Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate Andr Gides Lafcadios Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime.When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that hes heir to an ailing French noblemans fortune, hes seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadioone of the most original creations in all modern fictiongoes free.