ABSTRACT
Andre Gide was born on 29 November 1869, of a father whose origins linked him to the traditionally protestant south of France, and a mother descended from a Norman family which though staunchly Protestant at the time of the author's birth, had been Catholic in earlier generations. His father died in 1880, a month before the boy's eleventh birthday, and Andre's mother, for all her inward insecurity and the great affection she bore her only child, adopted a rigorously puritanical and authoritarian approach to rearing him. As an infant he had become an object of scandal and had been withdrawn from regular schooling following an incident involving so-called mauvaiseshabitudes; throughout his youth he was haunted by guilt concerning masturbation and associated sexual phantasms. He was to devote most of the next three years to travel, spending three extended spells in Algeria.
