For all their gifts, André Gide and François Mauriac appear in this book rather like two elderly coquettes doing a complicated modesty display dance for each other’s benefit, with Claude running from one to the other and keeping the score. Claude himself is a mysterious case. There are so many well told, funny episodes in the book that one might suspect him of having written it all with his tongue in his cheek. But like Eckermann or Boswell, he seems at once profoundly convinced of the greatness of his great man and yet puts things in such a way that the human foibles of his subject are brought out with particular clarity.