14 Word missing. (Gide’s note.)
15 The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a romantic adaptation of an old Christian legend, pictures the hermit in the desert, tempted by sensual pleasures and secret intellectual delights but victorious in his struggle to remain virtuous.
16 Gide wrote that Schopenhauer was responsible for his alternating periods of anguish and ecstasy, for his awareness of a second reality behind the visible one, and for his passion for poetry and music.
17 Pierre Louis warned Gide against undertaking an autobiographical work at the age of twenty and cited Goethe’s regret over the shortcomings of Werther as proof that such an undertaking should come toward middle age. Ironically, structural integrity and variety of detail, the two elements advocated by Louis, are missing from the Notebooks.
18 This passage invites comparison of André Walter and his feminine counterpart, Alissa, in Strait Is the Gate (1909). She epitomizes the same ideal and mystical love. Afraid of physical love, she longs for an impossible happiness, for perfect Love, for God.
19 Emmanuèle is the fictional name of Madeleine Rondeaux, who appears under a different name in many other works. Significant details of her life before and after she became Mme. André Gide have been related in subsequent works, notably If It Die, Strait Is the Gate and Et nunc manet in te (1951). These include the infidelity and divorce of her mother, the death of her father, and her unconsummated marriage together with the suffering, privation and shame which she endured for her husband’s sake. In Gide’s imagination Emmanuèle was transformed, idealized, ennobled, imbued with the very qualities he would like to have attributed to himself.
20 The choice of Brittany as the setting may have resulted from Gide’s admiration for Flaubert. The interplay of setting, race, and religion may reflect the thinking of Hippolyte Taine, whose works were of especial interest to him during the period of the composition of the Notebooks. An interesting parallel between the two Andrés can be established on the basis of Taine’s three great factors (Race, Environment and Epoch): Walter’s Breton mother was a Catholic, his Saxon father a Protestant; Gide’s Norman mother came from a Catholic family, and his Protestant father traced his ancestry to Languedoc; both were the product of two bloodstreams, two regions and two faiths; the anguish of both was caused by the interplay of Taine’s three factors.
21 Lucie was an older sister whom André Walter had lost in 1885. (Gide’s note.)
22 The influence of the older sister illustrates Gide’s technique of abstracting and reinterpreting reality in terms of his own psychology. It has been suggested that the older sister is identified with Gide’s mother — the symbol of purity and the one who keeps Emmanuèle (Madeleine) and André physically apart even as she makes possible their mystical union.
23 This passage recalls the Tristan legend as well as earlier and later writings that stress gratification through deniaclass="underline" the Orphic cult and Platonism, the troubadours and the chivalric tradition, Dante, German Romanticism.
24 The notion of the role of the poet in bringing out the truth hidden behind the appearance of things, though probably suggested by Schopenhauer, was nurtured by the Symbolists. Gide defended the doctrine of the Symbolists in his second work, Narcissus (1892).
25 Pages rediscovered (note by André W.). (Gide’s note.)
26 The allusion to the courtesan probably has no parallel in the life of the author. We learn from his journals, however, that he began at an early age to practice the solitary vice that caused him to be expelled from school, to incur his mother’s disapproval, and subsequently perhaps to associate sin with sex.
27 It is possible that this is the first allusion in any of Gide’s writings to his sexual aberrance.
28 From earliest childhood the author evidenced a vivid imagination and a preference for dreams in contrast to reality. His answer to a question put to him in his old age might be cited to support theories he first formulated on the basis of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Idea. When asked whether Madeleine was the model for Alissa, he replied, “She became Alissa.”
29 Noteworthy here is the characteristic link between sex and sin, attraction and repulsion with respect to the same object, and the practice of employing external surroundings as memory aids.
30 His Journals reveal that Gide’s virtuous resolutions were made repeatedly only to be broken whenever his demons overpowered him. The Notebooks represent his first attempt to escape through his art from the clutches of his demons.
31 Parts of the Notebooks were written while the author was in seclusion near the Grande Chartreuse. He viewed the monastery, considered visiting it as a tourist, decided against the visit.
32 Gide seems here to anticipate his own paradoxical development, which prevented the consummation of his marriage even while permitting him to father an illegitimate daughter.
33 Frequently in Gide’s writings we find an allusion to his concern for Madeleine, dating back presumably to his discovery of her mother’s infidelity and his intense longing at that time to protect her against the harshness of a counterfeit world.
34 These same notions form the substructure of The Immoralist (1902).
35 Ribot.
36 The conflicts between faith and reason, appearance and reality, carnal passion and ideal love are familiar antinomies that motivate much of Gide’s art.
37 The notion that in Madeleine he had found a kindred soul (an Echo for his Narcissus), persisted for years in Gide’s imagination despite indications to the contrary on her part
38 Gide’s fraternal relation with his cousin Madeleine probably began at an early age. He was present at her father’s funeral in 1890, just as she had been present at the funeral of his father ten years earlier.
39 Frequently and for many years Madeleine’s actions apparently belied Gide’s hopes.
40 Madeleine, though frightened and insecure because of her childhood experiences, was older than Gide and had enough common sense to refrain from marrying him until after his mother’s death. It is doubtful that the two ever fully understood each other.
41 Pierre Louis praised Gide for his choice of quotations, particularly this one from Baudelaire (and gave rise to the suspicion that he considered the quotations superior to the text).
42 Paul Claudel once rebuked Gide for his fascination with mirrors. Gide completed his first book and simultaneously practiced the art of self-scrutiny by setting down his thoughts as he stood before a secretary equipped with a mirror.
43 This section seems to recapitulate Gide’s adolescence and to anticipate his predicament after he had realized the full consequences of the complete separation of (carnal) pleasure and (ideal) love. His reaction to statues is recorded in his Journals, and his sensuousness and sensitivity to physical contact endured a lifetime and caused him alternately to tend toward renunciation and affirmation of the desire “to remain carnal unto death.”
44 Gide was convinced that he had something to say to his generation, that his problem of formulating an austere ideal to free him from temptations of the flesh and protect him from anguish was a familiar problem, and that his time was limited. Though he had long nurtured the project, he was not able to begin writing systematically until the spring of 1890, when he, aged twenty, broke away from his mother for the first time and secluded himself at Menthon, near Grenoble. He felt that before the age of twenty-one he had to finish the work — and he did.