SOURCE: Smith, Maxwell A. “Giono as Epic Novelist.” In Jean Giono, pp. 75-87, 180. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966.

[In the following chapter from his full-length biographical-critical study of Giono, Smith analyzes the 1933 novel Le Serpent d'étoiles and the three mid-1930s novels of the Pan Trilogy—all of which use epic themes and settings.]

I LE SERPENT D'éTOILES

After writing the semi-autobiographical Jean le bleu and before beginning his trilogy of epic novels, Giono has given us in Le Serpent d'étoiles (1933) his own personal impressions of the primitive shepherds who every spring drive their thousands of sheep from the parched plains of lower Provence to the fresh pastures of the Alpine plateaux. The tone is set at the very outset by his quotation from Walt Whitman: “Can your work face the open countryside and the ocean shores?”

In the recital of the shepherd we are reminded of the epic beginning of Le Grand Troupeau in its description of the long procession of flocks enveloped in clouds of dust which hide the shepherd from those in front and behind him. If Giono seems obsessed by comparison with water and the sea, it is because the vast herd is in essence liquid and marine: “this flood which scrapes the soil with its belly, its wool, this deep monotonous sound, creates in the shepherd's soul a sense of the sonorous movement and weight of the sea.” Giono is successful in achieving a sense of immensity and grandeur in his account of the waves of sheep which form themselves around the helpless dog to crush him and in his portrayal of the mad revolt of the flocks in their vengeance against the shepherd who has imprudently and unjustly struck one of the rams.

The most moving and original episode in the book is the annual meeting of shepherds with their hundred thousand sheep on the lofty, desolate plateau of Mallefougasse, a half-way point on the long trek from the plain to the verdant mountain valleys. Here under the leadership of Le Sarde is performed a spontaneous folk drama, in which Le Sarde is the Narrator and Earth; the other shepherds take the rôles of Sea, River, Mountain, Rain, Cold, Tree, Wind, Grass, Animal, and finally Man. As Peyre has claimed, “if, as he avers, Giono has preserved the original integrity of these folk songs and folk dramas, the book contains some of the most unique documents ever recorded in a popular and spontaneous literature.” In a sort of mystic rapture we see evoked here the birth and youth of the world before the final imprint of man. The impression of poetic sorcery is enhanced by the continuous music of æolian harps alternating with flutes and gargoulettes (water flutes) and by the haunting magic of the setting which Peyre praises for “a splendor of imagery that recalls the greatest of primitive epics, the Vedas and the Iliad.” The strange title of the book is suggested by the vision of one of the shepherds in whose imagination the night sky represents a great serpent of stars.

In his discussion of Giono's poetic style in Le Serpent d'étoiles, Firmin Roz¹ praises the author for his perfect blending of style and content: “For this nature intoxication which no longer makes any distinction between spirit and matter, Giono has succeeded in creating an appropriate style, in which nature and thought mingle and blend all their relationships which become harmonies.” One example of Giono's felicity of melody must suffice, and it is taken from his evocation of night, in which so much of this work is enveloped: “At this hour night was complete, dense night whose foliage had never been trimmed, lovely night flapping like a sail, marine night, and its flood rolled over the shore of the trees, in those reefs on the top of the hills; the moon's foam crackled gently against the rocks.” Whether Giono speaks of the sun “still perched like a pigeon on the top of our hill” or of the little villages “closed up tight in the evening like surprised turtles,” his images are always fresh and original, expressive of his close communion with the world of nature which envelops and pervades his every fiber. His cosmic imagination has found its wings, and Giono is now ready to embark on his trilogy of epic novels.

