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His passion for seclusion is justified, he feels, because he works so hard. "My first phrase is always a monster .. . Everything has to be rewritten." Moreover, he says: "Write ... if you must, but for God's sake don't talk about it." For 20 years, Martin du Gard wrote and rewrote The Thibaults. Once he threw away a whole volume when he decided it would weaken the cycle. In 1940 the last volume, Epilogue was published.
Martin du Gard spent most of World War II in Nice. There, or on his Normandy estate, he still lives and works, "ensconced in his materialism," so his friend Andre Gide has said of him, "like a wild boar in its wallow." Now 68, he is busy on a new novel, which, as usual, he declines to discuss.
Still the studious observer of the dilemmas of life, the author of Jean Barois intends to remain true to his own modest self-definition: "An independent writer who . . . escaped the fascination of partisan ideologies, an investigator as objective as is humanly possible, as well as a novelist striving to express the tragic quality of individual lives."