Soon, though, his liking had become tainted by a growing moral anguish over the slave question.

"What is essentially a love story turns into a sensitive, powerful reflection on moral anguish in Vichy France," Anita Gates said in these pages last year.

While at one point crediting the sincerity of Mr. Clinton's moral anguish in confronting the draft, Mr. Maraniss lapses at other points into unjustified cynicism.

Fisk cried, his moral anguish tempered by the greed of desperation.

His culpability and distance, however, led Mr. Maillot to depict him as a failed peacemaker who punctuates the ballet with expressive bursts of moral anguish.

With the conviction of Lt. Calley, the moral anguish some Americans have been experiencing for years has touched nearly all of us.

In addition, the very naivete of his character protects him from real moral anguish - or lasting emotional damage.

Then for an instant he thought lie knew the face - he felt small and helpless, turned away in moral anguish, rejecting the terrible half-familiarity of the dead man's features.

So it comes as something of a surprise when, more than halfway through the book, what is essentially a love story turns into a sensitive, powerful reflection on moral anguish in Vichy France.

The point is that if the French created the world's first revolution (in the new, 1789 sense of the word), they also invented the moral anguish that surrounded it then and still does.