[In the following essay, Goodrich examines the role of the narrator, the technical skill of Giono, and the use of history, fantasy, and mythology in Le Moulin de Pologne.]

In 1952 Jean Giono published a novel which he called, for the following excellent reasons of his own, Le Moulin de Pologne:

Parce que beaucoup de fermes, ou domaines de Haute Provence avaient au XIXe siècle des Moulins à farine attenants, qu'ils moulaient du blé pour tout le voisinage et qu'ils les appelaient naturellement Moulins avec une caractéristique quelconque: … Parce qu'au XVIIIe siècle beaucoup de domaines ont été baptisés Pologne à la suite de la nationalité de la reine de France qui était Polonaise …¹

As we shall shortly see, this novel, which is told, not by Giono but by an auxiliary narrator, partially relies for its credibility upon a certain historical authenticity. Allusions to the Empire are, in fact, so skilfully evoked and interwoven into its tissue that the story becomes fearfully urgent and credible. What is less immediately perceivable, however, is that the narrator's story itself is, on a second level, a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty, since the Moulin de Pologne is also “ce château de la Belle au bois dormant.”² Thus, under the easily accepted historical reality lies a pervasive fabulous reality to which the principal characters may be related.

Belle, or Briar Rose herself, is here called Julie.³ Like her French fairytale ancestress, she is also “belle,” a princess, “endormie” for a hundred years, an accomplished musician, a dancer, and finally, after her rescue, a queen.⁴ Similarly, the stranger Prince Charming, who arrives miraculously to awaken and to wed her, is here called M. Joseph, “le chevalier,” characterized by “son charme,” with his mysterious power, his “damasseries royales,” and his “visage de race.”⁵ While Julie has neither fairy godmother nor spindle, she is subject to a similar curse, a fatal destiny which has pursued the Coste family relentlessly for five generations. Instead of the traditional seven fairies, Julie's family has been protected by an old woman named Hortense, who, along with three “bécasses”⁶ or weird sisters, exercised her function as marriage broker, or “sacerdoce civil.”

Giono's novel is exciting not only because of its similarities to an old legend, but also because of its strikingly original departures. In this world of the “jadis” of Giono, which corresponds to the “Il était une fois” of Charles Perrault and others,⁷ in this historically authentic fairyland where sudden death strikes, or where “la peste s'était mise,”⁸ we also have a monster. By the most malicious irony, or rather, due to the superb æsthetic control of Giono, it is the monster who recounts the tale. Before we pass on to an examination of this evil man who is the principal character of our story,⁹ however, we should also establish the fact that beneath the historical reality of the Empire,¹⁰ and below the fabulous reality of the fairy tale, there lies in this novel the solid substratum of an ancient myth.

The fact that Giono has based this novel upon a vegetation myth may perhaps explain its haunting appeal. What we also have in this book, then, is the arrival of the future god, M. Joseph, from across the western sea.¹¹ Like ancient gods, he is represented as a tiger,¹² “virile et souple, … d'une salubrité attirante … mystérieux” and threatening. He is also clearly an officiant, a priest of some sort. Resisting temptation, he waits quietly outside the theater of action until he is summoned to assume his role of fertility god. Meanwhile, as we shall see, the people celebrate the advent of spring near what used to be the local slaughter house.¹³ During the bacchanalian ceremonies of purification, Julie, who according to local consensus was to have been the scapegoat,¹⁴ or sacrificial offering, escapes. Clad in green for Dionysos,¹⁵ she has already, in her solitary dance, summoned the god. Then follows through the dark and frightening night the search for Julie, much like ancient searches for Persephone in Greek mysteries.¹⁶ Suddenly the god reveals himself as her bridegroom, and as the master. Their wedding is followed, again as in the ancient nature rites, by a celebration of the goddess—the celebrants are even escorted with lighted torches¹⁷—the conquest of the waste land, the birth of a son, the installation of triumphal god and goddess in a special palace, the Moulin de Pologne, and an era of peace and virtual serenity.

