On New Year’s Day 1931, the novelist Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958) and his wife were seriously injured in a car crash, and they spent the next few months recuperating in a Le Mans hospital. That Martin du Gard had recently finished a solid first draft of the seventh installment of The Thibaults, the roman-fleuve he’d been trickling out since 1922, should, one would think, have been a source of some comfort to him during his long convalescence. But no: mulling in bed over his project, he came to the conclusions that this latest stretch of it simply would not do and that, to forfend against dithering, he had better torch the whole thing then and there. The replacement volume, Summer 1914, took another five years to complete, but Martin du Gard must have felt vindicated in his sacrifice when, the year after publication, it was singled out by the Swedish Academy in bestowing on him the Nobel Prize for 1937.

Nor was this the only time Martin du Gard unflinchingly abandoned work in progress. A methodical perfectionist, he never balked at crawling back to the drawing board. He objected that his friend André Gide tended to grow bored with his characters and hustle their demise; on his own fictional brood, meanwhile, he lavished infinite patience and pains. Descended from a clan of lawyers and stockbrokers, trained as an archivist and paleographer, Martin du Gard was a writer to whom rigor, prudence, and meticulous documentation came