Novel: Les Caves du Vatican

Overview
André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (1914), subtitled a “sotie,” is a sharp, farcical satire that entangles a bourgeois family, a credulous pilgrim, a master swindler, and an amoral young adventurer in a plot where faith, hypocrisy, and chance collide. Gide braids multiple storylines around a brazen hoax, the claim that the Pope has been kidnapped and hidden in the Vatican’s cellars, and culminates in the notorious “act gratuit,” a motiveless crime that exposes the fragility of moral systems.

Plot
The novel opens on the Baraglioul circle, a Parisian family whose public pieties and private self-interest supply Gide with comic targets. Julius de Baraglioul, a celebrated man of letters, measures life by reputation and decorum. His in-laws include Anthime Armand-Dubois, a dogmatic anti-clerical scientist, and Amédée Fleurissoire, a timid, devout provincial who longs for edifying certainties. Their domestic debates about belief and reason run parallel to wider intrigues moving through Europe.

From the margins enters Protos, a cosmopolitan impostor who orchestrates an international swindle. He spreads the rumor that the Pope has been abducted and replaced by a double, then solicits secret “ransoms” from the faithful to fund a fictitious rescue. Fleurissoire, primed by piety and vanity, becomes an ideal mark. Persuaded that his money and courage can restore the Church’s dignity, he slips away to Italy, clutching letters of introduction and a wallet of cash, chasing coded directions through a maze of agents, aliases, and hotel lobbies.

Running alongside this is the story of Lafcadio Wluiki, a striking, rootless young man of uncertain parentage. Wary of all obligations, he toys with the idea that true freedom lies in an act without motive, an assertion of self beyond good and evil. When Lafcadio and Fleurissoire share a night compartment on a train, the strands meet. In a hushed sequence of calculation and caprice, Lafcadio decides to test his freedom by committing a perfect crime. He quietly opens the door and, timing the sway of the carriage, sends the unsuspecting Fleurissoire into the darkness. The body falls between stations; the deed leaves almost no trace.

The aftermath ricochets through the other plots. Julius, half drawn to scandal as material and half offended by it as a moralist, follows rumors to Rome. Protos fades back into a labyrinth of doubles and disguises. At home, a shock of the miraculous overturns Anthime’s militant unbelief: a sudden, inexplicable recovery leads him toward the religion he mocked, to the confusion of those who built their identities on skepticism. Lafcadio, outwardly unruffled, circles the thought of confession, then recoils, tasting a freedom tainted by chance and by the possibility that the man he killed belonged to his family’s orbit.

Themes
Gide stages belief and unbelief as symmetrical temptations, both susceptible to vanity, convenience, and the hunger for meaning. The Vatican hoax lampoons credulity, yet the rationalists prove equally eager to convert coincidence into doctrine. The “act gratuit” tests the prestige of motive: if an action can be perfectly motiveless, what becomes of moral judgment, responsibility, or psychological explanation? The family comedy reveals how social roles and reputations mask contingency, while the crime, committed at random, unthreads any consoling narrative of justice.

Style and significance
Written with airy irony and theatrical pacing, the novel refuses closure. The swindle is never neatly punished, the miracle never securely explained, the murderer never brought to account. Gide’s sotie levels sacred and secular seriousness under the same playful, exacting skepticism. Lafcadio’s motiveless murder became a touchstone for modern literature, influencing explorations of absurd freedom and ethical ambiguity from existentialists to noir fiction, while the title’s cellars echo as a metaphor for the hidden vaults where institutions and individuals store their useful fictions.