The literary critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Gilles “is, without any doubt, one of the greatest novels of the century—and one of those books in which the disarming sincerity of a man rises to the grandeur usually reserved to literary transpositions.” Released in serialized chapters, the first English translation of Gilles was published in 2024 by Tikhanov Library. You can read it here.

Mr Falkenberg knew that Gilles was often at his house and this presence annoyed him. At first he had seen Gilles as a rascal and a dowry chaser, then, after a few conversations, as a character who was not devoid of an indefinable, but absurd, virtue. He would do nothing, or if he did, odd and useless things. He turned his back on success. Whatmore, he was sure that Gilles did not love Myriam; not loving his daughter himself, he could not believe that any man could love her. This man’s kindness, which had been great towards his sons, died with them. Parents often make a curious and arbitrary choice among their offspring. From the moment they were born, Mr Falkenberg had decided that his sons were his flesh and blood, but that his daughter was his wife’s flesh and blood. Yet it was his daughter who had inherited his qualities and faults and who should have been closest to his heart. Since he believed she was doomed to loveless ambition, he accepted Gilles Gambier as much as the next man.

One evening, he said to her:

“Are you going to marry this boy?”

Myriam grit her teeth

“Yes.”

“Have you really thought about it.”

“…Yes.”

“That boy doesn’t love you.”

If he warned his daughter, it was more to hurt her than to protect her. Myriam rose to leave.

“Is that all you have to say to me?”

He stopped brusquely, and if he still wore a contemptuous smile, it was directed against himself. He had a theoretical sense of human duties that was still imprinted on his memory. He said to himself, “This is what pain has done to me.” As the minutes passed, from the bottom of his heart, he made a profound resolution. “I must get out of this life, where I can no longer behave decently.”

“I thought you were intelligent and that I could talk to you,” he continued in a tone that tried to be conciliatory.

He was used to handling men, not women. It was true that Myriam was a bit of a man; that was her weakness, she always gave in when the abstract and insidious pretext of impartiality was put forward. She sat down again.

“Why do you say that Gilles doesn’t love me?”

Mr Falkenberg, for a moment, having made his resolution, felt completely detached from the world, and his daughter seemed to him an atom among other atoms. Ceassing to hate her, he was able to assume some semblance of kindness. So he didn’t respond: “It’s plain to see,” but:

“He’s a boy who thinks about other things.”

He blunted his point, and Myriam was less able to refuse him.

“He can think of me, and at the same time, think, strongly, about other things.”

“…Yes. But he thinks of other things.”

“What do you find so reproachable about him? Isn’t he employed” You forget that he’s still a soldier.”

“It’s not like that, Besides, he should have some idea what he’ll do after.”

“When you were at Polytechnique, did you know you’d be going into business?”

“I knew I would work.”

“Gilles travels in his own way, it’s just not yours.”

Mr Falkenberg was tempted to admire the strength of this devotion. “She will suffer,” he thought. This strength of delicious, stubborn suffering had been within him, and he glimpsed that Myriam was his daughter. But she was lost with all the other beings in the distance. He continued:

“There’s something else… This boy needs to be investigated. What you’ve told me about him is vague, totally inadequate. Yes, of course, you gave him your trust. You think that he alone can be his own guarantee. But, in the end, in the ins and outs of a man, there is a presumption. Orphan?”

Myriam looked at her father with utter contempt. This revolted her.

“Anyway, I don’t think I’m that weighed down by prejudice. I’d just like to know where this man comes from. It’s incredible that he won’t tell you anything about his family. It should be a natural response to your curiosity and mine.”

Myriam glared with proud defiance at her father. The silence he reproached Gilles for seemed to her his most precious and captivating feature. She took great pleasure in making him dance around the point; finally she said, in a tone that sought to conceal malice:

“Put it to rest, he explained everything to me.”

She told her father what Gilles had told her about his birth.

Mr Falkenberg repeated the name Carentan and asked where he lived. Now, Gilles, out of disdain for self-indulgent details, had never given Myriam a place name, and he knew, moreover, that like most women, she was ignorant of geography. Mr Falkenberg raised an eyebrow and she shrugged.

Suddenly, he became exasperated and threw back at her what he thought he had suppressed for good since the start of the conversation.

“Enough, this boy doesn’t have a penny, and you’ll soon be rich… besides your two brothers, I let them die and that I…”

If it had still been necessary, Mr Falkenberg would have sealed his daughter’s fate with this word. From now on, Myriam’s pride would always refuse to believe in Gilles’ greed. He sensed this and laughed lightly: other people’s desire to live seemed to him to be a mortal foolishness. Seeing things from the point of view of the will, this last concession he would make to the absurdity of the world, he said again, but quite mechanically:

“Fine. Get married under the regime of separation of property. In any case, that won’t stop him from ruining you, if he feels like it.”

If Myriam was sad afterwards, it was because of the humiliating pity that this poor wickednesses had wrung from her. However, her idea of Gilles’ feelings towards her had changed. Long afterwards, she had felt the after-effects of the affair with Mabel, without knowing anything about it. Gilles’ repeated absences had forced her to take account of his moral absence. “For him, the world is bigger than I am. How could I hope to be the whole universe in his eyes?”

If she had been Gilles’ mistress, she would have unashamedly claimed to be the whole universe to him. But in the state of restriction in which he kept her, she would have sincerely rebelled against anyone who pointed out to her the secret misery masked by modesty and resignation. She had gone completely astray. She was becoming more deaf to the cry of her heart at the very moment when that cry was rising louder. The more insensitive Gilles became, the more she became absorbed in him. She became mystical. The idea of sacrifice gradually replaced the idea of giving. Women are all sensuality, but sensuality is an instinct, and nothing is more easily misled than an instinct. Look at wild animals; they easily fall into a pit barely covered by a light covering of branches.