The Revolt of the Angels

Maurice d'Esparvieu

Maurice d'Esparvieu is a well-off young man of fashionable Paris, living on family money and entangled with a married woman, Madame des Aubels. When his guardian angel Arcade abruptly renounces Heaven and walks out, Maurice is left genuinely frightened — not of damnation so much as of facing life without the spiritual support he'd always assumed was there. His helpless, half-comic attempts to reason with Arcade and his alarm at the angel's blasphemous reading matter anchor the novel's opening and give the cosmic revolt its first human witness.

Arcade

Arcade begins as the dutiful guardian of young Maurice d'Esparvieu, but long hours in the family's library have led him to study theology, cosmogony, and natural philosophy — and to conclude that the God he served is an ignorant, cruel tyrant. He abandons his post, recruits disaffected angels across Paris, and dreams of renewing Lucifer's revolt, though his old comrade Théophile Belais, fallen for love of a music-hall singer, wants no part of it. His fervor and his willingness to argue theology with anyone make him the engine of the book's central rebellion.

Monsieur Julien Sariette

Monsieur Sariette has devoted his life to the d'Esparvieu library, cataloguing it with scientific precision and treating every volume as sacred. When books begin appearing on wrong shelves and in wrong rooms — a polyglot Bible blotted with ink, a Genesis dissertation dragged down from the attic — he is thrown into anguish, suspecting burglars, then monkeys, then his own sanity. His mounting panic over the rearranged library is the novel's first signal that something supernatural is at work among the shelves, and his distress makes the angelic intrusion feel domestic before it feels cosmic.

Madame de la Verdelière

Madame de la Verdelière moves in the best French society as one of its most gracious grandes dames, assiduous in every modish and patriotic cause. When Maurice is injured, she personally calls to ask after him and offers to nurse him — only to have Arcade, at Madame des Aubels' urging, shut the door in her face. Her brief appearance captures the polished, self-satisfied world of charity and visiting cards against which the angels' revolt plays out, and the small humiliation of her rejected kindness shows how quickly that world's protocols can be overturned.

Gilberte des Aubels

Gilberte des Aubels is a young married woman of Maurice's social circle, carrying on an affair with him while keeping up appearances. When Maurice is wounded and visitors crowd to his flat, it is at her vehement instigation that Arcade shuts the door on Madame de la Verdelière — a small sign of how much influence she holds over the household and over Maurice himself. Her presence grounds the novel's celestial drama in ordinary Parisian intrigue, and her jealousy and practicality make her a quiet counterweight to the angels' grand abstractions.

Prince Istar

Prince Istar is a Kerûb who has joined the colony of fallen angels in Paris, where he spends his mornings bent over furnaces and retorts, concocting explosives for the good of humanity and dodging the police. He has spoken at radical meetings and served prison time for anti-militarism, and he tells Arcade frankly that he has no preference for angels over men — the coming social revolution interests him more than the reconquest of Heaven. His blunt, uncouth laugh and his willingness to forget his native land in favor of earthly upheaval make him both a comic foil and a serious challenge to Arcade's celestial ambitions.