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INTRODUCTION 1. While Gide himself initiated much of this vast program of “spin control,” friends like the astute and cautious Roger Martin du Gard also encouraged judicious editing and placement of the wartime writings. 2. “[U]n itinéraire intellectuel [. . .] marquant, au sortir d’une ombre épaisse, les étapes d’un lent acheminement vers la lumière” (J II: 1104). 3. To be sure, Gide was not the only Frenchman to alter his political views with the changing events of the war, nor was he the only writer to publish in periodicals with varying political tendencies. Sartre, for example, contributed to both the collaborationist arts weekly Comoedia and the clandestine newspaper Combat during the course of the Occupation. Yet Gide makes a particularly illuminating object of study because his wartime publications cover a very wide political range—in terms of both content and organ of publication—and because he made a methodical effort to reinvent himself during the course of the war. 4. “Je souhaite la victoire de l’Allemagne” (qtd. in Ferro 187). 5. Jeannine Verdès-Leroux has demonstrated the extent to which Gide’s wartime opinions made him “an ‘ordinary’ citizen” (“un citoyen ‘ordinaire’”) (273). The only divergence from the mainstream of public opinion comes in the early glimmers of dissidence that Gide showed by late 1941—somewhat ahead of the curve. But then, Gide was probably better informed than the average Frenchman: his admirers and well-connected friends provided him with all sorts of contraband, from rationed tobacco to clandestine newspapers (J II: 1427; CAG 6: 281). 6. Gide’s father Paul Gide was a professor of law and his uncle Charles was a noted economist. 7. Maria Van Rysselberghe, known affectionately as “la petite dame,” occupied the apartment adjoining Gide’s at 1 bis, rue Vaneau in Paris and chronicled Gide’s activities in great detail from 1918 until his death in 1951. 8. See Maaike Koffeman, “André Gide et l’évolution de la première NRF, ou la stratégie des satellites.” 161 Notes 9. Gay writers of Gide’s acquaintance included his N.R.F. associates Henri Ghéon and Jean Schlumberger, Jean Cocteau (his rival for the affections of teenaged Marc Allégret), Marcel Jouhandeau, Henry de Montherlant, and the two writers now recognized as the gay icons of the period, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. 10. It was Montherlant who initiated the gender-switching code in his correspondence with diplomat and writer Roger Peyrefitte, who shared his taste for prepubescent boys (Krauss 153). 11. “[T]ransposer ‘à l’ombre des jeunes filles’ tout ce que ses souvenirs homosexuels lui proposaient de gracieux, de tendre et de charmant, de sorte qu’il ne lui reste plus pour Sodome que du grotesque et de l’abject” (J II: 1126). 12. “[L]es homosexuels normaux” (Gide, Corydon [Fr.] 123). 13. “Quant aux invertis [. . .] il m’a toujours paru qu’eux seuls méritaient ce reproche de déformation morale ou intellectuelle et tombaient sous le coup de certaines des accusations que l’on adresse communément à tous les homosexuels” (J I: 1092). 14. Gide thought that a young boy would benefit more from a man’s love than from a woman’s (Corydon [Fr.] 127). In privileging homosexual over heterosexual relationships , he differed from his contemporary and fellow pederast Henry de Montherlant , who rationalized that pederasty was not really homosexuality: “pederasty [. . .] is sensual love for children and adolescents (until they have their first beard [. . .]), that is to say, love of the femininity that is in them, that is to say that [pederasty] is heterosexuality with a very slight difference” (“La pédérastie [. . .] est l’amour sensuel pour les enfants et adolescents (jusqu’à leur première barbe [. . .]), c’est-à-dire l’amour de la féminité qu’il y a en eux, c’est-à-dire qu’elle est l’hétérosexualité à la petite différence près”) (qtd. in Sipriot 19). 15. Segal explains that Gide’s theory of pederasty was not identical to the classical norm: “Corydon is dedicated to trying to create a new norm by means of the old genre of the Socratic dialogue” (22). 16. “[L]’interprète-procureur”; “choisie et sacrifiée”; “la prétendue impudeur des Noirs, [. . .] le cynisme des Blancs”; “l’avantage des goûts homosexuels qui du moins n’entraînent jamais ces détresses et ces involontaires cruautés” (SV 1253). 17. Voyage au Congo retains the narrative of Marc Allégret’s sexual tourism...

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