Families, I hate you! Homes shut tight; doors closed again; jealous possessions of happiness.
Genuine
Yes. In Fruits of the Earth (1897), Livre IV, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897).
Found word for word by program in the French original.
The English is our own translation, not yet reviewed: there is no public-domain translation of this text in our sources.
Checked against André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (first published Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1897; read in the Nouvelle Revue Française / Gallimard edition of 1921, University of Toronto copy), Livre IV, p. 72 of the 1921 NRF edition (from the OCR running heads), in the text of a page scan, not the image.
- Work
- Fruits of the Earth (Les Nourritures terrestres), 1897
- Where
- Livre IV, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897)
- Found at
- Paragraph 361 of the French text
- Translation
- Our own, not yet reviewed (no public-domain translation in our sources)
- Source
- André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (first published Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1897; read in the Nouvelle Revue Française / Gallimard edition of 1921, University of Toronto copy), Livre IV, p. 72 of the 1921 NRF edition (from the OCR running heads)
- Checked
- In the text of a page scan, not the image
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
Il y eut un temps où ma joie devint si grande, que je la voulus communiquer, — enseigner à quelqu’un ce qui dans moi la faisait vivre.
[…] — Le père rentrait, las de travail ; les enfants revenaient de l’école. La porte de la maison s’entr’ouvrait un instant sur un accueil de lumière, de chaleur et de rire, et puis se refermait pour la nuit. Rien de toutes les choses vagabondes n’y pouvait plus rentrer, du vent grelottant du dehors. — Familles ! je vous hais ! foyers clos ; portes refermées ; possessions jalouses du bonheur. — Parfois, invisible de nuit, je suis resté, penché vers une vitre, à longtemps regarder la coutume d’une maison. […]
Le lendemain je le revis, comme il sortait de l’école ; le surlendemain je lui parlai ; — quatre jours après il quitta tout pour me suivre. […]
— Seul, je goûtai la violente joie de l’orgueil. J’aimais me lever avant l’aube ; j’appelais le soleil sur les chaumes ; le chant de l’alouette était ma fantaisie — et la rosée était ma lotion d’aurore. […]
Families, I hate you! Homes shut tight; doors closed again; jealous possessions of happiness.
The scene
In Livre IV the narrator tells of a time when his joy grew so great that he wanted to teach it to someone. Evenings, in villages he did not know, he watched the households gather again: the father coming home tired, the children back from school, the door opening on light and warmth and shutting for the night, so that nothing of the wandering world could get in again. The cry comes there. He then recalls looking in at a window at the father by the lamp, the mother sewing, a grandfather’s empty place and a child at work, and wanting to take the child away on the roads; next day he spoke to the boy, who left everything within four days to follow him.
What it means
The cry of someone who prizes the open road and sees the family household as a closed place that keeps its happiness to itself and shuts the wanderer out.
Often misread
Quoted as Gide’s own verdict on the family. It is a cry from the book’s wandering narrator, remembered in a passage where he goes on to lead a boy away from his home; it belongs to that narrator’s story, not to a doctrine the book states for the reader to follow.
Topics
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Sources
- archive.org/details/lesnourritureste00gideuoft (Les Nourritures terrestres, NRF, 1921)
Cite it
André Gide, Fruits of the Earth (1897), Livre IV, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897), our own translation. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/families-i-hate-you/ (31 October 2026).
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Checked by people
People who checked this entry against its source, under their own names. Their checks do not change the verdict: an editor reviews every entry.
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