Release date is 2025-11-22

Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

"La gangue" by Paul Brulat is a novel written in the early 20th century. It appears to be a psychological and moral study of beauty, ugliness, and compassion, centered on a disfigured man whose inner nobility struggles against society’s cruelty. Through a first-person narrator, it probes how pity, desire, and secrecy shape relationships, especially with a woman, Madame Derive, who seems to love beyond appearances.

The beginning of the novel follows a narrator who, after encountering a hideously scarred man at a spa town, is struck by the contrast between the man’s frightful face and his luminous, sorrowful eyes. He witnesses the harsh recoil of others, glimpses the man’s private tears, and later shares a silent train ride to Paris with him. In Paris, the narrator sees the man mocked by streetwalkers, then, surprisingly, walking tenderly with a still-beautiful woman who kisses his hands—an enigma that haunts the narrator. Back in the city, he meets this woman, Madame Derive, learns she is ill, and notices a mysterious visitor who slips into her building at night when her lamp is lit. Called to her bedside, he watches her die as the nocturnal visitor knocks and is not admitted, then observes the man hovering in anguish at her funeral, apart from the mourners. Afterward, the narrator befriends him—René Grandon—discovers a photograph of him as a strikingly handsome child, and hears that a terrible burn disfigured him before he begins to relate his life story. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Paris: Albin Michel, 1903