Could the Pope have been secretly abducted?When nineteen-year-old Lafcadio Wluiki learns he is to inherit a French aristocrat's fortune, he heads to Rome, where a plot is afoot: ingenious fraudsters have set about convincing their wealthy victims that the pontiff has been imprisoned by freemasons at Castel Sant'Angelo.Saving toddlers from burning buildings one minute and committing a shocking, motiveless crime the next, the amoral Lafcadio is one of Nobel-winner André Gide's most original creations, and a model for later fictional anti-heroes such as Sartre's Meursault and Highsmith's Ripley. A send-up of conventional morality, The Vatican Cellars also carries an enduring warning about how easily we are duped by charming rogues.

Could the Pope have been secretly abducted?When nineteen-year-old Lafcadio Wluiki learns he is to inherit a French aristocrat's fortune, he heads to Rome, where a plot is afoot: ingenious fraudsters have set about convincing their wealthy victims that the pontiff has been imprisoned by freemasons at Castel Sant'Angelo.Saving toddlers from burning buildings one minute and committing a shocking, motiveless crime the next, the amoral Lafcadio is one of Nobel-winner André Gide's most original creations, and a model for later fictional anti-heroes such as Sartre's Meursault and Highsmith's Ripley. A send-up of conventional morality, The Vatican Cellars also carries an enduring warning about how easily we are duped by charming rogues.