[In the following essay, Goodrich explores the role of bachelors in fiction in Giono's and others' work, concentrating on a comparison between Les Grands Chemins and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.]

When Pierre-Henri Simon noted in Témoins de l'homme (Paris, 1951, p. 190) that we are now witnessing in fiction a century without women characters, he stated a fact undoubtedly true for a great many modern novels created by authors generally considered outstanding. However, the novel based upon a love story involving a desirable heroine follows only one novelistic tradition. As early as the sixteenth century authors had demonstrated that fiction can rise to great heights, indeed, when the problem of love is reduced to a minimum, with women as coveted objects incidentally introduced, relegated to shadowy presence in the periphery, or entirely absent. In the twentieth century certain writers of fiction, as we shall see from the following few examples, have, particularly by studying a pair of bachelors, scrutinized problems which concern men: money, occupations, friendship, responsibility to another, and the nature of man himself.

It may very well have been Balzac, perhaps following the idea central to Le Tiers livre, who inaugurated in French fiction the general subject of celibacy, when for Scènes de la vie de province he chose that theme for three works entitled Les Célibataires: Pierrette (1839), Le Curé de Tours (1832), and La Rabouilleuse (1842). His condemnation of bachelordom is unequivocal, for he pits “ces deux célibataires,” the brother and sister Rogron and Sylvie from the first story—with their evil hearts and their love of money, bourgeois comforts, and political power—against an innocent child. In this Cinderella-type story, Balzac explains, as he studies “les immondices du cœur humain,” that because of their isolation, celibates replace natural affections by factitious ones: the love for dogs, cats, canaries, etc. In the third story the original bachelor is the imbecilic Rouget with his shrimp-netting mistress vs. outsiders to the family circle at Issoudun. Balzac afflicts Rouget with physical and moral timidity.

In Le Curé de Tours Balzac grapples more closely with the problem. Here with unforgettable artistry he tells of the pitiful Abbé Birotteau, aged 60, “très mouton de sa nature,” “grassouillet,” his face reflecting good humor devoid of ideas. His adversary is Abbé Troubert, aged 50, whose orange-colored eyes betray his “haute et profonde ambition.” Naturally, Birotteau is defeated and despoiled by Troubert, seconded by the vicious spinster (“célibataire”) Mademoiselle Gamard. Completely opposite, then, Birotteau yielded perforce to “ce grand sec” whose vaulted shoulders resembled yellow arches. The pitiful hero is disarmingly frank and expansive, easily diverted, “sans fiel ni malice,” a plump man who rolled when he walked, juxtaposed to a gaunt man illustrating in his person “les forces des gens solitaires.” These clerics are, if we omit Panurge and Pantagruel, perhaps the first carefully distinguished and well-known pair of bachelors in French fiction.

The characters of bachelors, portrayed in a manner very opposite to that of Balzac, of course, interested Charles Dickens in 1837 when he gave us the four charming Pickwickians, two of whom remain celibate to the end. Smollett had already, and with equal tenderness, painted a comic bachelor in the neurasthenic Matthew Bramble. More to our pattern here, however, is Flaubert's last work in which he also chose as central characters, not two enemies, as in Balzac, but two friends, the widower Bouvard and the bachelor Pécuchet. Although both 47-year-old men are copyists, both weary of the city and longing for the country, both addicted to the same crazes, both snorers in the moonlight furnished with the same political views and desires, and equally fond of each other, Bouvard is methodically differentiated from his partner. The former appears amiable, is taller, wears linen garments and a hat on the back of his head, has half-closed bluish eyes, curly blond hair, and a childish face. Pécuchet appears grave, is shorter, wears a brown redingote too large for him and a cap with a pointed visor, has flat, black hair, and—always disconcerting in a little man—possesses a deep, cavernous voice. Even though they soon come to resemble each other, to borrow, in fact, each other's distinctive traits until “l'union … était absolue et profonde,” Bouvard's confidence, giddiness, and generosity oppose Pécuchet's discretion, parsimony, and meditativeness. Flaubert still has not finished establishing the givens: on their last day at the office, Bouvard offered punch to his fellow employees, while Pécuchet slammed the door as he departed. Bouvard was sad to leave his apartment, while Pécuchet, glad to be going, maliciously carved his name on the fireplace. On the way to Chavignolles, one took the coach, and by this time we can easily guess which one, while the other rode on the baggage cart. That first night in their new domain, Bouvard slept on his back, but the less secure Pécuchet slept on his side.¹

