Gide the novelist is in eclipse, and it seems doubtful hether he can ever recover the central position he enjoyed up to 30 years ago. He was always more a man of letters and an intellectual than a born writer of fiction; moreover, he tends to be short-winded and rather lacking in inventive power. For that reason, his short books are almost always his best. A degree of autobiography probably underlies this story of a youthful aesthete falling in love with his cousin, and her moral and other scruples - for him, not for herself - which make her cast him off in the end. This is a typical French novella of the kind which Radiguet wrote in The Devil in the Flesh, mingling an almost idyllic background with a sense of moral stress and sharp psychology. The title, by the way, is borrowed from the Gospel of St Luke.
