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.

Gilles’ treatment was coming to an end and he had to decide. Was he going to let himself be sent back to his regimental depot, and then to the front? He still had a slight infirmity in his arm which, thanks to Myriam’s contacts, could easily be exploited and could earn him, if not a temporary discharge, at least a transfer to the auxiliary service. To Myriam’s great surprise and delight, he quickly decided on the latter arrangement, without debate.

The possibility of marriage opened up such prospects in life that it became as or more attractive than death. Since 1914, he had pulsated between heaven and earth, in a constant tension between life and death. Now he was reclaimed by life. Was it social life, whose powerful mirage masks the ultimate horizons of nature and death? No, this ambitious man was not ambitious to the ordinary objects of ambition. He saw money only as a means of rendering these objects useless.

He knew that in Myriam’s eyes, the money she was bringing him meant that he could work as he pleased. She didn’t know what that work would be. Did he know? If he gave himself over to his natural inclination, he didn’t imagine acts or works that could be restrained by success; he felt in himself an infinite inclination towards immobility, contemplation and silence. He often stopped in the middle of a street or a room to listen. Listen to what? To everything. He felt like a light, stealthy, solitary hermit, walking with invisible steps through the forest and suspending himself to take in all the sounds, all the mysteries, all the accomplishments. He wished to wander for years in cities and forests, to be nowhere and everywhere. The dreamer has a divine taste for omnipresence.

Could it be called work? Certainly not, in the ordinary language of men. They want achievements that can be grasped in the hands.

He had always loved to read, but was now rejecting it like a drug that absorbs all the charms of life. In any case, it had been a preperation that had prepared him for intimate, original works and experiments. Sometimes he would return to this preliminary study; in the middle of a bar he would take a book out of his pocket. He didn’t ignore the fact that he was trying to find his way through the chaos of trial and error. When he had started writing in hospital, he had been surprised. He had been tempted to regard this fortuitous gesture as a culmination, an achievement. But he shook his head sceptically. When, after a while, he reread what he had written, he had not found that essential tension that makes poetry; the only true literature. That’s why he had frowned when Myriam had said to him: “You’ll write”. No, for lack of genius, he would keep silent and content himself with contemplation, meditation. This would make a luminous prayer that would capture more than the chatter of talent and would be a surer accompaniment to the rare voices of those who have the right to speak. He would listen and look at people. He was their most actual and most in-the-moment witness, the most present and the most absent. He would watch them live with an acute eye in their slightest quiverings of yesteryear and tomorrow, and suddenly he would take a step back and see them only as a great single mass, as a great single being in the universe who passed through the seasons, grew, aged, died, was reborn to live again a little less young. He sensed with anguish, and took pleasure in the anguish, the human adventure as a mortal adventure… unless it renounces itself, disincarnates and, confessing its exhaustion, rejects itself in God.

For a few moments during the war, he had felt alive, no longer like a plant or an animal that grows and then declines with ravishing inflections, but like a spiritual quiver ready to detach itself, motionless, mysterious and therefor unspeakable. It was in these moments, when he was closest to death, that he secretly felt the most alive. Beyond the agony, an intimate life was calling him. In the trenches, he had had hours of ecstasy; it had taken the most terrible convulsions to wake him up. During his first periods of leave, he had had no desire for women or for Paris. As if in a daze, at his guardian’s house in Normandy, he would look out at the sea or walk endlessly in the village church, glancing from time to time at the Virgin, Mother of God, at the God who became man to take man by the hand and lead him into the depths of hell. He felt drawn into the divine cycle of creation and redemption. This was his most exquisite beatitude in the trenches: the imperceptible sigh of the eternal within being.

But now he was taken back by the seductive belly-dance of carnal life. He had seen the Louvre again, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées, Versailles. He glimpsed the treasures of plasticity that lie in a woman’s womb, the heartbreaking games of politics, thousands and thousands of things. Thousands. I will live a thousand minutes, I will breathe this clump of flowers in my hand.

Myriam appreciated this rare disposition in the young man. A modest, inward-looking person herself, with a taste for work for work’s sake, she could understand why Gilles, a flâneur, absent-minded, diverse, would go to the least expected places like bars or music-hall promenades with a contemplation worthy of laboratories. However, she was a woman and she anticipated the fruits of this elaboration. She counted on Gilles writing books; she gloried in this accomplishment. Her father’s gaze also urged her to think about results.

“It’s annoying. Dad’s always asking me what you’re going to do with your life. I tell him that you’ve got time and that he just has to rely on my confidence in you. But it’s hard for him to understand; at your age, he was just out of Polytechnique.”

Gilles also resented, even more than Myriam, the regard of Mr Falkenberg; he came to suspect himself. Was he a parasite? After all, he was sensitive to other people’s work. In the end, don’t you have to rely on works of art to carry your reverie further, in case it turns in on itself and becomes empty and nothing? Yet he did not want to lose himself in nothingness. You can’t absolutely refrain from giving proof, from committing yourself, from compromising. To live is first and foremost to commit oneself.

She risked a few questions.

“What were you planning before the war?”

“I didn’t care. No, something like this: I wanted to be a consul or an archaeologist somewhere in Asia.”

In the meantime, he had to find a position in the auxiliary that would keep him in Paris and give him time off. To do this, he had to contact the Morels.

