François Mauriac

Air and water take seven of his ten planets between them, four and three, which leaves two in earth and a single one in fire. Air arranges the thing and water registers it; the element that would charge at it is down to one planet. The record calls Mauriac a French Catholic novelist, gives Therese Desqueyroux, and adds that he wrote for the Resistance and took a Nobel.

The Sun sits at eighteen degrees of Libra with Mercury at fifteen and Uranus at four, three planets across fourteen degrees of the sign that works itself out in relation to other people. Venus sits on the twenty ninth degree of Scorpio. His Moon sits at twenty seven degrees of Scorpio at noon and may have crossed into Sagittarius, and the private half is left undecided between feeling a thing at full depth and showing none of it, and needing room instead. For a novelist whose subject was conscience, a Libra Sun that cannot settle a question alone is the placement to start from.

Mercury sits sixty degrees from Mars at eleven hundredths of a degree, an opening between thinking and drive as close as this project finds one, and it reads as a mind that works under pressure and finishes what it starts explaining. Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Pluto at just over two tenths, strength that does not need demonstrating. The Sun sits in hard contact with that same Pluto at just under half a degree, which is the angle of a confrontation with authority. In a writer the record places in the Resistance, those three contacts are not a coincidence worth passing over.

He died in Paris on 1 September 1970, at eighty four. Venus rules his Libra Sun, and three separate planets were on that Venus the day he died: Neptune conjunct it at four tenths of a degree, Mars square it at a quarter, and Mercury sixty degrees from it at under nine tenths. The Moon was new and entirely unlit, the phase that starts a thing without waiting to see the whole of it. Three planets in Libra with a single one in fire describes a writer who argued everything out on the page rather than in the room, and a Sun in hard contact with Pluto is why the arguments were never small ones.