["The Bachelors"] has no plot, no content, little characterization, only style and avid irony. Montherlant's hatred for these members of his aristocratic class is not relieved by pity; but it moves the reader, for it only half disguises the author's hatred of himself. Behind his Stendhalian technique of intervening in his descriptions and in his narrative and of commenting upon his sad weaklings for the reader's sake, one detects Montherlant's fundamental isolation and shyness. These pathetic noblemen reduced to insignificance might have been members of his family, or what he would himself have become, a misogynist bachelor, if he had not been saved by vitality, by talent and by a boundless and arrogant faith in himself. (p. 1)

The themes [of another of Montherlant's works, "Selected Essays,"] are the traditional ones among French moralists since Montaigne and and La Rochefoucauld. First, interest in oneself as the most fascinating epitome...