Lafcadio's Adventures

André Gide is an outstanding French prose writer, playwright, and essayist, a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Gide’s work had a huge influence not only on French literature, but on all world literature of the 20th century.

“The Vatican Cellars” is the most witty and unusual novel by the great writer.

“The Vatican Cellars” (1914) is the most unusual novel by the great André Gide. A clever, full of mischievous humor story about a gang of intellectual swindlers who devise a truly ingenious way of “taking money from the population”—a fundraising scheme for a crusade to free the unfortunate pope, who is supposedly kidnapped by Freemasons and locked away in the Vatican cellars.