II LE CHANT DU MONDE (THE SONG OF THE WORLD)

As Henri Peyre stated: “Giono was predestined among the French novelists of the century to attempt an epic novel. … His humble origins and his obstinate determination to remain a provincial and a man of the people preserved him from the cleverness that gives a veneer of charm, but nothing more, to many brief novels. He had no cynicism and hardly any irony, not even much of a sense of humor, which is a saving grace in some writers but which occasionally paralyzes creation.” However inexact this last sentence may seem in its application to the Chroniques of Giono today or even to the early Giono of Naissance de l'Odyssée, Peyre's statement does characterize aptly his production of the 1930's and explain how it was possible for Giono in the midst of our highly sophisticated age to reproduce in modern guise the spirit of that most ancient of story forms, the epic. Giono has himself defined his aim at this period of his development: “To renew the great Greek tragedies, to revive Pan and the terrestrial mysteries of marvelous paganism, to abstract the soul and substance from everything alive, the clouds, the plain, the wind, the starry sky. … And more precisely I wish to speak to you of the eternal verities of the earth and bring you close to joys of such quality that those you already know will fade away as the greatest stars fade when the sun springs up above the mountains.”

The reader familiar with Giono's early work will already have glimpsed flashes of epic power in the three short novels comprising the Trilogie de Pan, in the opening pages of Le Grand Troupeau, and in the festival of shepherds just discussed in Le Serpent d'étoiles. Though surpassed perhaps in grandeur and poetic beauty by individual passages in its two successors, Le Chant du monde (1934) is universally regarded today as the masterpiece of Giono's epic period. The reason for this esteem is the perfect balance which Giono only here has achieved among pictorial richness, interest and credibility of intrigue, and development of characters which blend into and are explained by their background. With its three divisions representing autumn, winter, and the glorious rebirth of the world in the spring, Le Chant du monde possesses at the same time the coherence and unity of great drama and the musical harmonies of a symphony.

The narrative itself is immensely moving in its recital of the expedition of Antonio and Matelot to rescue the latter's son from pursuit by the tyrant Maudru in his mountain domain. It is enveloped, moreover, with epic and cosmic poetry as a result of its unique blending of concrete reality with the sublime grandeur and haunting mystery of its background of the forces of nature. As Marcel Arland has written, “Never in his work have the spirit of the Odyssey and that of the Saga been more intimately joined. And the same thing is true for anecdote and legend, man and hero, and finally, men and nature.”² What gives essential unity to this work is, first of all, the river, with its various moods and seasons. To quote Arland again: “As the Odyssey is constructed around the sea, so is Le Chant du monde around the River. And the River is present on each page of the book, on which it imposes its current and its meandering, even its seasons; it is the book's soul.”

For Giono, the river is a living creature; and he expresses this sense of life and personality in metaphor taken from the animal kingdom: “All day long he has been watching that river ruffling its scales in the sun, then those white horses galloping in the ford with large foamy splashes on their hoofs.” As Varillon has so well noted, Giono's style and language are not those of an observer translating the impressions of a spectacle, but of one who is himself immersed in the world of nature he depicts: “Like his hero Antonio, the poet bathes in the river of life. With his hands, his feet, his entire body, he perceives perfumes, colors and sounds like a tissue of relationships more impossible to sever than the universe of Baudelaire.”³

To this sensibility and subtlety which enable Giono to render palpable the pulsating night of the forest is added an epic grasp which allows him to embrace with poetic sweep an entire horizon: “The night was now turning blue. There was only a reddish star left … Day flowed suddenly in a flash along the river, far into the distant water. The mountains lit up. The hills, set abruptly aglowing, started their dance around the fields, and the red sun leapt into the sky, neighing like a stallion.” In discussing Giono's rendition of the mystery of the physical universe in Le Chant du monde, many critics have used the term “cosmic lyricism.” No writer, perhaps, has expressed more forcefully the evolution of the seasons: the dismal rain and fog of autumn, the sparkling radiance of winter frost and snow, the throbbing warmth and exhilaration of the springtime. As Matelot and Antonio plod wearily through the autumnal tempest, Giono adds to the landscape of gloom and despair a touch of cosmic grandeur and terror: “At times, in the surrounding darkness, a strange glimmer kindled northward, and it became impossible to know the time of day. It was like a vision of Doomsday, with everything changed, dawns and sunsets alike, and with the dead rising from their graves.” What a contrast later when winter makes of this land a brilliant country which dazzles an eye unprotected by a dark mask: “The sun, scarcely emerging from the horizon and crushed under the weight of relentless azure, would stream all over the frozen snow; the most stunted shrub would blaze up like a flaming heart.” And finally after the Odyssey of pursuit in the autumn and the Iliad of murder and revenge in the winter, the rebirth of nature in the spring unfolds the triumphant return of the two sets of lovers towards the peace and tranquility of the South.

