The Immoralist

The Immoralist is a classic novel by André Gide originally published in 1902. Gide, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, was a French essayist and novelist who participated in the Symbolist movement in the late 19th century. This study guide refers to the 2000 Penguin Books edition translated from French into English by David Watson.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a frame narrative: a letter that introduces the story of the protagonist, Michel. The letter’s author, one of Michel’s childhood friends, explains that he and two other friends, Denis and Daniel, had not seen Michel since his wedding three years prior. When Michel reached out to his school friends for help, all three came to Tunisia to find him. When they arrived in the remote village where he lives, they found him immensely changed from how they remember him. Michel confessed the tale of his experiences to them, and the narrator passes on the story in his letter.

The main narrative tells Michel’s story. A scholar from a middle-class French family, he has an atheist father and a Huguenot mother. He becomes engaged to a Catholic woman named Marceline. His father, who is dying, hopes to see his son settled, but dies shortly before their wedding. Michel and Marceline get married in Angers and then travel to North Africa. They do not consummate their marriage on the journey, but Michel gets to know his wife better and is pleasantly surprised to find she is intelligent and charming. When they arrive in Tunisia, Michel becomes ill. He coughs up blood into a handkerchief, and when his wife finds out, she faints in horror. Michel calls a doctor who tells him he has tuberculosis. Michel falls gravely ill and Marceline takes care of him, bringing him to Biskra, Algeria, where he recovers.

In Biskra, Marceline invites local children to play in their hotel rooms. She introduces Michel to a boy named Bachir. Bachir plays with a knife and cuts himself. Michel is struck by the boy’s health and by his nonchalance at the sight of his own blood. Michel coughs up blood again and compares his own sickly blood to Bachir’s. Realizing he wants to survive his illness, Michel then devotes himself to curing it.

Michel not only feels weak from his tuberculosis; he also experiences extreme sensitivity to temperature. He slowly recovers, going on walks with his wife to a park where he sees many locals. Realizing he enjoys these walks more when he is alone, he goes to the park without his wife and socializes with children, including Bachir, his sister, and a teenage boy named Ashour. Michel savors the sensations of nature and starts to feel truly alive.

Once Michel feels strong enough, he and Marceline visit nearby orchards. There, they encounter a boy named Lassif, who works as a goatherd and plays the flute, and Lassif’s brother Lachmi. Soon, Michel visits the orchards often and befriends the children there. He invites the children to his hotel rooms to play games and his wife invites other children from the school to join them. Michel starts feeling ill again and becomes annoyed with his wife and the children, growing distant from them. However, one boy, Moktir, catches his notice when the boy steals a pair of scissors. Michel secretly delights in the theft and does not betray Moktir’s transgression to his wife.

Once Michel has mostly recovered from tuberculosis, he and his wife leave Biskra. Before they go, he is seized by the thought of his own mortality, feeling both joy at experiencing the present and fear of his own death. He fixates on this thought, hoping not to forget it.

The couple travels to Italy, where Michel feels reborn. Whereas he used to enjoy visiting ruins, now they remind him of death and he is no longer interested in studying history. He starts to live in the present more, avoiding ruins and taking walks in nature instead. While visiting Ravello, he climbs forested hills and builds his endurance. He starts to feel physically stronger due to his exercise, and indulges in sensuous encounters with the natural world. Next, he shaves his beard, but once he is cleanshaven, Michel fears he is more exposed to the world and hides how he has changed from his wife. He realizes that lying to her, like any sin, becomes easier the more he does it.

Michel decides to travel to the next city, Sorrento, on foot, while his wife takes a carriage. When the carriage driver nearly kills Marceline with his reckless driving, Michel fights him and wins. That night, he finally consummates his marriage with Marceline. After having sex with her, he feels anxious at the thought of her mortality.

The couple decides to return to France and to live on Michel’s family estate, La Morinière, in Normandy. Michel also receives a job offer to become a professor at a university in Paris. He decides to focus his research on the Gothic empire and its debauched rulers, who fascinate him. After he and Marceline move to the farm in Normandy, Marceline becomes pregnant. On the farm, Michel meets Charles, the son of his estate manager, Bocage. Michel is attracted to Charles, who is 17 and training to become a farm manager. Michel gets to know Charles while they capture eels in a drained lake, and soon they spend a lot of time together, going on horseback rides. Charles teaches Michel about running the farm, advising him to eke out more money from his tenants by demanding that they farm all the land they rent. Michel follows Charles’s advice, and when the tenants refuse to agree to his terms, he takes over their land and farms it with Charles’s help. When the weather grows colder, Michel and Marceline move back to Paris due to Marceline’s fragile health and her pregnancy.

Michel grows bored quickly with all the socializing he must do in Paris. The only person he enjoys talking with is a man named Ménalque, a hedonist with a scandalous reputation. Ménalque became interested in Michel after hearing about his journeys in North Africa. Ménalque also visited Biskra, where he met Moktir, who confessed to having stolen the scissors from Marceline. Moktir told Ménalque that Michel saw him take the scissors and did not give him away. Ménalque views this as proof that Michel is a kindred spirit, a person who doesn’t care about material possessions. Ménalque points out the irony that Michel owns a large property and suggests that Michel would be happier if he gave up his comfortable life and took more risks to pursue pleasure. Meanwhile, Marceline loses her pregnancy and has an embolism, which causes her to become chronically ill.

To help Marceline recover, the couple returns to La Morinière. There, Michel fraternizes with the workers. Charles returns to the farm, but Michel is no longer interested in him. Michel helps Bocage’s younger son, Alcide, set illegal traps in Michel’s own forest. When their plan unravels, Bocage is none the wiser, but Charles sees what has happened and grows angry with Michel for being irresponsible. Meanwhile, Marceline becomes sicker. Michel decides to sell the estate and travel with Marceline, hoping a change in climate will improve her health.

They go to Switzerland, then to Italy, and finally back to North Africa. At each step of their journey, Michel care for his wife but also gives in to self-indulgent urges. When they arrive back in Biskra, he finds that all the children he used to play with are now too grown up to interest him. The only exception is Moktir, who was recently released from prison. Michel invites Moktir to show him and Marceline the city of Touggourt. While in Touggourt, Moktir takes Michel to see his mistress and stays in the room with them while Michel and Moktir’s mistress have sex. Meanwhile, Marceline’s health continues to diminish, and she dies in Touggourt. In a return to the frame narrative, Michel confesses to his friends that he no longer sees the point in living his life in pursuit of pleasure since it has only brought him sorrow. The narrator of the frame narrative feels complicit in Michel’s sins after hearing them. Finally, Michel ends his tale by admitting that he is sexually attracted to boys.