ABSTRACT
A young, rich, and frivolous woman loses her only son, who commits suicide one evening when his mother is so preoccupied with her social life that she sends him to bed rather than be forced to pay attention to him. The poor woman’s moral shock is so violent that it plunges her into a cri sis of conscience that she initially tries to resolve by dedicating herself to humanitarian causes, on the advice of a cousin of hers who is a Communist intellectual. But little by little she gets the feeling that this is only an inter mediate stage beyond which she must go if she is to achieve a mystical charity all her own, one that transcends the boundaries of politics and even of social or religious morality. Accordingly, she looks after a sick prostitute until the latter dies, then aids in the escape of a young criminal from the police. This last initiative causes a scandal, and, with the complicity of an entire family alarmed by her behavior, the woman’s husband, who under stands her less and less, decides to have her committed to a sanitarium. If she had become a member of the Communist party or had entered a con vent, bourgeois society would have had fewer objections to her actions, since the Europe of the early 1950s is a world of political parties and social organizations.
