Which French author wrote `The Vatican Cellars'?

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 – 1951) was a French author and winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. His career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. Gide wrote more than fifty books and at the time of his death his obituary in The New York Times described him as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposed to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively), which a strict and moralistic education had helped set at odds. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, but without betraying one's values.

`The Vatican Cellars' was published in 1914 and is set in the late 19th century, chiefly in Paris and Rome. This strange drama involves the alleged abduction of the Pope, a 'miraculous' conversion, swindling, adultery, bastardy, and murder. The characters are a motley crew of noblemen, saints, adventurers, and pickpockets.