Novel
The Counterfeiters
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
André Gide · 1925
Opening lines
— C’est le moment de croire que j’entends des pas dans le corridor, se dit Bernard.
“This is the moment to believe I hear footsteps in the corridor,” Bernard said to himself.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from fr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Bernard Profitendieu learns that he is not the son of the man he took for his father, and leaves home. He meets up with his schoolmate Olivier Molinier, whose uncle Édouard, a novelist, keeps a journal and is preparing a book entitled Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Around them, in a boarding house for schoolboys, a counterfeit-money racket is organised, in which Georges, Olivier's younger brother, is involved; several families cross paths there, each of whom lives more or less in falsehood.
Context
The author dedicated it to Roger Martin du Gard as his “first novel”, though until then he had refused that name to his books. Extracts appeared in the NRF review in 1925, and the novelist Édouard writes a book of the same title in it, a mise en abyme construction that has become a landmark. The suicide of a schoolboy in Clermont-Ferrand, in 1909, supplied one of the episodes. The volume bears the date 1925; a specialist bookseller states that it was not put on sale until February 1926.
Who it is for
Four hundred pages, about thirty characters and several plots that cross. Reading it demands attention, not erudition.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's masterpiece, the novel appeared in English as early as 1927 under the title The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy Bussy.
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