It is also in the area of mythology, as we saw earlier in his treatment of the fairy tale, that Jean Giono displays his consummate art, not only in establishing the principal features of the myth, but also in departing from a set ritual. Thus, this novel is full of surprises. Before it ends, the god-hero has died peacefully, and the reader is forced to infer that the Dionysian heroine Julie will succumb to her terrible fate.¹⁸ Giono has also added his monstrous narrator, through whose eyes and due to whose efforts we know this story. He is a monster born, in a sense, from the waste land which preceded the arrival of M. Joseph, when the Moulin de Pologne had fallen prey to swarms of wasps. Although the wasps and their nests were destroyed by the hero, “Où la guêpe a passé, le moucheron demeure.”¹⁹ After the god's demise, in other words, the narrator remains. Disdaining “le monde réel, impur, infidèle et médiocre,”²⁰ he tells us this story, from only one point of view, his own. It is principally through a study of how and when he reveals himself as the narrator, how much and what he allows the reader to know about himself, and how he gradually becomes a character of more and more compelling interest until he is revealed in the final pages as Julie's antagonist and also as her virtual murderer, that we may best appreciate the extent of Giono's mastery of a complicated fictional technique. This study of the narrator will further furnish a conjecture as to Giono's personal involvement in the material of this novel, or a possible reason for his having written it.

The first chapter of the novel, which begins with traditional statements in the third person past definite, as if Giono himself were telling the story, plunges us into details concerning the Moulin de Pologne from which the book takes its title, and concerning M. Joseph, a mysterious man of about forty, newly arrived in the small city: “Malgré tout son mystère, il n'inquiétait pas. Ceci est assez difficile à expliquer. A vrai dire, il inquiétait. Mais il ne faisait pas peur. Quand je m'en aperçus, je fus bien plus étonné de voir que la méchanceté ne s'exerçait pas contre lui. Enfin, pas vraiment” (p. 13). Thus, on the seventh page of the novel, emerges unexpectedly an unknown narrator who will refer to himself throughout as “je,” and who appears so inconspicuously that the casual reader may not even have noticed this change from the third-person pronoun. Immediately following this reference, the reader is distracted by a vigorous discussion of seeming trivia, in this case, of the rival musical societies which “nous” have in town. Three pages later, however, “je” reappears, this time as one of the collectivity attempting to disarm or compromise M. Joseph.

It is not until page seventeen that we can glean the first solid information concerning the narrator: “je” is a man, first of all, a fatuous and important personage, who draws sharp class distinctions: “Je ne peux pas me flatter d'avoir été très mondain, mais la stricte vérité m'oblige à dire que la bonne société de notre petite ville n'a jamais dédaigné mon humble personne. Et cette bonne société n'est pas la première venue” (pp. 17-18). The narrator is proud to be a confidant of the “gros bonnet,” M. de K. … ; both believe that M. Joseph is a judge, “un jésuite de robe courte”: “J'en fus tout ébahi et vraiment effrayé … J'étais troublé au possible.” In this “aventure dangereuse” the narrator and M. de K. … lead public opinion against M. Joseph. “Je ne suis pas un esprit pénétrant et universel comme M. de K. …,” says the narrator (p. 26). Neither is he to be classed with “ces gens du commun sans imagination”; he belongs to “des meilleurs entre nous.”

By the end of chapter one, the reader, struggling to understand the who, what, and why of this work, perceives that the past tense is appropriate to the narrative since “je” is frequently powerless to reconstruct all the incidents “même avec le recul du temps.” Reviewing from memory, “je” evokes what happened long before, sometimes a scene he witnessed as he huddled close to M. de K. … at the other end of an esplanade. The narrator recalls watching M. Joseph; he adds to what he saw interpretations present and future, colored by the deductions of M. de K. … By the end of the chapter, then, we find ourselves hearing a story told by the arch enemy of M. Joseph, the only character thus far for whom we can feel any admiration.

