[In the following review of the English version of Le Hussard sur le toit, Peyre, one of the first English-language commentators on Giono, notes that Giono's postwar emphasis changed to one of pure storytelling, in contrast to the symbolic, anti-modernity themes of his earlier works.]

Before World War II Jean Giono enjoyed the devotion of many worshipers in Europe, who hailed him and his contemporaries Malraux, Saint-Exupéry, Montherlant as the torch-bearers of a revolt against the introspective novel of Proust and Mauriac. Giono had scored an immediate triumph as an epic novelist and as a magician whose colorful words were dynamite. He soon became the prophet of a crusade against mechanical civilization. The Song of the World, Joy of Man's Desiring, even Blue Boy, from which the celebrated episode of “The Baker's Wife” was drawn, were, and have remained, great books.

World War II came. Giono and other French writers failed to live up to the expectations of their admirers. He was condemned to a year of enforced silence after the liberation of the country. He emerged from it a new writer and the extent of his metamorphosis, at fifty years of age, is amazing. Eight volumes by Giono have appeared in the last six years, and some twenty more have been promised. The overflow of words and metaphors, the sensuous delight in all that pertains to the flesh and to animal life, the pagan communion with nature had gone. Giono had given up lyricism and cosmic ambitions.

The Horseman on the Roof is the best of his novels in the new manner. It is very ably translated by Jonathan Griffin and elegantly presented by Alfred Knopf. The author is no longer concerned in curing the ills of civilization or in proposing pretentious symbols. He is a pure storyteller, a creator of pure and heroic characters. Few books of such healthy charm and of such ebullient optimism have come out of Europe in the last decade.

Yet the setting of this story of heroism and of nobleness in love is a grim one. The scene is laid in Provence in 1838. The country is ravaged by the plague—not an allegorical plague as in Camus' novel, but by the genuine Asiatic cholera. People die by the hundreds. The air reeks with the stench of burnt fat; funeral pyres are burning on the outskirts of villages. The people, freed from the fear of gendarmes, have become rapacious. Any traveler is suspect as a germ carrier and is in danger of being thrown into quarantine, or robbed and murdered.

Angelo will escape that fate. He is a Piedmontese colonel of Hussars, twenty-five years old, handsome, fearless, who had escaped from his native land after killing a man in a duel. He encounters the plague in upper Provence, fights his way through road blocks and lines of soldiers, eludes quarantines, nobly assists a nun who was conscientiously washing corpses to make them neat for resurrection. The contagion spares him. But, hunted by a panicky mob in Manosque, he saves his skin through escaping to the roofs.

Roofs are uncomfortable; swallows peck at him when he tries to sleep; hunger drives him to slip down chimneys. He lands in a room where a beautiful lady watches this man from the moon arrive, starved and shaggy. He is even more intimidated than she is and, after a hearty meal, takes back to his roofs, and eventually to the road. There he meets his benefactress, arrested by angry villagers.

Both flee together, always behaving with the utmost dignity. Their hair-raising adventures recall picaresque novels of old, but their tone remains noble and even precious throughout; they relish the thrill of their adventures, do not waste their pity on the dying and the dead, sleep in the woods, feed on maize, boiled tea, and an occasional broiled chicken. At the very end the young woman falls ill. Angelo rubs her body tirelessly, fights off the benumbing disease, nurses her, cleans her, all in the open country, and she recovers. Only then does she shift from vous to tu and their pure comradeship assumes a restrained tenderness. The colonel of Hussars escorts her to her home and to her husband. She was the Marquise Pauline de Théus, married to a man forty-five years older and in love with her husband, who was also surrounded with the halo of having killed a man, honorably. Another novel as yet untranslated, Angelo, will follow up their subsequent adventures and the progress of affection in their hearts.

Historians might cavil at an historical novel which does not always respect historical accuracy. Devotees of Stendhal might be annoyed at a book which reads almost like a Stendhalian pastiche. Angelo acts, thinks, loves (or rather conceals love under respect and admiration), talks to himself very much like Fabrice in “The Charterhouse of Parma.” The plasticity of Giono, who once did the “Odyssey” over again and now gives a sequel to Stendhal's novels, is amazing and not a little disturbing. But the scruples of the surly reader are soon silenced by the zest in life, the joyful élan, the foolhardiness pleasantly tinged with irony of one of the most cheerful novels written by a Frenchman in the last ten or fifteen years.