La Symphonie pastorale is the story of a blind girl (who’s not really blind) adopted by a man who is really blind but doesn’t realise it. Gide shows us a man, an upright Protestant pastor, blinded by his own theologically and socially inspired certainties. His chance encounter with a neglected but beautiful young girl creates a relationship which, because it is quite out of the ordinary run of expectations, forces him to re-examine the bases of his thinking and behaviour. It becomes a liberating experience for the reader to accompany this essentially sympathetic and well-meaning man on his road to truth...


The book is also something of an exposé of those poor or isolated intellectual environments where religious thinking holds unchallenged sway; showing in particular the sometimes enormous power of religious ideas over the innocent or narrowly-educated. For the time when it was first published (in 1919) when polite society was still generally pious it must have seemed a deeply subversive text.


Isabelle is also subversive, in a subtler way and with a less obvious target. The illusions that this novella (published in the UK in the same volume as La Symphonie Pastorale) exposes are those of the romantic (and eager) young lover. It is an extremely precise and often very amusing dissection of the wishfulness of someone who wants to have an adventure. Isabelle’s would-be lover is a young student, who sees himself as the most sophisticated Latin Quarter jade possible. By chance he is introduced to the inhabitants of a wonderfully ramshackle country house somewhere between the ruined chateau of the marvellous Le Grand Meaulnes (by Alain-Fournier, reviewed elsewhere) and Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.


Amongst the sad but immensely atmospheric figures who inhabit the old house he encounters the image of a woman pictured in a mysterious miniature and he falls in love with this chimera. The results are marvellously instructive. Isabelle is a slightly more traditional story than La Symphonie Pastorale, self-contained, and rather beautiful. This story too has a jibe at a priest, this time a Catholic one.


Both stories are very readable, and this book is a very pleasant introduction to one of the acknowledged 20th century masters of French literature.

‘It was at that same lunch that Monsieur Floche, without a word of oratorical warning, led me into the presence of the Saint-Aréol couple. The Abbé at least might have dropped me a hint the night before. I remember having experienced the same feeling of stupefaction once upon a time at the Zoological Gardens, when I first made the acquaintance of the Phoenicopterus antiquorum, or the spatula-beaked flamingo. It is impossible to say whether the Baron or the Baronne was the more peculiar; they made a perfect pair... in a museum they would have been placed in the same glass case without a moment’s hesitation and labelled «extinct species».’ p96