The same theme, in 1912, furnished M. Gilbert des Voisins with the matter of _L’Enfant qui prit Peur_. Here the plot is pushed to a tragedy; the child, aghast to find the serpent rampant in his little Eden, and his father’s friend his mother’s lover, commits suicide. We are still further here from M. Boylesve’s exquisite moral delicacy. We neighbour it again in _L’Élève Gilles_, the first novel of a young schoolmaster which, in 1912, obtained the new great prize of the French Academy--the prize of £400, as yet only twice bestowed: once on _Jean-Christophe_ and once on the too-slender but charming book before us. (I mention all these prizes to show the undoubted popularity of the theme, and may add that M. des Voisins’ book very nearly obtained a Prix Vie Heureuse.) Gilles is a little boy suddenly sent from home to live with an old aunt in the country because his father is suffering from neurasthenia and needs a complete rest: no noise, no movement about him. The child’s mother takes him and leaves him with her aunt and the old servant, Segonde, whose portrait is one of the charms of the volume; and though the lad is happy enough with them, we feel there is something poignant behind--something we do not know, and that the child does not even suspect. He is sent to the grammar school of the little town near his aunt’s property, and we feel that the shadow--the unsuspected shadow--hangs over him, there, too, increasingly evident to those about him, though still invisible to the child narrator. Little by little, by a word here, a silence there, by the sensitive temperament of the child himself, by the strangeness of the father (who has come for rest and change to the quiet country house) we learn the truth: the man is mad. Gilles never knows it; but if he is so quiet, so sensitive, and so solitary, it is because the whole little world around him marks him for the madman’s child; a being to be spared, respected, but not played with like another boy. He is a child apart.