Le Chant du monde deserves to be called an epic novel not only because of its grandiose background of natural forces but also because of its characters and narrative. Henri Peyre considers the actors above the common stature of men: “epic heroes not because they accumulate feats in violent battle but because they are the very forces of nature embodied in simple, strong creatures; they echo the song of the world.” Peyre makes an exception only of Toussaint, the healer, “the meditative character who always appears among Giono's primitive souls.” It is true that Toussaint, like all of Giono's guérisseurs or healers, doubtless owes something to the author's memory of his father; Michelfelder thinks he may have come from the pages of Shakespeare. To most readers Toussaint will seem, I think, the most otherworldly and legendary of these protagonists by virtue of the Hugonian contrast of an ugly, misshapen body with a soul of tender compassion, and the likeness to a medieval Merlin with his prophetic fervor and power of divination.

If Antonio, the muscular, sinuous fisherman, is the man of the river, old Matelot, stocky, gnarled, and sturdy, is the true man of the forest. Maudru is presented first as the embodiment of evil who holds the countryside in thrall and whose wrath is like that of an outraged god, but later we see him off his guard as a purely human figure, full of lonely despair over the deaths of his nephew and the woman he had loved. More rugged and epic a character is his sister Gina who fled into the mountain wilderness with three score of her brother's herdsmen and buried one after another a succession of primitive lovers. Her daughter Gina has the same passionate flame within her, and the latter's lover, the red-haired twin, is likewise a creature of adventurous daring and impulse. As a foil for these magnificent and primitive creatures, we have the gently plaintive figure of the blind girl Clara, whose eyes are green like leaves of mint; she also transcends banal reality in her almost mystic power to divine spiritual truth behind the veil of the physical and sensual.

The narrative of Le Chant du monde likewise contains many episodes of epic grandeur. As Michelfelder has pointed out, most of these take place in the night when shadows give depth and grandeur to the action portrayed. Among those which hold the reader under a spell, one must mention the following: the orgiastic and mystical celebration of the springtime in the city of Villevieille with the dance around the burning figure of the Mère du Blé; the lugubrious funeral procession with lanterns which wends its way up the snow-covered mountain to the graveyard where Gina's lovers lie; and the terrible revenge taken by Antonio and the twin when they set the stables of Maudru on fire, releasing into the night the maddened and frenzied bulls. Epic also in their power of fateful presentiment are the image of the white horse always seen on the mountain when a member of the Maudru clan has been slain, and the warning of approaching death which comes to Matelot when the snowcapped mountain seems to him like a great ship of death with all sails set ready to carry him away into the darkness.

III QUE MA JOIE DEMEURE

Giono tells us that he took the title of Que ma joie demeure (1935) from that of Bach's famous chorale, but he omitted the first word, Jesus, “the most important of the entire appeal, the name of the one who is called upon; the only one who up to now has counted for the pursuit of joy.” Giono's reason for this omission is his feeling that this word implies a renunciation and, to him, “One must renounce nothing.”

Pugnet has called this book the hinge, le livre-charnière, of all of Giono's productions because it marks the implicit failure of his apology for peasant life; but Pugnet exaggerates slightly when he says that this is the first work of Giono in which all of the characters are unhappy. (He forgets that one at least, Zulma the simpleminded shepherdess, dressed in fur like the animals she loves, remains untouched by the tragedy of loneliness which weighs so heavily upon the others because of her total absorption in nature.) Another factor which differentiates this novel from the earlier works of Giono, as pointed out by Henri Fluchère⁴, is the fact that here for the first time the author is not interested in individual solutions for a couple but in the welfare of an entire social group or community, the inhabitants of the Grémone plateau.

