You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The act is consummated almost haphazardly. It illustrates more dramatically than any other episode … the temperament of Lafcadio, freed from the conventional laws of behavior. Whether the act was totally gratuitous is impossible to ascertain.7
With these words, Wallace Fowlie dismisses the murder of Amédée Fleurissoire as the perfect example of André Gide's fascination with the acte gratuit. He thus forecloses exploration of the act itself and of Lafcadio's prior and subsequent life in order to discern among the myriad of events those which might offer clues to Lafcadio's motivation. One readily understands Fowlie's reluctance to explore, for how can anyone make sense of Lafcadio, determine his purposes and his goals? Ostensibly, to answer this is difficult, perhaps impossible, for he appears to have no purposes, no goal whatsoever, except that of immediate gratification. He is a consummate adventurer, seemingly equally content whether in Paris or in Rome, whether rich or poor, whether his mistress is the cast-off prostitute Carola or his own niece Genevieve, whether he has just purchased a new wardrobe or brutally slaughtered an innocent traveler. As Cordle pithily states it: “He is, in short, the image of a perfect human freedom, aimless, careless, and unaccountable.”3a
But Cordle, like Fowlie, is mistaken in believing that Lafcadio is free from the conventional laws of behavior. Indeed, it is precisely because he is bound by these laws that we can penetrate to the core of this ostensibly diffuse novel in which characters keep meeting each other at various crossroads in both probable and improbable ways. His goals, his purposes, his motivations for the murder yield