
Michel and Ménalque become friends at this time, when Ménalque is able to understand Michel's lectures. He devotes his time to creating lectures, which ultimately prove controversial.

Michel is immediately bored by and irritated with Parisian high society. Soon after Michel and his wife, who is now pregnant, move back to Paris. As time passes, Bocage tells Michel that Charles will be returning to Alençon. Although initially uninterested, Michel takes great interest in Charles' company and gentle nature.

Shortly after the couple arrive, Bocage, the properties caretaker, shows Michel his property and mentions that his son Charles will soon return from an experimental farm in Alençon. The couple return to La Morinière, an estate owned by Michel. The trip concludes after the couple travel through Italy. While traveling between, Tunis, Malta, and Syracuse, Michel realizes that he has changed. He slowly recovers and the couple leave North Africa through Tunis. Michel slowly recovers under his wife's constant care and with a new found zeal for life after interacting with some of the local children. Marceline takes him to Biskra, Algeria, where he may recover. His illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis and it was unlikely he would survive. Shortly after leaving El Djem, Michel becomes very ill. Michel is disappointed by the first ruins he sees in El Djem. Shortly after wedding Marceline, Michel and his wife go on their honeymoon to Tunis. To please his father, Michel hastily married Marceline. At the age of twenty-five, Michel's father was on his deathbed. The essay was published under his father's name and gained praise. He entered academia around this time, when he wrote the "Essay on Phrygian Religious Customs". By the age of twenty he was fluent in French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. He applied the austerity his upbringing had produced in him to his studies. Although she had raised him with strict Huguenot values, he did not observe these values later in his life. Michel was raised by both his mother and father until his mother's death, when he was fifteen. Through his journey, Michel finds a kindred spirit in the rebellious Ménalque. Important points of Michel's story are his recovery from tuberculosis his attraction to a series of Algerian boys and to his estate caretaker's son and the evolution of a new perspective on life and society.


R., Président du Conseil, a transcript of Michel's first-person account. One of those friends solicits job search assistance for Michel by including in a letter to Monsieur D. The Immoralist is a recollection of events that Michel narrates to his three visiting friends. The Immoralist ( French: L'Immoraliste) is a novel by André Gide, published in France in 1902.