At first glance Que ma joie demeure seems much less epic and more realistic than either the preceding or following novel. The narrative, which relates the efforts of Bobi, the wandering acrobat, to bring a sense of joy and beauty to the monotonous and lonesome life of these isolated peasants, is discursive and rambling, filled with the details of husbandry and descriptions of the seasons. The style in the main is simple and free from the exuberant prolixity of imagery of the earlier volumes. Yet, on the whole, in spite of the brooding melancholy which has only temporarily given way to Bobi's poetic magic, the general atmosphere of the book is replete with quiet charm and appreciation of humble things which here are tinged with spiritual beauty. As Peyre has written, “The ardent love of nature, the insight into the life of animals obeying sovereign forces, mating in the woods with a grave delight worthy of Lucretius' avocations, the portraying of the changing seasons and of the work and days of peasant life reminiscent of Hesiod—these are the finest merits of the book.” Brasillach likewise, after expressing his distaste for what he calls the detestable Romanticism which pervades the human characters, has only praise for Giono's treatment of animals and of nature: “And enveloping the adventures of the animals, the seasons, nature, wind and storm mingle to enchant us through the simple means of eternal poesy.”⁵

One would be justified, therefore, in asking why this novel, which resembles a bucolic idyll, should be included by all critics in the group of epic novels. Part of the answer is given by Henri Fluchère: “In none of his books, even in Le Chant, have we yet had that slow and grave ascent which is the trait that marks the epic poet.” This critic is referring to the majesty of the central theme, which envelops and gives unity to the disparate episodes—the gradual diffusion throughout a whole community of the vivifying force represented by Bobi's emphasis upon the beauty of the apparently useless, and the joy of fraternal companionship. According to Michelfelder, this novel is above all the story of man's confrontation with the eternal myths: “The principal myth is that of Dionysus, but the myth of Cybele underlies the entire book, as indeed all his work.” The spirit of Dionysus is represented throughout the novel largely by the stag Antoine, who seems more truly alive than some of the human characters. Michelfelder calls this stag “the primitive Dionysus, god of trees and vegetation, god of dampness often represented in the form of a goat, but how much more supple here; a stag is the symbol of the forest and of the beasts of the earth.” Brasillach likewise considers the advent of the stag an almost sublime touch, and he is reminded of the most beautiful pages of Kipling—of Mowgli among the wolves of the jungle. Equally magnificent are the other animal episodes in the book; the hunt for the hinds, the bath of the stag in the lake, and especially the magical scene of the lovemaking between the horses which in its quality of myth reminds Brasillach of Virgil and Lucretius, and which Michelfelder calls “the great dance of Dionysus-animal … a ride of Centaurs.”

Though Giono has stressed the humble, rustic events of daily husbandry, there are at least two episodes in which he has achieved the broad sweep of the epic. The first of these is the rustic banquet, characterized by Peyre as “an epic dinner in which meat and game and fragrant herbs and wine pour out with Rabelaisian lavishness.” In this truly Homeric repast, one worthy of the ancient Greeks, we feel as Michelfelder has suggested, the presence of Dionysus, god of intoxication, who makes the entire world dance to the dull rhythm of the blood beating in the veins. Another incident of epic proportions is the harvesting of wheat by the hundreds of mountaineers who have descended on the plains for this annual occasion: “The men of the mountain were singing the great poetic choruses of love and of woman and of the battle against the demons of life. Through the innermost flesh of the city dwellers passed a wind terribly perfumed by the bitter fragrance of blossoms from the almond trees. … The voices of the mountaineers were more heavily laden with stars than with night.”

