_L’Immoraliste_ is the story of a young man, newly married, highly gifted, with all his life before him apparently, who suddenly falls sick of a mortal illness. Hitherto he has been a student, spiritually minded, almost austere. But the sudden neighbourhood of death, the dread possibility of annihilation, change his philosophy; he feels that instinctive shudder, that sense of the futility of creeds and conventions which Mademoiselle Lenéru has called _le sens profond de la mort_. And his ideals are reversed. Henceforth he esteems not the moral, not the refined, but such things as seem especially vital: Life, in such manifestations, bad or good, as appear the most spontaneous, the most energetic. Instinct and Vigour draw him like a magnet, for these make for survival. At Biskra, where he winters for his health, he finds himself admiring the little Arab boy who steals his wife’s scissors--the scamp is so adroit, so deft!--and when he returns to his country home in Normandy, it is the drunkards and the poachers in the tavern who strike him as the most alive, and therefore the most estimable. When his wife, worn out with nursing, falls ill in her turn, he neglects her (for illness has become in his eyes disgusting, almost monstrous) and she dies in isolation. André Gide may be himself, perhaps, something of an Immoralist--or rather an Amoralist--as was the manner of the _Fin-de-siècle_, but he preserves, as the clay preserves the trace of the long crumbled sea-shell, the imprint of a severe and religious education. Like our English Edmund Gosse, he has left behind him a Protestant past, which he looks back upon to-day with some distaste, and yet perhaps with something of an unconscious nostalgia. His best novel, _La Porte Étroite_ (1909), is laid, so to speak, on the grave of that Huguenot youth of his, so utterly vanished, like a handful of flowers. ‘Le goût exquis craint le trop en tout.’ These words of Fénélon’s rise to one’s mind in reading this story of a rare soul drawn into the abyss of the inner life, ‘as waters are by whirlpools suck’d and drawn,’ through a sort of dread of the excess, the commonness, the transitoriness of mortal happiness. Alissa Bucolin was the child of a West Indian Creole and a Norman banker, Protestant and pious. The beautiful Mme Bucolin never took root in the Huguenot society of Havre; she spent her days swinging in a hammock or reclining gracefully upon a couch, a shut book dropping from her idle hand; sometimes a violent _crise de nerfs_ would interrupt the languid course of her existence, would alarm and arouse all the quiet, plain, provincial household; only sometimes at dusk she would awake for a moment as it were, show a transient animation, or sit at the piano and begin some slow mazurka of Chopin; but her lovely hands would stop in the middle of a chord, her voice leave the phrase unfinished, and the sleeping beauty sink again into her incommunicable _ennui_.