After having brought us to “la nuit du scandale” (p. 34), the narrator explains in chapter two that he must make a long detour (into what will be pluperfect time). Giono's purpose here seems to be to acquaint us with what M. Joseph has already learned about the Moulin de Pologne. This regression, during which the reader is following as closely upon the track of the narrator as upon that of the five generations of the Coste family²¹ destroyed by their “destin, cependant défié” (p. 46) until only the tragic Julie remains alive, occupies approximately one-third of the book. Through these historical tragedies the reader can only rely upon the narrator, who admits that he has his information from “notoriété publique,” from “semble-t-il,” and from “disait-on,” and furthermore, that, having subsequently lived in the château, he is able to imagine Coste there on a given day in November: “Je connais assez maintenant les personnages du drame pour imaginer sans trop y mettre du mien leurs conversations et leurs gestes” (p. 40). Occasionally the narrator reveals more of himself: “La vie des autres, avec ses vicissitudes, ses malheurs, ses défaites, est extrêmement agréable à regarder.” What is agreeable to the narrator is immediately explained; he enjoys observing in the lives of others “de belles haines, de splendides méchancetés, d'égoïsmes, d'ambitions” (p. 58). After the tragic death of Coste, the narrator apologizes to the reader (p. 61) for what will be an accumulation of “malheurs,” asks the reader not to laugh, and explains that his only pretension is to a knowledge of the human heart, since he is neither artist, creator of art, nor a useless art critic: “Je me borne à dire ce que je sais de source certaine et le plus simplement du monde.” After such a falsehood, the narrator continues dispassionately to recount the tragic and sudden deaths of Coste's granddaughter, of his daughter, and then, with pride, the madness of her husband: “J'ai trouvé des signes de dérangement chez lui bien longtemps à l'avance.” He relates the flight of Coste's other daughter and of her family, which he found elucidated in the city archives. When he became interested in the Coste story, says the narrator, he did research in the back issues of two newspapers, finding the articles and “dessins horribles” concerning the deaths of Coste's second daughter Clara who was “carbonisée” along with her husband, her two sons, and such innocent travelers as Dumont d'Urville.²² The file at the Préfecture contained scores of anonymous denunciations directed against the last two members of the second and third generations of Coste's family, his son-in-law Pierre and his son Jacques. The collectivity was by this time terrified of the Costes since their destiny could also strike bystanders. When accusations are leveled, says the narrator (p. 75), “je sais qu'il ne faut jamais dire non. Il n'y a pas d'innocents.” Therefore, continuing his research, he decides that the old housekeeper Hortense perhaps loved Jacques: “Je n'ai jamais été embarrassé par l'amour: je ne sais pas ce que c'est … Il paraît que l'amour est un don de soi. L'égoïsme, sans son extrême pureté, a le visage même de l'amour. C'est pourquoi on dit que mademoiselle Hortense mourut d'amour et que sa mort a été inscrite au compte de Jacques” (pp. 91-92). Jacques' children were Jean and Julie whom the narrator knew personally; he has thus brought the reader up to present time and to first-hand knowledge.

When Julie was ten years old, the narrator was “un tout petit jeune homme avec déjà des soucis. J'avais classé les gens en deux catégories bien distinctes: ceux qui pouvaient me servir et ceux qui ne pouvaient pas me servir.” “Je” saw Julie being carried home from her tormentors at school; he had also been one of those who reproached Jean for his destiny: “Je n'en ai pas gardé bon souvenir.” As a boy he also detested Jean, “le mort,” because, brave as a lion, he met his enemies face to face instead of “par des biais” like everyone else. Julie, once an “adorable petit fille étonnée,” also called “la morte,” finally fell ill. One side of her face became paralyzed and hideous while the other side remained beautiful. Julie was “un ogre de musique,” a fact that the narrator records although he is “nul en musique” himself: “Je participais à la chose plus par politique que par passion personnelle” (p. 105).²³ The town (“nous”) hated Julie; their hatred, shared by the narrator, kept them alive, since man does not live by bread alone. Like the others, the narrator hoped to see Julie “disparaître en charbons dans les ténèbres” (p. 114). As chapter two ends, the narrator has returned to “la nuit du scandale,” where Julie, says he, did not disappear forever “à l'encontre de l'espérance générale.”