In his epic lyricism Giono is especially effective in his sense of the movement of natural forces, such as the wind rolling clouds into fantastic and monstrous images, or the melting of mountain glaciers and snowfields in the spring: “The brooks and torrents sprang up everywhere like sheep racing or cavalcades of plump white mares. High up in the mountains where rested the sharp edges of eternal ice, one could sometimes hear the glaciers neighing; for a moment they would remain motionless, then suddenly with a creaking of their muscles they would rear and the avalanches set free would gallop towards the abyss.” No writer, perhaps, has given a more dazzling and terrifying description of lightning than that of the storm in which Bobi meets his death in a flaming vortex of destruction: “The thunderbolt planted a tree of gold between his shoulders.” The stark simplicity of this ending forms a fitting climax to the novel. In the light of the descriptive passages quoted, it would be difficult to disagree with Peyre's judgment: “Its magic descriptions unite the splendor of the epic with a familiar simplicity of dialogue that few realistic novels have struck so felicitously.”

Why does Que ma joie demeure leave a less favorable impression than Chant du monde on most readers, even if we agree with the critics who assert that certain scenes and chapters equal anything that Giono has ever written? One may find Brasillach a trifle facetious when he feels “a disrespectful Voltaire rising in us against this new Rousseau trying to make us walk on all fours.” Brasillach may be justified in stating that Giono writes better of animals than of men, but he goes too far perhaps when he adds: “He takes away from men the power to reason, he diminishes them, he reduces them to an elementary sensibility, to an instinct of coarseness.” It is true that, of all the characters in the novel, only three stand out with any distinction: the mystical and passionate Aurore, the fawn-like shepherdess Zulma, and the poet-acrobat-philosopher Bobi. Indeed, of these, the first two are inarticulate, mystical dreamers; and Bobi himself is far from being thoroughly credible. One has the impression that Giono wavered between making him an abstraction, a mouthpiece for his own generous ideas on poetic beauty and fraternal love, and on the other hand a creature of flesh and blood whose sensuality betrays his lofty ideals.

A second disturbing feature of the book is the apparent inconsistency and cloudiness of philosophy that brought forth almost as many interpretations as there were critics. During the greater part of the novel the author has convinced us that a new awareness of values has permeated this isolated community, bringing hope where there had been despair, a new zest for life and beauty to replace humdrum monotony and brooding care. Then in the last few pages this idyllic dream is rudely shattered by the suicide of Aurore and by the departure of Bobi, accepting the blame remorsefully and shouting “There is no joy.” Does this mean, as Pugnet suggests, that Giono suddenly realized the bankruptcy of his philosophy which preached the superiority of rural over urban life, or shall we agree with Fluchère that Giono's conclusion is not really pessimistic but only realistic since the outcome merely shows that Bobi had tried to create his social revolution too rapidly without taking into consideration individual conflicts and weaknesses? Is the collapse of Bobi's dream caused by the tragic flaw in his own character which made him choose the less worthy of the two women who loved him, or was his dream unrealizable in any case, as Pugnet suggests, because “the poet's joy cannot be shared. Bobi feels that he cannot share his joy and that there is no joy for a poet if he does not share it.”

It is not easy to see clearly among the conflicting interpretations. For one thing, why need we assume that with Bobi's departure all his teachings must perish? The group still has its newly awakened appreciation of beauty in flower and foliage, its reborn joy in working and sharing together. That this novel marks the end of Giono's optimistic solutions cannot be denied, however; for in his later works one no longer finds the happy endings of his earlier volumes. When questioned about the three suicides in the story, particularly that of Aurore which seems to clash melodramatically and almost crudely with the gentle tenor of the narrative, Giono replied that the blazing sun and unflecked sky produce such loneliness among the isolated dwellers on Lure Mountain that this district has the highest percentage of suicides in France. When asked whether the dénouement meant that his outlook on life had become more pessimistic, he answered, however, that this was far from the truth; he had merely come to realize that it is possible to bring happiness only to individuals and not to an entire group.

