When Jacques de Lacretelle died in 1985 at the age of ninety-six the daily Figaro called him the last French moralist. It would have been more correct to say that he was the last traditional novelist. Between the two world wars he was acclaimed as one of France's leading novelists and achieved membership in the venerable Académie Française at the early age of forty-eight. His traditionalism accounted for his initial successes in a period when French literature was still trying to return to its past, in spite of the dadaists and surrealists, but it inevitably doomed him to oblivion after World War II when the traditional values of French classicism succumbed first to existentialism and then to the New Novel.

A friend and admirer of Proust and Gide, Lacretelle took little more from them than the first-person narrative, hardly a new invention since it bore...