In the dramatic climax to this book, ironically called the “bal de l'amitié” (p. 117) of chapter three, the collective hatred of the town is unleashed against their intended scapegoat, Julie. The scene of the festivities is the Casino, situated next to the local slaughter house, as we have already seen. After having applied himself assiduously to non-essentials, which hypnotize the reader and divert his attention from the hatred and hypocrisy of the dancers, the narrator describes, from close proximity, Julie at the ball, her flight to M. Joseph, and the latter's mastery as he rescues her. By chapter four, Julie is the cherished wife of M. Joseph, who has undertaken her combat with fate. The narrator has been enlisted as their agent:

Je sifflotais en tribut d'admiration pour l'habileté consommée de M. Joseph. Je tirais mon chapeau. C'était du travail de premier ordre.

On me croira si on voudra mais, en songeant au rendez-vous qui m'attendait, le fait que j'allais avoir affaire à cette habileté suprême et de tant de bonheur me réchauffa et me réconforta. Je suis très difficile à abattre. Je crois que, ce qui me glace le plus c'est la médiocrité ….

(p. 171)

Although chapter five is an artistic triumph in that it succeeds almost totally in persuading the reader that Julie is henceforth safe and will continue so, and although chapter six, despite the death of M. Joseph and the incipient insanity which only the narrator suspects in his son, lulls the reader and causes him to believe in the narrator's decency, there are enough clues in the final chapter to revive the reader's suspicions and enable him to clarify the finale according to what he has learned of the narrator in the first four chapters. It is finally “je” who is guilty of Julie's death, “par des biais,” of course. By delaying her in his room, he killed her by intent: “Si les intentions tuaient, nos salles à manger, nos chambres à coucher, nos rues seraient jonchées de morts comme au temps de la peste” (p. 85). After her flight, it is the narrator who tapped along the pavement, hoping to find her body. Destroying her slowly that evening was one of the joys he savored “dans les lenteurs” (p. 6) for, as the reader recalls, the narrator was a slow man. Once M. Joseph was dead, and the narrator was the only person in town M. Joseph had to “buy,” “je” could use “des atouts pour gagner” (p. 15) and “la force des choses.” He hated Julie not only because of her share in the Coste destiny but also because she charmed others: “Si je disais qui j'ai vu, aussi subjugués, je ferais comprendre les autres raisons que nous avions tous de haïr et de brocarder cette jeune fille” (p. 106). Julie “n'offrait que des places au Paradis” (p. 140). Therefore “je” helped her commit suicide, just as the townspeople had decided she should do, the evening of the ball. A master stroke on the part of Giono is Julie's half-lucidity when she inquires abruptly of the narrator if he will betray her. This also has been prepared, for the reader recalls again that “la souffrance peut tout animer” (p. 67) and for the narrator's part that “il n'y a pas d'innocents.”

After having returned to the first three chapters in order to understand the final or seventh chapter, and after having established the narrator's guilt, it is possible to list the character traits of “je.”²⁴ He is, first of all, a narcissistic man, not content to record, for example, that he smiled, but impelled to say: “je me contentai de sourire finement” (p. 123). He admired M. Joseph only because he was an antagonist “de taille,” showed some admiration for Pierre and Lucien because he alone detected their weakness, and particularly, he disliked women. The vulgarity of his language throughout the book (the anonymous letters were “ordurières à souhait”—p. 74) is most pronounced in his descriptions of women, as: “Son énorme poitrine surplombait le vide et, à force de compression et de retenue sans défaut, elle avait fait passer son ventre dans ses fesses” (p. 31). He is completely callous, as in his account of Coste's tragic death: “La mort de Coste fit un certain bruit” (p. 61). More than callousness, however, his prime characteristic is sadism. He dwells with delight upon macabre details. Dumont d'Urville, for instance, “perdait sa graisse comme un rôti tombé de sa broche” (p. 72); Jean lay dead “sous la bouillie de sang, de cervelle, et d'os” (p. 108). His malignancy is often betrayed by a single word. In chapter one he had said that the château was so near the promenade that one could “cracher sur la toiture” (p. 35); he recalls this later (p. 105): “J'ai dit que notre promenade de Bellevue surplombe le Moulin de Pologne de telle façon que, si on le voulait, on pouvait cracher sur les toits.” Many of his attacks are completely gratuitous, having little or nothing to do with plot or characterization, as in: “Il [Pierre] va aux garces comme un poitrinaire va au piano et aux poèmes” (p. 82). “Je” is cynical, even about his friends: “Je savais très bien combien valait l'aune de leurs amabilités” (p. 108).