IV BATAILLES DANS LA MONTAGNE

Batailles dans la montagne (1937) is the most ambitious, the most truly epic of the novels in this cycle. One must agree with Peyre when he writes: “The story leaps almost beyond human bounds; the actors are hardly made real. … Giono's epic qualities have swollen dangerously.” According to Villeneuve, who had access to Giono's unpublished diary: “No work was to require of him more effort or procure him such feelings of emotion.” For more than a year he remained steeped in its creation, even to the extent of forgetting for days on end to eat or shave. To one who knows Giono, however, it is difficult to believe that he abandoned his pipe for two whole days. Apparently Giono no longer regards this book as one of his better volumes, for his biographer Chonez quotes him as saying: “I wanted to employ a muddy style to paint mud—the result is unreadable.”

As in the case of Que ma joie demeure, Batailles aroused tremendous controversy among critics. Some of those who agreed with Giono's own later harsh judgment are Firmin Roz⁶ who considered it difficult to read because of its minute, compressed and sometimes strange detail, and Henri Peyre who charges that “the dramatic and even the plain human quality of Giono's earlier work seems gone.” On the other hand, Henri Pourrat⁷ considers Batailles the finest of Giono's works, and Henri Bidou calls it a magnificent book: “Never has the epic genius of M. Giono painted with greater power the forces of nature and the combats of man against those gods as much alive as in the primeval days of the world.”⁸ Occupying a middle ground between these two extremes of denigration and hyperbole are Jacques Madaule and Robert Brasillach. The former, although he criticizes the ensemble for leaving the reader confused and disconcerted, nevertheless is full of praise for individual episodes such as the epic combat of the hero Saint-Jean against the frenzied bull.⁹ The latter, while admitting that “M. Giono becomes at times a whirling dervish whom we watch without being able to share his delirium,” is impressed nonetheless by the potential beauty of the book which, if the author had consented to be a little more intelligible, might have made him “the true rival of Vergil and Mistral in the French language.”¹⁰

The action of this novel concerns the efforts of a mountain village to escape a gigantic flood caused by the melting of a glacier and the obstruction of the river by a landslide. Never, perhaps, has Giono exceeded the intensity of hallucinating emotion created by such episodes as the conquest of the murderous bull, the procurement of the dynamite, and the final expedition to explode the dam which had caused the inundation. The setting likewise is grandiose and awe inspiring. Starting, as always, with a basis of realistic observation—in this case, a grotto which he had observed on the mountain at Tréménis overlooking the plain with its four hamlets and five small streams—Giono has enlarged this scene to form the vast gray mass of the glacier La Treille, whose massive outline casts a shadow of foreboding over the immense landscape.

We have seen that Chant du monde has been likened to an Iliad and Odyssey, and Que ma joie demeure to the myth of Dionysus and Cybele. As for Batailles, Michelfelder, preoccupied as always with the classical inspiration of Giono, cannot refrain from comparing the episode of Saint-Jean in quest of the dynamite with that of Prometheus going to the isle of Lemnos to seize the divine torch from Hephaestos.¹¹ Yet most critics have found in Batailles a predominantly biblical rather than classical foundation. This basis is manifest in part in the character of Bourrache, a sort of prophet from the Old Testament, who is constantly reminding the peasants that their misfortune is a visitation from Jehovah to punish them for their godlessness. It may be wondered, however, whether Bourrache is not in the eyes of Giono a satiric figure, sadistic, bristling with self-importance and over-weaning smugness. More truly a biblical character is the wealthy and majestic Boromée, who, like a patriarch in the Old Testament, has twenty-eight wives and thirty-seven children. When Sarah arrives at his home as a servant and becomes his common-law wife during the first evening, the critic Brasillach is reminded of Ishmael, and Bidou of the Moabite. At times, moreover, the language of the book has a definitely biblical flavor, as in the description of the transformation which takes place on the mountainside as the soil becomes fluid from the seeping of the glacier: “The forests bend towards the earth. The water smokes along the rocks. The meadows flow like fountains.” Finally the vastness of the inundation which has brought disaster to thirty cantons reminds the reader of the biblical flood—and the knoll of Villard l'Eglise which shelters the survivors and their livestock plays the same rôle as the ark.

