The Immoralist (French: L’Immoraliste) was published by the Mercure de France in 1902. Michel, a young French scholar specializing in ancient languages, marries Marceline — a woman he likes but does not love — and takes her on a honeymoon to North Africa. There he contracts tuberculosis and nearly dies. During his recovery, he discovers sensations he has never known: the heat of the sun on his skin, the beauty of Arab boys, the pleasure of physical existence unmediated by books and scholarship. He recovers his health but loses his morality — or rather, discovers that the morality he was taught was a prison, and that the authentic self beneath it is amoral, sensual, and ruthless.
The récit traces Michel’s progressive abandonment of his old self: he neglects his scholarship, befriends poachers and vagrants, lets his estate decline, drags the increasingly ill Marceline across North Africa, and watches her die — not with indifference but with an inability to sacrifice his new self for her sake that amounts to the same thing. The final scene, in which Michel confesses his story to three friends and asks for their help, is ambiguous: is he asking for rescue or for absolution? Gide refuses to clarify.
The novel was understood — correctly — as partly autobiographical. Gide’s own sexual awakening in North Africa, his discovery of his homosexuality, and his guilt about his marriage to his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux are all present in the text, transmuted but recognizable. The book lost Gide the friendship of Francis Jammes and established his reputation as a dangerous thinker, which he cultivated with characteristic ambivalence.
Collecting The Immoralist
First edition (Mercure de France, Paris, 1902, in French): Paperback wrappers.
Market values:
- French first edition, fine: $800–$2,000
- English first edition (Knopf, 1930): $100–$300