Madeleine Author:Andre Gide The story of a great writer's marriage, a deeply disturbing account of Gide's feelings toward his beloved and long-suffering wife. It was a relationship which Gide exalted -- he termed it the central drama of his existence -- yet deliberately shrouded in mystery. — This was no ordinary marriage. Madeleine Rondeaux, two years older than he... more »r cousin Andre Gide, became his wife after Gide's first visit to Algeria. In his journal, Gide refers to her as Emmanuele or as Em. Only in this book, written after her death and published a few months after his own death, does Gide call her by her real name and painfully reveal the nature of their life together. In French, the book was published as Et Nunc Manet in Te -- from the line attributed to Virgil concerning the lost Eurydice, "and now she remains in you."
All of Gide's vast work may be viewed as a confession, impelled by his need to write what he believed to be true about himself. In Madeleine this act of confession reaches a crowning point. It is a complex tale by a complex man about a complex relationship.« less