From Zone de mort, Stock, 2017 (not translated) :
This book of correspondence ends with an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s Notebook 24. In it, he noted down a conversation he had just had with André Gide, in 1925. Gide, who was fifty-six years old, confessed everything to him. “I had been ignorant of his life and his habits until quite recently, which shows how blind I was,” Valéry remarks, before continuing: “He then told me—that all the feeling he had ever had was for his wife. He had never mixed the slightest bit of intellect with his senses. Any intervention of the mind cooled him. But as for the senses—complete debauchery. He had tried everything and still continued. He insisted on that word.”
Here Gide laid out his so-called thesis of “uranism,” based on the separation and rupture between love and sexual need. Love is platonic; sexual need is of the flesh, devoid of feeling. He lies. He knows he is lying to himself. His affair with the young Marc Allégret in 1917 was both love and sex, sentimental and carnal. Discovered by his wife when the “couple” left for England, the idyll led to the destruction—in tears and by fire—of thousands of letters Gide had written to Madeleine, which he regarded as the best part of his work. Madeleine, the writer’s first cousin, virgin and martyr, then sank into sorrow. She could be seen, in Cuverville, advancing with the small, shuffling step of life’s defeated, distributing food to stray cats.