Lafcadio's Adventures: a Novel Reprint edition

Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate André Gide?s Lafcadio?s Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime.

When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he?s heir to an ailing French nobleman?s fortune, he?s seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio?one of the most original creations in all modern fiction?goes free.