The Pastoral Symphony (French: La Symphonie pastorale) was published by Gallimard in 1919. A Protestant pastor in a Swiss village takes in Gertrude, a blind orphan girl, and undertakes her education. The education is a triumph: Gertrude learns language, music, ideas, and joy. The pastor is enchanted by her innocence and by her dependence on him, and gradually his affection becomes something he refuses to name. He reads her the Gospels but omits the passages about sin; he describes the world to her but omits its ugliness; he creates for her an Eden of moral innocence in which the only reality is his version of reality.
The pastor’s journal — which constitutes the entire narrative — is a masterpiece of unreliable narration. The pastor believes he is describing a spiritual relationship; the reader sees clearly that he is in love with his ward and that his theological justifications are self-deceptions. When Gertrude’s sight is surgically restored, she sees for the first time the faces of the people around her — including the pastor’s — and what she sees destroys the world he had built for her. The pastor’s son Jacques, whom the pastor has forbidden to court Gertrude, loves her honestly; the pastor’s wife, whom he has neglected, suffers silently. Gertrude’s response to seeing the truth is devastating.
The récit is among Gide’s most perfect formal achievements: brief, concentrated, structurally elegant, and merciless in its exposure of self-deception. The Beethoven symphony of the title — which Gertrude hears at a concert and which represents for her the beauty of a world she cannot see — becomes ironic: the pastor’s “pastoral” existence is as carefully composed, and as remote from reality, as the music.
Collecting The Pastoral Symphony
First edition (Gallimard, Paris, 1919, in French): Paperback wrappers.
Market values:
- French first edition, fine: $200–$600
- English first edition (Knopf, 1931): $60–$150