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Blanche de la Force, the troubled woman at the center of Francis Poulenc's luminous operatic treatment of the Georges Bernanos screenplay Dialogues des Carmelites, is the only one of the five main characters who was not a historical figure. She is the creation of Gertrud von le Fort, a German author who conceived her for a 1931 novella Die Letzte am Schafott ("The Last on the Scaffold"), giving her a French version of her own last name. Von le Fort based her book on the diary of the real Mother Marie of the Incarnation, who survived the Reign of Terror, while Bernanos in turn based his screenplay on a scenario by Father Raymond Bruckberger. The Bernanos script was never ...