This picture which we have been able to draw of the narrator, who is related to Giono only by his imagery and his exploration of language,²⁵ is still incomplete, however. We also know that “je” is a writer because his “friend,” M. de K. …, observes that he is inferior to Victor Hugo (p. 163). Such an allusion, even despite the meticulous care with which Giono has written this novel, might be disregarded were it not for the narrator's question addressed abruptly to the reader in the final pages, at the disappearance and hypothetical suicide of Julie (p. 235): “Et moi, qui clopinais péniblement derrière elle. (Ai-je dit que je suis bossu?).” Such information, it would seem, explains the first reference to Hugo, whose “Quasimodo-lebossu” was, like our narrator and for the purposes of fiction, both physically and spiritually distorted. As Hugo says: “Son cerveau était un milieu particulier; les idées qui le traversaient en sortaient toutes tordues … Il est certain que l'esprit s'atrophie dans un corps manqué.”²⁶ After recalling the macabre ending of Hugo's novel, we have even more reason to suspect that Giono's narrator may have driven Julie to suicide because he could possess her only in death.²⁷

Aside from having certain fictional resemblances to Quasimodo, our narrator, due to his absorption with death, also resembles other “bossus” of Giono, and in particular the Jérôme called Toussaint in Le Chant du monde (Paris, 1934). We have gathered that “je” was either a lawyer or a clerk, and the latter supposition imposes itself when we recall that Toussaint, who was also frustrated in his love for Marguerite, was commonly called “le clerc de notaire.”²⁸ In Le Moulin, “je” discusses the Coste destiny with the local notary, M. Didier. We also infer that the narrator handled Julie's affairs after her death, when in the living room of her château, he examined a painting of Coste's wife with its “drapeau des Amalécites” (p. 39). Unlike Amalek, which according to Exodus 17:8-16 was destroyed by the rod of God, Julie's fate, or the Coste destiny, was to desire destruction: “elle allait mourir, somme toute, de cette belle mort tant desirée par toute cette famille d'Amalécites” (p. 233). Thus, the narrator wrote her story, from generation to generation, much as Jehovah commanded Moses to do for Amalek.²⁹

Although, as we have seen, the narrator is a fictional character for whom the author feels little affinity, the contrary is true for the victim Julie. It is she alone, the scapegoat and the object of hatred and persecution, who has his sympathy. As the reader knows that Julie's face was only half beautiful, so one may recall with Henri Peyre the memorable sentence he quoted from Jean le bleu (1932): “The tragic thing about our lives is that we are nothing but halves.”³⁰ Just as Jean (Giono) viewed the world in blue, so does Julie: “Les hommes de loi s'occupèrent du Moulin de Pologne … Avec Julie, ils avaient trouvé à qui parler, ou plus exactement, à qui ne pas parler. Elle les entretint d'un monde bleu où ils n'avaient que faire” (p. 108). It is Giono and Julie who are fond of music, and Julie who caused a “scandale” (p. 104) by singing at “une certaine messe de Pâques” (p. 103) “un alleluia ou un In dulcis jubilo …” The narrator's conclusion is: “Nous sommes des chrétiens, bien sûr, mais il ne faut jamais trop demander à personne” (p. 104). That Julie was persecuted must be attributed to “la comédie” of life itself; that “nous” may be excused for this persecution is implied in the narrator's question (p. 139): “Qui n'a pas ses désespoirs?”

