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Nobel Prize winner - Mauriac's classic work that dissects the core of loveless marriage. It is a model of psychological analysis at the hall of French literature. It influenced Camus and Sartre's "Poison Master" and wrote about the suffocation of loveless marriage with a cold writing style. When marriage is reduced to a tool of reality and interests, and when two people are forced to consume each other in the same space, intimacy becomes a mental shackles that tortures each other. The greatest pain in love is that I love your freedom and freshness, but my existence is exactly the cage that imprisons your freedom. Jean Peruel, the son of a landowner, was young and wealthy, but ugly. As a result, he had low self-esteem and was sad, thinking that he could not be loved by the opposite sex. Jean's father regarded his son's marriage as a transaction and took a fancy to Noemi, a beautiful but poor girl from the neighbor's family. Noemi's parents also coveted Jean's family's wealth, so the two got married under the arrangement of the priest. There is no love in this marriage. Noemi's kiss is just a wife's duty, just like the kiss given by a saint to a leper, showing courtesy and mercy. Aware of Noemi's disgust and suffering, it hurt deeply, and made her feel even more painful and inferior. In order to free Noemi, whom he deeply loved, he decided to sacrifice himself to give her freedom...

Lawyer Louis came from a humble background, was stingy with wealth and vicious and cold-blooded. He spent his life trapped in a cage of suspicion and revenge. When he was approaching old age, he wrote a suicide note in which he complained about his wife and children. In the letter, he poured out his resentment, complained about his wife's past love history, scolded her for being cold to him, and hated that his children coveted his inheritance. He carefully planned and made various calculations, planning to give his property to his illegitimate son to take revenge on his family. However, an unexpected critical illness wiped out his accusations and hatred, and his suicide note turned into a confession and repentance. When death came, he faced his twisted soul fed by resentment and untied the "snake knot" that had entangled him throughout his life in love and faith. The alienation of love, the rift of marriage, the calculation of family affection, the loss of faith... Mauriac uses cold writing to reveal the fatal knots intertwined in intimate relationships, allowing hatred and redemption to fight fiercely in the dying candlelight. "Inability to love" is a disease. Only by cutting off the snake knot can we learn how to love.