The Immoralist

Michel narrates his own recent history one night to three old friends, and Gide gives the reader nothing else to judge the story by. A scholar raised in strict Protestant discipline, Michel marries Marceline mainly because his dying father wished it, and on their honeymoon in North Africa he falls seriously ill with tuberculosis. Nursed back to health by Marceline in Biskra, Algeria, he discovers in his own convalescence a hunger for physical life he had never let himself feel, and he grows fascinated by the vitality of the local boys he watches playing in the streets, an attraction that reorders everything he thought he valued.

Back home at his estate, La Morinière, Michel grows drawn to Charles, the caretaker's son, and comes under the influence of Ménalque, a friend whose contempt for property, marriage and settled virtue gives Michel's private hunger a philosophy to hide behind. He starts poaching on his own land alongside his tenant farmers for the thrill of it, neglects the estate's accounts, and eventually sells the whole property. Marceline, meanwhile, contracts the tuberculosis that once nearly killed him, and Michel drags her from city to city seeking a cure he does not truly pursue; she dies in the desert town of Touggourt while he stands by, more interested in his own freedom than in her suffering.

Three months later, alone and adrift with no one left to perform his old virtue for, Michel summons the three friends to hear the confession that is the novel itself, and asks them, having heard it, to tell him how to live. Gide refuses to answer for him. It reads less like a scandal novel than a cool, exact interrogation of what happens when a man decides that being truly free means owing nothing to anyone, including the wife who saved his life.