The more one reflects upon the Moulin de Pologne, the more one admires the perfection of this work. The technical mastery of Jean Giono, who celebrated in 1952 his twenty-third year as a distinguished novelist, is a source of delight, as are his patience and his skill in creating in this novel unity and an appearance of simplicity, which upon examination (and his study by no means exhausts the literary affiliations of the Moulin de Pologne) prove to contain such a multiplicity of tightly meshed threads: French history, fairy tale, mythology, an atmosphere of anxious suspense, and significant characterizations. After the feelings of fear and pity for Julie's death have subsided, and after the condemnation of the narrator has been made, filed, and digested, there still remains in the reader's mind the moral lesson, which cannot be so easily dismissed, a moral lesson which haunts and rankles: to the collectivity Julie was expendable; for this artistic person, the bell tolled. Therefore, Jean Giono as a novelist, and in the Moulin de Pologne, by virtue of his lessoning the reader severely, stands squarely in the ranks of the great moralists of France.

Notes

1. This passage is cited from a letter, dated Manosque, 7.2.65, which Mr. Giono wrote to me in answer to my questions.

2. All page numbers refer to the 48th edition of Gallimard, Paris, 1952. This novel appears also in the Livre de Poche series, and in English, translated by Peter de Mendelssohn under the title The Malediction, New York, 1955. In this case, see Le Moulin, p. 79.

3. In the famous French prose version of this tale, La Belle au bois dormant by Charles Perrault, from Contes de ma mère Loye, Paris, 1697, the heroine is not named. Perrault gives names only to the two children of the princess: Aurore (the daughter) and Jour (the son). The name Aurore, with tragic associations similar to those made with Julie, does occur in Giono's Que ma joie demeure, Paris, 1935; in this earlier case. Aurore commits suicide (see pp. 93 and 465).

4. For these references, see Le Moulin, pp. 97 and 105, 98 and 136, 144-146, and 173.

5. For examples of these traits applied to M. Joseph, see Le Moulin, pp. 33, 13, 14 and 7.

6. Ibid., pp. 37 and 51, for example.

7. For a history of the Sleeping Beauty legend through the seventeenth-century version of Charles Perrault, see Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder—Und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, Erster Band, Nr. 1-60, Hildesheim, 1963, p. 434 ff. Bolte and Polívka establish the medieval prose romance of Perceforest (Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 346, or ed. Galliot du Pré, Paris, 1528) as the original version of this tale. In Perceforest are found the essential elements which later writers followed: the birth of the king's daughter Zellandine, three goddesses invited to her christening, the curse that she would fall asleep for one hundred years after having pricked her finger on a flax awn, the arrival of Prince Troylus, and a happy ending after the birth of their son. Before the familiar version of Perrault, the story had appeared as the fifth tale in Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, usually referred to as Il Pentamerone, of 1637. Basile called his version Sole Luna e Talia. The only possible recollection by Giono of this Italian version, it seems to me, is the heroine's name, Julie, which is somewhat similar to Basile's heroine, Talia. The opening phrase, Era na vota, is similar to the Il était une fois of Perrault. The nineteenth-century version of the Brothers Grimm, Dornröschen, translated into English as Briar Rose (Grimm's Fairy Tales, trans. Mrs. E. V. Lucas, Lucy Crane and Marian Edwardes, New York, undated, pp. 101-106), is a much happier and less macabre tale than that of Perrault. Giono's recollections, then, are close to the Perrault tale. Julie's characteristics are similar to those of Sleeping Beauty, and they correspond to the seven gifts of the fairy godmothers. The words “ogre” and “ogresse” also occur in Perrault, where they apply to the wicked mother-in-law, or to popular superstition. See also F. Vogt (Dornröschen-Talia, Breslau, 1896), who traces this legend to a Greek vegetation myth of Thalia—Hephaestus—Hera—Zeus.

8. Although we shall have occasion to speak further of this fatal curse which hangs over the Coste family and the Moulin de Pologne, Giono does compare it to “la peste” (see p. 16, for example). M. Joseph might, then, be grouped with Giono's Angélo and Camus' Dr. Rieux whom Léon-Francois Hoffmann called recently modern heroes because each “par son action personnelle, peut contrecarrer les forces obscures de l'inconscient collectif.” See La Peste à Barcelone (Princeton University, Paris, 1964), p. 85.

9. The fact that the narrator is “le personnage central” of Le Moulin de Pologne was first established by Pierre R. Robert in Chapter I (La Narration), pp. 17-19, in Jean Giono et les techniques du roman, University of California Press, 1961.