Yet the essentially epic quality of this book is found in the character of its hero Saint-Jean, who, in Peyre's words, is “more a symbol than a living man; Jacob wrestling with the angel or Prometheus defying the gods to serve man … his epic stature alone fills the novel.” Though Saint-Jean seems human enough at first in his humble calling as a carpenter, in his brotherly affection for his group and particularly for his comrade Antoine, and in his bashful, almost inarticulate love for Sarah, he lifts himself under the spur of catastrophe to superhuman heights of endurance, courage, and selflessness. One must agree with Michelfelder's statement: “In the extraordinary efforts he has to accomplish, Saint-Jean loses his human stature; he becomes as strong and powerful as the dynamite which he warms against his breast.” And Madaule terms him “almost as much a myth as the glacier of La Treille.”

In summary, it may be said that Batailles marks the extreme limit of Giono's epic inspiration. He realized that he had exhausted this poetic vein, for this is the last novel of what has been called his first manner. This novel is followed by the very different style of the Chroniques, in which the lyric rhapsodies of nature are subordinated to a sobriety of expression almost metallic in its hardness, even though his fondness for strange, mysterious adventures still persists.

V SUMMARY

In comparing the three novels, one may say that Batailles has the greatest sweep, the most impressive grandeur of natural setting, and the most dramatic theme—the struggle for survival against the forces of nature. By judicious cutting, particularly in the confused and prolix introduction, this somewhat disorganized and disconcerting work might have become the finest of the three. Que ma joie demeure, less compelling in its story, though full of admirable scenes and descriptions which could be chosen for an anthology, is too episodic in narrative and too contradictory in theme to be entirely satisfactory. On the other hand, Chant du monde because of the perfect equilibrium of Giono's epic qualities—grandeur of natural beauty, credibility and interest of narration, and perfect blending of heroic characters with their background—will remain for most readers, and I believe for Giono himself, his true masterpiece in the epic novel. We may even, like Marcel Arland, prefer it to everything else Giono has written:

Just as the great Hugo, the authentic one, is not the modest and plaintive author of Feuilles d'Automne but the visionary of the Légende des Siècles and of Satan, so it is by neglecting almost every care for verisimilitude that Giono proceeds to give his measure, build his world and sometimes convince us of its truth. These mountains and forests, these rivers and glaciers, these dawns and shadows are the true personages of Giono; their mere presence is already speech, or rather song, a tragic hymn.

Notes

1. Firmin Roz, Revue Politique et Littéraire (Paris, June 17, 1933).

2. Marcel Arland, “Le Chant du monde,” Nouvelle Revue Française (Paris, Sept. 1, 1953), pp. 495-505.

3. François Varillon, Etudes (Paris, June 2, 1937).

4. Henri Fluchère, “Le Chant du monde,” Cahiers du Sud (Marseilles, July, 1935), pp. 588-91.

5. Robert Brasillach, “Le Cas Giono,” Les Quatre Jeudis (Paris, 1951), pp. 312-24.

6. Firmin Roz, “La Manière de M. Jean Giono,” Revue Politique et Littéraire (Paris, Oct. 16, 1937).

7. Henri Pourrat, “La Pensée Magique de Jean Giono,” Nouvelle Revue Française (Oct., 1938), pp. 646-58.

8. Henri Bidou, Feuilleton du Journal des Débats (Nov. 2, 1937).

9. Jacques Madaule, “Jean Giono,” Reconnaissances II (Paris, 1943), p. 151.

10. Robert Brasillach, “Batailles dans la montagne,” Action Française (Paris, Oct. 7, 1937).

11. Christian Michelfelder, Cahiers du Sud (Marseilles, Feb. 1938), pp. 144-7.