Myriam often talked about the Morels. And that was one of her privileges. The Falkenbergs shared in the power of the Morels. Mr Morel was then Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet of National Defence. A former socialist, he was one of Clemenceau’s strongest supporters. He was a close friend of Mr Falkenberg, and he and his wife showed the father and daughter the most affectionate solicitude. Mr Falkenberg had always been a vigilant adviser to Mr Morel, and not only in financial matters.

“I’m going to introduce you to Marcelle Morel.”

They both disembarked in front of one of those ministries set up in the old hotels on the Left Bank. He noted that he looked like a filthy little knave who comes to solicit some con or government position. He summoned up all his lucidity to suppress his embarrassment and revolt. In any case, he had to depend on someone. Rather this intelligent, sensitive girl than some arrogant, humiliating protector. No one can make a life for themselves on their own; at one time or another, the most purely ambitious person is at the mercy of someone who is bound to take advantage of them. Letting himself be led into this ministry by a delicate hand, he would take the back door to escape the dirty touch of intermediaries. In an age of saturated civilisation, there are many people who pretend to keep the fraudulent illusion of their egotism as white as an ermine, because it is subtle. But ermine are only white in fairy tales.

The réactionnaire education he had received from his tutor and his teachers at school meant that he entered this ministry with a feeling of contempt and irony. Everyone he met, from the bailiff to Madame Morel, was a usurper. The democratic world was a world of usurpation. The usher was a small usurper who, like all usurpers, was imbued with anointment, completely wrapped up in the sanctity of the place he had taken; yet with a hint of joviality and redness in his nose. They walked through the old regime, with its tapestries, armchairs and carpets everywhere. Democracy was left sitting its ass forever on the Gobelins. Gilles looked out of the corner of his eye at Myriam, who was triumphant. The Jews come forward, mingling with the ranks of democracy. They are rarely shocked by such a triumph; or that doesn’t stop them from enjoying it, quite the contrary.

“Anyways, where did the usurpation begin?” Gilles asked himself. “Nowhere. Hugues Capet himself… It’s still no less amusing to see, from one epoque to another, the usurpers emerge.”

Gilles remembered in time that he was for usurpers, all of them, whoever they were. Colbert undoubtedly had more substance than Mr Morel, but Mr Morel, a small bourgeois who had disguised himself as a man of the left in his youth, had the merit of putting something into an empty chair, a chair left empty by all those arrogant, polite and sterile grande-bourgeois whose sons Gilles had known well at school. Someone had to give orders to the crowd, who would be waiting for them forever.

When Mrs Morel entered, Gilles became even more complacent. We don’t look at history enough from the woman’s point of view. Women shape everything. Gilles immediately saw the history of the Third Republic through the eyes of Mrs Morel. Mrs Morel was beautiful. She even had grace and kindness. Gilles definitively rejected his reactionary irony about usurpations. The Republic concealed treasures of kindness.

Gilles thought he saw that the smile on the ministress’ face was sympathetic, but at the same time disillusioned. He was enchanted by this supposition. He lent her a conniving soul. Wasn’t he a prisoner of Myriam, poorly dressed, just as this beautiful woman was a prisoner of Mr Morel, who had an ill-trimmed beard, according to the photographs? Her nonchalance pleased him with Mrs Morel’s supposed admission that lies are the only means to survive within certain circles, that as much is lost as is gained.

“Is she cheating on him?” he asked himself, with curiosity that was anxious, and then, completely disinterested.

This curiosity would return to him later. As with the beautiful Mrs Morel, on the rare occasions when he met a distinguished person, he would only admit her to play the shady game of society on condition that she cheated.

However, while he was lending the romantic effects of lying to this lady, who was in fact more annoyed than sad, he did not think of lying to her, and, looking her in the eyes, he tacitly admitted that he did not love Myriam. This admission shocked the ministress. Gilles was very disappointed. “Does she see that her duty to herself includes at least abandoning herself to a lover two or three times a week?” He feared that life had not taught Mrs Morel enough about this; he had already noticed that human beings are averse to joy unless they are forced into it.

Nevertheless, the meeting followed its honourable course. The beautiful lady brought a tired but exact gentleness to the perpetual diplomacy of her days. She asked Gilles a few questions and saw immediately that they were useless. She said to herself: “He’s a scatterbrain. With such an impulsive and naive nature, he’ll torture and then soon let go of poor Myriam. I’m more charitable with Mr Morel.”

Mrs Morel did all she could to help Myriam to leave him. A few days later, Gilles was transferred to the auxiliary service, then posted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an additional editor for the duration of the war.

He wrote his benefactress a letter of too ardent thanks, which she hardly distinguished from the flat statements to which she was still accustomed.

Gilles found himself installed on the banks of the Seine, in a small office in the attic. He had been very well received, with a great deal of curiosity and complicity, for it was known that he was protected by Morel and doubtless by Berthelot, whom had been introduced to him and had found him to his liking. People in the quarry immediately placed him in the category of Berthelot’s protégés who owed their good fortune to scandalously whimsical qualities.

Gilles’ immediate boss was Mr de Guingolph. He was a very long, very thin man, with a pale, exhausted face. He was dressed with an old-fashioned elegance that had more to do with avarice than poverty. The timid cynicism of his smile and the anxious questioning in his eyes soon told Gilles all about the man and the reasons for his relentless affability.

The job they gave him did not hold his interest: it was to keep up to date the correspondence with the South American consuls. These consuls didn’t do much, which was all that was asked of them.