Les Caves du Vatican Reading Order

Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914) by André Gide is the most playful and satirical of Gide's major works: a 'sotie' (a medieval comic form Gide adopted) about a criminal conspiracy to convince Catholic believers that the real Pope has been imprisoned in the cellars of the Vatican and replaced by a Freemason impostor, and that a ransom is needed to free him. Around this central swindle Gide weaves a cast of characters — a devout Catholic, a freethinker, a fraudster, a criminologist — who are related by an absurdly complicated family tree, and at the centre of the novel is Lafcadio, a young man of mixed European parentage who commits what he calls an 'acte gratuit': he pushes a stranger from a moving train for no reason whatsoever, simply to see whether he is capable of acting without motive, consequence, or calculation. The acte gratuit is Gide's most famous contribution to French philosophical fiction: an action performed in complete freedom, detached from past, future, convention, and self-interest, and Lafcadio's crime — committed with the lightness of a holiday — anticipates both the existentialist murder in Camus's L'Étranger and the gratuitous violence in many later works. The novel is also very funny, a quality unusual in Gide.