It is strange to think that The Vatican Cellars was written by the same author as Strait Is the Gate and The Immoralist. In those two archly serious books, where nothing much but thought takes place, characters have a tendency to pass away overnight as a result of too much or too little faith. In The Vatican Cellars, newly translated to mark the centenary of its publication, Gide loosens up, directing his pen not at God but at the institutions that claim to represent and serve Him. Told by a mysteriously omniscient first-person narrator, the novel kicks into gear when a group of fraudsters convince several members of the French upper class that Pope Leo XIII has been imprisoned by Freemasons in the Vatican cellars and replaced by a false pope. The naive Fleurissoire attempts to pay the ransom and save the True Pope. What follows is an expertly constructed network of coincidence and error, shot through with a level of dramatic irony not present in the work for which Gide is most renowned.