10. See Le Moulin, p. 36, for example.

11. Aside from the works on mythology by Sir James Frazer, Andrew Lang, Stephane Mallarmé, Pierre Gordon and Jessie Weston, to name only a few outstanding contributors to this field, The Philosophy of Symbolic Form by the late Ernst Cassirer (Yale University Press, 1955) is of particular pertinence. See especially Parts I and II, Chapters I and II for the structure of the myth. See also an earlier example of what Cassirer describes as mythological thinking in François Rabelais, Chapters XXVII and XXVIII of Le Quart Livre, where Pantagruel discourses “sus la discession des ames héroiques” and on “le trespas des héroes,” ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Schéler (Paris, 1959), pp. 612-619.

12. For usual characterizations of the god in ancient cults, see Thespis by Theodor Gaster (New York, 1961), Section 14, p. 34 ff.; and Le Moulin, pp. 15-19.

13. This reference in Le Moulin to the local slaughter house (p. 120 ff.) very possibly contains a hidden and personal meaning for Giono himself, since he says, while discussing his methods of composition in Noé (Paris, 1947): “Et, dans le faubourg de l'abbattoir, … j'ai installé les paysages de Dostoiëwski,” and later when asked if he will write about his own prison experience, “Certes non, dis-je, pour le faire, il faut y avoir passé longtemps, être Latude ou Dostoievsky …” (Noé, pp. 12 and 163). In other words, there seems to be some connection between Le Moulin de Pologne and Giono's own life.

14. See Leviticus 16:22, and for a human scapegoat or popular victim in ancient Greece, see Thespis, pp. 34-35, 37, 54 and Note 104. Giono's knowledge and use of Greek culture and thought is well studied in Christian Michelfelder's Jean Giono et les religions de la terre, Paris, 1938.

15. See Les Pages mystiques de Nietzsche by Armand Quinot, Paris, 1945 and 1954, under Index explicatif du vocabulaire théosophique de Nietzsche, p. 297: “objet de lumineuse perception extatique, la couleur verte, pour cette raison entre autres, devient couleur dionysiaque.”

16. See Thespis, p. 276.

17. For this custom in southern France, see B. de Saintyves, Essais de folklore biblique, Paris, 1923, p. 42 ff.

18. As we shall see, violent death in this novel is horrifying only to the reader—not to the narrator, and not to Julie. It is possible that there is here some idea of suicide as being a “victory,” as in Nietzsche. Quinot defines “victoire” (Les Pages mystiques, p. 297) as “salut dionysien.” The suicide of Aurore already mentioned as occurring in Que ma joie demeure is thus qualified by Giono (pp. 465-6): “Avec ses éclaboussures de cervelle et de sang rayonnantes autour d'elle, elle éclairait l'herbe et le monde comme un térrible soleil.”

19. The preceding verse of La Fontaine could also be taken, as we shall see, to qualify our narrator:

              Tous les mangeurs de gens ne sont
    pas grands seigneurs; …

    See Fables et œuvres diverses, ed. C. A. Walcknær (Paris, 1874), p. 94, for Fable XVI: Le Corbeau voulant imiter l'aigle.

20. See Le Moulin, p. 204.

21. As a matter of fact, Giono sketched the outline of the Coste story as early as Jean le bleu (Paris, 1932). After his illness, the child Jean was sent to Corbières to recuperate. While there at the home of the Massot family, he witnessed the suicides of Costelet and of Costes, and heard Julie Costelet screaming (p. 131 ff.). It is therefore of very great interest to see how twenty years of dreaming (p. 143) about what was apparently a real experience of childhood culminated in a work so meticulously studied as Le Moulin de Pologne (see Claudine Chonez' Giono par lui-même (Le Seuil, 1956), p. 59).

    The fact that Jean le bleu is to some degree, at least, a source from which the mature Giono drew inspiration and material was noted by Giono's great admirer, Henry Miller, who in 1950 devoted chapter five of The Books in My Life (New York) to Jean Giono. Miller says (p. 108): “In Blue Boy he gives us the genesis of a writer, telling it with the consummate art of a practised writer. One feels that he is a ‘born writer.’”

22. Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842), a famous antarctic explorer, perished, as Giono's narrator says, in the train wreck of Versailles. We have thus one date for our story, which could set the arrival of Coste and his daughters in the town as much as twenty years earlier. Giono would have us imagine Coste as an émigré returning from Mexico to France around 1820. This date is historically understandable, corresponding then to the period of revolution in Mexico which culminated in a short-lived empire (1821-1823). Even the name Coste is reminiscent of the Mexican priest, revolutionary and national hero, Hidalgo y Costilla (1753-1811). Coste's death by tetanus poisoning, his “rire tétanique” is perhaps an attempt on Giono's part to suggest the call to arms of Hidalgo y Costilla, the grito de dolores. A further similarity is the description of Coste and his daughters, who seem intended as Creoles like the Mexican revolutionary. M. Joseph also came from Mexico and is associated with Pancho Villa (see pp. 14-15).

23. The reader arrives at the narrator's age at this point. Julie is thirty at the death of her parents, and she is six years younger than Jean, who is the same age as the narrator. At thirty-six, then, the sinister narrator is “un jeune homme qui promettait” (p. 110).

24. Jacques Pugnet demonstrated of Giono's characters that “leur comportement est moins observé qu'imaginé” Jean Giono (Paris, 1955), p. 69.

25. The narrator prides himself on a knowledge of human nature, a clear characteristic of Giono himself. Like him, he is a spectator of human relations, and like Giono he has “l'ouïe fine” (p. 159) and eyes “exercés et sagaces” (p. 144). In one respect, finally, it is impossible not to see Giono in the narrator, and that is in his use of imagery derived from country life and animals. Although “je” is a city dweller, he observes that Sophie walks “comme les canards” (p. 29), that the girls at the ball assume “des immobilités de biches entendant le cor” (p. 129), that Hortense wanted “le posséder comme un taon possède un bœuf” (p. 89), that M. Joseph “récoltait beaucoup de saluts” (p. 33), and again that Hortense was a “femme forte comme un cheval … mangeant de la viande saignante, buvant sec, se crottant sans souci et portant ostensiblement du toc par esprit combatif” (p. 37). The narrator, then, carefully imagined so that he is unlike Giono in his character traits, still resembles him in the way he plays with words and in his exploration of their precise meanings, since common words such as “hope” and “promise” either take on a new and sinister connotation as they come from his pen, or are susceptible of redefinition: “je parle de passion maternelle (loin de moi de parler d'amour maternel) …” (p. 91). It is in respect to language that Giono was classed by Jacques Pugnet as a modern novelist: “Nous ne pouvons refuser à Giono, un des créateurs de notre langage, le titre de contemporain.” See Jean Giono, p. 132, and Style in the French Novel by Stephen Ullmann, Cambridge, 1957, pp. 217-231, where the imagery of Regain, characteristic of Giono, is studied.

26. See Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. Eugène Fasquelle (Paris, 1832), v. I, p. 173. Hugo also describes Quasimodo (p. 80) as “robuste, agile, méchant,” much like “je.”

27. There are many resemblances, in my opinion, between Giono and Hugo. There are also references to Hugo's characters and situations elsewhere in Giono, as, for example, in Noé, pp. 105 and 301.

28. See Le Chant du monde, p. 143, and for Toussaint's frustrated love, p. 174 ff. Contrary to the treatment of “je,” Giono describes Toussaint completely (pp. 115-143). Like our narrator, Toussaint says: “on a besoin de haïr fortement” (p. 143). For him, perhaps also, death is “la force pure” (p. 231). Since Toussaint is a healer, we might also suggest that “je” healed Julie of her ill, by helping her die, or become mistress of her destiny.

29. It seems quite clear, after a study of the various references to Amalek in the Old Testament, that Giono had in mind the longest one, that of Exodus, unless, to be sure, he adopted his auxiliary narrator partly out of respect for the counter injunction in Deuteronomy 25:17-19: “tu effaceras la mémoire d'Amalek de dessous les cieux: ne l'oublie point.”

30. See The Contemporary French Novel (New York, 1955), p. 136.