When Britain’s Eighth Army entered Tunis in May 1943, a gaunt, saturnine figure, who looked like an unshaved cardinal, popped out of a hideout in the Italian quarter. He was France’s most discussed, ...

WHO WAS THE GREATEST FRENCH POET of the nineteenth century? André Gide’s immortal comment—”Victor Hugo, alas!”—is as true today as it was when Gide wrote it in a letter to Paul Valéry almost a century ...

THE JOURNALS OF ANDRÉE GIDE VOL. II, 1914-1927 (462 pp.)—Translated and annotated by Justin O’Brien—Knopf ($6). One day in 1881 a Paris schoolboy “fell convulsively sobbing into mamma’s arms” and ...