Paul Bourget

 "One must live as one thinks, under pain of sooner or later ending up thinking as one has lived."

- Paul Bourget, Le Demon du Midi

Paul Borget (1852-1935) was a French novelist, whose most famous work was Le Disciple (1889), a novel about an agnostic professor and the terrible influence his materialism has upon his students. Bourget himself abandoned his Catholic faith as a young man, and drifted into aimless agnosticism until he slowly returned to the Church some twenty years later. In 1893, in an interview he gave in America, he spoke about his changed views: 

"For many years I, like most young men in modern cities, was content to drift along in agnosticism, but I was brought to my senses at last by the growing realization that...the life of a man who simply said 'I don't know, and not knowing I do the thing that pleases me,' was not only empty in itself and full of disappointment and suffering, but was a positive influence for evil upon the lives of others." On the other hand, "those men and women who follow the teachings of the church are in a great measure protected from the moral disasters which...almost invariably follow when men and women allow themselves to be guided and swayed by their senses, passions and weaknesses."

Bourget went on to become a widely regarded scholar, and his novels were popular among the general public. Nonetheless, his works have largely been abandoned; but if you are interested in character novels that deal with a wide range of issues from a Catholic perspective, then I heartily recommend his novels, some of which can be found here.