ABSTRACT
In Les Caves du Vatican Gide has his novelist-character Julius de Baraglioul theorize on the motiveless crime he intends to base a novel on; meanwhile another character, Lafcadio, commits what might pass for a gratuitous action: on a whim, he pushes out of a moving train an elderly fellow-passenger with whom, it later transpires, he is connected by circumstance and indirect family links. For Gide, a free act, whether a crime or not, is an act accomplished in such a way that other men do not see why a particular man should have committed it and consequently do not assert him to be its author. There is no gratuitous act, no free act, no inconsistent act, no detachable act - this is the very postulate of science. Everything which concerns Lafcadio's profoundest self is here expressed in order to bring the gratuitousness of the act into play.
