For those who may have forgotten the Latin of their schooldays, I should note that the name of the principal character, and hence the title of the book, is borrowed from the Second Eclogue of Virgil, “Alexis,” from which, and for the same reasons, Gide took the Corydon of his controversial essay. In addition, the subtitle, The Treatise of Vain Struggle, echoes The Treatise of Vain Desire, that rather pallid work of Andre Gide’s youth. Despite this allusion, there was not much influence of Gide on Alexis: the quasi-Protestant atmosphere and the attempt to reexamine a sexual problem both come from elsewhere. What, on the contrary, I find once again on more than one page (perhaps excessively so) is the influence of the profound, moving work of Rilke, which a happy chance brought to my attention early on. In general, we tend to forget too easily the existence of a sort of “law of delayed diffusion,” which explains why educated young people around 1860 read Chateaubriand rather than Baudelaire and those at the end of the century Musset rather than Rimbaud. Although I don’t consider myself in any way typical, I myself passed the years of my youth in a relative indifference to contemporary literature, partly as the result of my study of the past (and thus a work on Pindar, really quite clumsy, precedes this book on Alexis in what might be called my oeuvre), partly as the result of an instinctive distaste for what one might call modish values. Most of the great books of Gide in which my subject had at last been discussed openly were as yet known to me only by hearsay; their effect on Alexis is much less the result of their contents than of the fuss made about them, of the sort of public discussion which focused on a problem up to then examined only behind closed doors, and which certainly made it easier for me to approach the same theme without excessive hesitation. It was above all from the point of view of form that my reading of Gide’s early books was valuable to me, demonstrating as they do that it was still possible to employ the purely classical form of the novella, which otherwise would probably have seemed both precious and outmoded to me, and preventing me from falling into the trap of a real novel, the composition of which demands of its author a variety of human and literary experience which I did not at that time possess. All this is certainly not intended to reduce the importance of the work of a great author who was also a great moralist, even less to separate Alexis, written in isolation from the fashion by a twenty-four-year-old young woman, from other contemporary works with more or less similar intentions; on the contrary, it is intended to lend them the support of a spontaneous confession and an authentic testimony. Certain subjects are in the air at certain moments; they are also in the fabric of a life.