Camille Angelica Mendoza

PH 103 K
Vipers Tangle
Vipers tangle started as a hate letter addressed to Louis wife. He started
writing this farewell letter because his sickness has timed his life to just six months and
he wanted to cause Isa pain and suffering even after his death. The letter contains his
revenge of disinheriting his whole family. It is also in this letter that we see more of
Louis life. He recounts all his memories from childhood until his old age. He further
explains how his anger towards Isa and his children developed into a hatred that
extends to everyone friends, co-workers and even himself.
Louis is a wealthy man who had humble beginnings. However he grew up with
so much hatred in his heart. He saw himself as a monster, a person incapable of doing
any good except for sparking fear and sadness. He is a person who sees only the
negative things in other people and thus assumes things without really confronting
them. He keeps all his problems and insecurities to himself. He ends up as a man in
despair of himself, working hard day and night to earn money that he plans to deprive
his family of.
Marcel in his writing, Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope,
writes about hope. According to him, we begin with a low order of hope. Usually there
is a wish and there is a belief. In Louis case his wish was to bring suffering and pain to
his wife and family, and his belief is that he will be successful by depriving his family
of his inheritance. He is confident that his plan will succeed because he believes Isa
married him just for his money.
Marcel also transitioned from talking about a low order of hope into a hope as a
response during a time of trial which may be suffering, difficulty, darkness or
captivity. He then talks more bout captivity. Captivity means failing to reach a fullness
of life. When one is held captive, hope now becomes for liberation. Louis is suffering
from an illness, and so he is now limited in what he can do and therefore could not
reach a fullness of life however his illness in itself is not really the reason why he is
held captive. This is because he accepted that he is going to die, and that he is
completely fine with it. Rather we can see him as a captive of his own hatred and
anger. Ultimately, we see that he is a captive of his own despair towards himself. His
hatred and anger resulted to his negative outlook on life. As mentioned, he assumes
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that other people dislike him right away, and therefore he makes the first move to shun
them away.
This is evident in in his relationship with Isa. After learning about Rudolph, he
completely ignored his wife. Since then he always believed that Isa married him for his
money, and that all she ever cared about was their children, her religion, her family,
basically everything but him. He believes that Isa never really loved him, and that her
indifference toward him proves it. At the beginning of his hate letter, he mentioned: I
want to triumph over your silence, the silence in which you persisted about our
marriage 1. According to him anything about him bores Isa and that Isa was
completely silent about their relationship because she never really cared. He then
proves this by enumerating how indifferent Isa was towards him. First, she completely
ignored his success in his career. She did not notice that at the age of less that sixty, he
had become a civil law barrister. She also did not notice his victory in the Villenave
case. Second, Isas attention was completely turned away from him after she she bore
their first child, and since then she was a mother and nothing else. She focused all her
energy and time taking care of the children. To him, the children stole the attention that
was supposed to be for him. At this point we see that what Louis hungered for was
really attention, something that he never really got because of his own doing. He never
really gave other people an opportunity to reach out to him. He made this assumption
that nobody ever cared about him and thus he lost hope of knowing how it feels to be
noticed, to be important and to be loved.
Moreover Isas indifference

