SOURCE: “The Pleonastic Sucide of Aristide Valentin in Chesterton's ‘The Secret Garden,’” in The Chesterton Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, August, 1992, pp. 391–94.

In the following review, Cervo argues that Chesterton's Valentin character was created to personify those who would destroy the Catholic Church.

In the Father Brown story, “The Secret Garden,” the names Aristide Valentin and Cato bracket Chesterton's story, lending a non-“progressive”¹ (pagan) aura to its central metaphor of the garden without an exit. The names thus point the reader away from what Valentin calls “the superstition of the Cross”² toward what is truly superstitious, the anti-God amalgam that Valentin embodies.³ At one level of interpretation, Aristide may be understood to refer to a descendant (as suggested by the suffix -ide) of the stoic philosopher, Ariston. According to Ariston, it is impossible to form a conception of the shape or sense of the gods; it is doubtful...