Thais

Anatole France sets this ironic tale in fourth-century Egypt, where Paphnuce, a monk who has fled the world for the desert, resolves to save the soul of Thais, the celebrated courtesan of Alexandria. He succeeds. She renounces her old life and dies in the peace of a convent, revered as a saint. But the closer the monk comes to her, the more his own faith curdles into obsession, and salvation and ruin quietly trade places between them. France, a skeptic to the bone, reworks the legend of a repentant sinner into an attack on the vanity of asceticism. The story later gave Jules Massenet the subject of his famous opera. Free to read here as a PDF and EPUB download.