The proviso at the end about going 'up hill' is equivalent to the earlier one about God. It's a good thing to follow one's inclination, provided it leads up hill' (327). This apparently hedonistic dictum is only superficially scandalous the license given by 'happiness' is withdrawn in advance by 'God.' The same sort of ambivalent statement shows up at a key point in The Counterfeiters when Edouard advises Bernard about how to conduct his life: 'The answer seems to me simple: to find the rule in oneself to have for goal the development of oneself.' Like Gide, Edouard rules out a priori judgments but when Bernard worries about making errors, Edouard replies with Gidean double-handedness: 'That in itself will teach you. 'There exists no difference between God and one's own happiness,' Gide famously wrote. As a moralist with a particular concern for the young, Gide is careful to show how his youths go right or wrong and one way of going wrong is to ignore one's own desires.

The Counterfeiters is a highly moral book, even in the most old-fashioned sense: there are 'good' characters and 'bad' ones and, in general, things work out well for the good and badly for the bad.

For example, if, as Kant says, the moral test of the rightness of an action is one's willingness to make it public, then Gide acted morally in publishing a book about his scandalous behavior in Algeria and showed as much bravery as irony in titling his confession The Immoralist. His new freedom did not derive from the surgical removal of a swollen superego but from gaining a measure of control over it and, above all, displacing the powerful sense of responsibility onto a different set of moral imperatives. Gide's break with Calvinism was spectacular and consequential, the obvious turning point of his life, and yet, in a sense, it was incomplete. : : available at Amazon US, Amazon Canada, and Amazon EUĪndré Gide, reared by strict Protestant women, entered adult life in a state of restless religious captivity, married his cousin, contracted tuberculosis, traveled to Algeria for his health, encountered Oscar Wilde, gave free rein to his repressed homosexuality and, instead of then discreetly perishing like Mann's Gustave von Aschenbach, returned to France, made a public avowal of his sexuality and of his new credo, wrote a notorious book about both, opened himself to sensuality, to life's possibilities, became the apostle of radical individualism, conceived the acte gratuit, embraced public responsibility, rejected narcissism, kept an enormous journal, and, in the fullness of time, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 'The Counterfeiters: A Novel' by André Gide (Vintage, 1973) André Gide, de Solange de Bièvre, huile sur toile.

Les Faux-monnayeurs by André Gide