Lafcadio's Adventures

When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he's an heir to an ailing French nobleman's fortune, he's seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in slick new duds, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, 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 Lafcadio goes free.