gave him the measure of his loneliness and

solitude2. As a result he pushed his family away and never really got to know them. He
separated himself from his wife, without knowing that his wife has been waiting for
him to make the first move from the very first year of their marriage. He failed to
realize that his own actions caused the silence in his marriage with Isa. His attitude
towards how other people viewed him has caused him to focus only on accumulating
his wealth. He was not able to establish a relationship with any one, he never had a
friend and he was never a husband nor father.
As a captive, one longs or hopes to be freed from his captivity. For Louis, he
believes that his revenge will make him feel better. As if he can say at last, just as
1 Vipers Tangle, Francois Mauriac, trans Warre B. Wells, New York,
USA, 1947, page 15.
2 Ibid, page 83
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how a prisoner will when he gets pardoned. He is now fixated on his revenge of
disinheriting his wife and children. He wanted to cause so much pain that he is ready
and willing to bequeath all he has to Luc, his nephew. According to Marcel, this kind of
hope is an improper way of hoping. The more one focuses on an particular thing, the
more he become susceptible to despair.
In page 182 Isa shared her side of the story for the first time. She recounted how
Louis neglected and betrayed her from the very first year of their marriage, and that
every night she was just waiting in her room, waiting for him to make the first move.
She told Louis that she was left with nothing else but to tend to the needs of their
children. This then sparked hope within Louis. He cannot believe what he just heard.
He realized that for the longest time he just focused on his side of the story and on the
negative things that nurtured his resentment towards his wife and other people. His
hatred eventually faded. In his own words he said: The tangle of vipers was outside
myself. They had gone out of me and rolled themselves together, that night.3
However this realization was not enough to completely change his heart. He
still went on his trip to Paris to continue his plans with Robert. His hopes of hurting Isa
got him so fixated on pursuing his plot of revenge that it was difficult to change old
habits. However his plans of revenge failed one-by-one. Luc died, Robert told Louis
family about his plans and finally, Isa died. Now he feels lost, yet he still continues on
writing the letter. It now became a diary that gave him comfort.
Louis was furious when he went home for Isas funeral. He called everyone
liars and that he discovered their plot against him. He knows that they intend to get all
of Louis wealth when he has bequeathed them to Robert. He was devastated but he no
longer wanted revenge. He even said: At that moment, I realized that my hatred was
dead and that desire for revenge was dead with it. 4 His confrontation with his
children, Hubert and Genevieve, inspired pity in his heart. He realized that his children
had many problems. Genevieve worries about her daughter, Janine, who has been
keeping up with a husband who was a rotter. Hubert on the other hand, has no prospects
in life despite his old age. Louis then figured out that his money could help his family.
He decided to give his fortune to his children. Also, he wanted to show them that he has
changed, and that he wanted to help. He even mentioned: I was impatient to show

3 Ibid, page 185

4 Ibid, page 234
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them my new heart.5 However he does not demand that his family will see this change
in him.
It is interesting to know that now he had a different sense of hope, not I hope
that but I hope. Marcel pointed out that to hope is not to be fixated on a fulfillment
of a certain desire. This is because the more you insist on this certain desire, the more
you make yourself susceptible to despair. I hope is different from I hope that
because in I hope there is a certain openness. One is open to the different possibilities
the hope could bring about. In other words, he does not demand anything in return. It
will be fine if nothing happens, but it will be better is something good did. We can see
that Louis had this type of hope in his last few days. Even when Hubert and Genevieve
failed to show up for dinner, he did not give up and revert back to his old self but
instead he went out looking for them to see if they were okay. Hope transformed Louis.
With his new hope, he does not require anything. He just wished that his decision
would help his children, and maybe in some small ways his family would understand
him. He said so himself, I should be very happy if I succeeded in penetrating just one
soul, before I died.6 Here we see that Louis wanted to let his new self be known, yet it
is not a requirement. He would be happy if only Janine will see his new self, yet it is
also okay if she did not. What is important is that he has changed, and his hope had
changed from one that is fixated on a particular thing into one that is open to
possibilities.
Marcel explains that the proper way of hoping is to be open to whatever good
may happen without demanding it. He also added that hope is supposed to be humble,
and best if it remembers gratitude. Indirectly we can say that Louis was thankful when
Janine said to him Take me with you.7 At last someone understood him, and
listened to him. For Louis that was victory and it brought him joy. Ultimately, we see
that Louis was able to get out from his despair of himself. He realized that people did
not really hate him in the beginning, and that they only became indifferent towards him
because he made the first move and shunned them away. At his last few days, he felt
peace. Even if he was alone, and on the verge of death, he remained calm, interested
and active-minded.8 He even mentioned that maybe, the peace which possessed him
was Someone. Louis now acknowledged the possibility of a higher order but does not
5
6
7
8

Ibid,
Ibid,
Ibid,
Ibid,

page
page
page
page

251
266
265
268
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really admit to being a believer. All we know is that he found peace, and that he died
with a light heart.