ÒWe do not know what we desire: we do not love those whom we think we love.Ó This musing from the lips of MauriacÕs protagonist in VipersÕ Tangle might well sum up the entirety of his fictional works, but particularly his 1922 novel The River of Fire. Daniel Trasis finds sanctuary from his troublesome Parisian mistress at a hotel in the French countryside. There he encounters the seductively innocent Gisle de Plailly and her forbidding companion, Lucile de Villeron. Amid his budding relationship with Gisle, Daniel is afflicted with warring obsessions with purity and lust, frustrated all the while by memories of his promiscuous past. Planting the seeds of characters and themes that will come to full flower in his later, and highly regarded, The Desert of Love, Mauriac crafts in The River of Fire a suspenseful drama wherein the gloom of sin can yet be a Òdarkness in which the faithful can hear and see their Savior.Ó First UK Edition 1954 translated by Gerard Hopkins in Eyre and Spottiswoode’s Collected Edition Series of this Nobel Prize winning author’s works.