot be comprehensible without the reality of hell. The divine thought of creating a new way for man is kindled on the flint of the hopeless no-exit inherent in the way of sin. Mouchette becomes more and more the exponent of utterly doomed mankind, and Donissan a transparency of Christ.