ABSTRACT
Between the lines of Gide’s second essay on “Nationalism and Literature” can be read the implication that he was as much interested as Dostoevsky or Baudelaire in the chartless underground of human psychology. And this explains his curiosity for the criminal, the vagabond, the outcast, for whom he had a fellow-feeling as if studying in them what in other circumstances he might have become himself. His Journals show that everywhere he went he seemed to attract such individuals, some of whom even found their way into his books in the guise of Protos and Strouvilhou.
