The Thibaults

The Thibaults (Les Thibault in French) is a multi-volume roman fleuve by Roger Martin du Gard, which follows the fortunes of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of the First World War. The author was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature largely on the basis of this novel sequence.

1. Le cahier gris ("The Grey Notebook") opens in Paris around 1904. School officials have discovered a notebook containing messages between Jacques Thibault and a Protestant fellow schoolboy, Daniel de Fontanin. The notebooks give evidence of a passionate, but not evidently sexual, relationship between the two. Expecting that the notebook will be misinterpreted, the two run away to Marseille, intending to travel to North Africa by ship. Jacques's father Oscar Thibault, a stern Catholic grand bourgeois, dispatches his older son, Antoine, a medical student, to retrieve his younger brother. In Marseille and unable to find a ship that will accept them, Jacques and Daniel are separated. Daniel is taken in by an older woman, who seduces him. In Paris, Daniel's younger sister Jenny is seriously ill and his mother learns that her husband Jérôme's infidelities have included an affair with her cousin Noémie. Antoine visits the de Fontanins and concludes that Jenny is beyond medical help. Jenny recovers after the intervention of an English Christian Science faith healer. Antoine brings the boys back to Paris where Daniel is greeted warmly by his mother. Jacques's father sends him to a reformatory and forbids him to have further contact with Daniel.

2. Le pénitencier ("The Prison" or "The Reformatory") resumes the narrative several months later. Antoine visits Jacques in the reformatory at Crouy, where he is disturbed by the boy's isolation and ill-treatment. Determined to rescue him, he confronts his father, who reacts with rage but is eventually persuaded to allow Jacques to be released and to live away from his father's roof under Antoine's supervision. Against his father's wishes, Antoine permits Jacques to see Daniel and his family, and the boys' friendship is renewed, though it becomes less intense. Jenny de Fontanin quickly takes a dislike to Jacques, who in the meantime has fallen in love with an Alsatian girl, Lisbeth, who is serving as the brothers' housekeeper and who, unbeknownst to Jacques, is having an affair with Antoine. Daniel, in the meantime, is attracted to his cousin Nicole (the daughter of Noémie), but she repulses his advances. Lisbeth and Jacques consummate their relationship, but soon afterwards she returns to Alsace, leaving him devastated.