Lafcadio’s Adventures (French: Les Caves du Vatican, literally “The Vatican Cellars”) was published by Gallimard in 1914. Gide classified it as a “sotie” — a satirical farce — rather than a novel, and the distinction is important: the tone is lighter, more playful, and more deliberately absurd than his serious récits. The plot involves a scheme to convince French Catholics that the real Pope has been kidnapped and replaced by an impostor, and that donations are needed to fund his rescue. The scheme is a fraud — one of many in Gide’s fiction — and its victims include the devout Anthime Armand-Dubois, who has been miraculously cured of his atheism, and the pious Amédée Fleurissoire, who sets out for Rome to rescue the Pope.
Lafcadio Wluiki, the novel’s central figure, is a young man of no fixed morality — handsome, intelligent, and entirely free of the social and religious constraints that bind the other characters. On a train journey, sitting opposite Fleurissoire, Lafcadio conceives and executes the “acte gratuit”: he pushes the old man out of the moving train, killing him, for no reason except to prove to himself that he can act without motivation, without consequence, without guilt.
The acte gratuit became one of the defining concepts of twentieth-century intellectual life. Gide’s question — is a truly free act possible? Can a person act without being determined by character, circumstance, or motive? — was taken up by the existentialists, and the figure of Lafcadio anticipates Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger by nearly thirty years.
Collecting Lafcadio’s Adventures
First edition (Gallimard, Paris, 1914, in French): Paperback wrappers.
Market values:
- French first edition, fine: $400–$1,000
- English first edition (Knopf, 1927): $80–$200