The situation of famous bachelors in French fiction at the turn of the century indicated that prose fiction could sustain a story with little or no love interest. Inheriting that tradition, Balzac contributed the following addition: (1) the problem of two bachelors is challenging to a novelist, (2) the pair must be carefully differentiated to orient the reader, (3) it seems psychologically sound to set one against the other (since bachelors are by the pressures of society and because of their own frustrations theoretically evil and unnatural), and (4) it is an excellent idea to enlist pity in the reader as he sees the weaker destroyed by the stronger bachelor. A recollection of Bouvard et Pécuchet finds Flaubert conditionally agreeing with Balzac's propositions 1 and 2, but disagreeing flatly with 3. As far as pity is concerned, Flaubert seems to have thought that bachelors in their union have no need of it; if they are comic, they are also and at the same time, tragic, but in their relationship to culture.

In 1930 a young novelist with several best-sellers already to his credit, published a collection of 20 short stories entitled for the first story, Solitude de la pitié. Thus Jean Giono opened what appears to me, at least, to have developed over the years into a dialogue between himself and his contemporary, the American novelist John Steinbeck. The keynote of this collection is stated in the title: pity for one's fellow man. The title story, barely 15 pages in length, tells with much subtlety how two penniless men travel by coach to a neighboring city in search of work, appeal to the local priest, who, after having set them to the perilous job of repairing his well, cheats them of their due so that they recover for their pains only the minimal coin required for their fare. One man is big, wears a hat (Bouvard), and provides for the other whom he helps and protects. The thin man “floated” in a gray cloak much too large for him (Pécuchet). He was apparently dying, either of disease or of starvation, for his neck, “décharné comme une tresse de fer,” rose with its prominent Adam's apple from the threadbare “houppelande.” His “regard de mouton” (Birotteau) pierced people from blue eyes “immobiles comme de l'eau morte.” As he stands shivering in the cold night air, on muddy feet, he sees through others “l'âme triste du monde.” These unnamed bachelors do not feel united, as in Flaubert: “Je suis seul,” says the big man, who fends for the other, decides for him, works for him even at the risk of life and limb, covers him from the cold with his own clothing, encourages him with a myth of eventual subsistence, and pledges to remain by his side. The little man is, like the author, clairvoyant. His gaze leaves a ring of pus around its impact point; others are rotten. The pair travels alone together, victimized by persons who should have shown them, if not charity, at least honesty in their dealings. In this story the thin man, “le maigre,” attracts the narrative focus to his person. When the big man climbs twenty meters down into the dark well, for example, the narrator stops in the courtyard, describing sights and sounds seen by “the other.” This particular story, along with Jean Giono's La Femme du boulanger, has appeared regularly, thanks to the discernment of Henri Peyre,² in college textbooks since 1935.

A characterization of bachelors, which is both comic and tragic, and because of its impersonality similar to the credo of Flaubert, is Henry de Montherlant's Les Célibataires (1934). Of the three bachelors here, the most important are the uncle and nephew, Elie de Coëtquidan and Léon de Coantré, aged 64 and 53 respectively. These “deux magots” wear (Giono's) “houppelandes.” The virginal Baron de Coëtquidan, an imbecile with a good memory, steals food from the kitchen, turns up the heat surreptitiously, does not care at all if his nephew is left penniless, and is, in short, as “mauvais” as Balzac's bachelors. He pushes and trips children, insults people by letter, renounces importance of any kind because he declines the inconvenience of a daily hour-long bus trip, and suffers from timidity aggravated by two sentiments caused by his shabby clothing and his impotence.

In this masterful novel the uncle abandons the nephew after four years of living together. Léon, the helpless one of the pair, a poor man who has neither situation, ambition, nor any love of money, although once excellent in music, in Latin poetry, and in painting, might have become an inventor, but he preferred manual labor. In his early years he had been supported by his mother, who feared that he might attempt suicide a second time. Once pushed out into the world, this aged fledgling soon dies of neglect, of humiliation, and perhaps also of malnutrition. The third bachelor, Baron Octave de Coëtquidan, on guard over his manias and prejudices, succeeds in remaining comfortably isolated from grim reality. He plays at being modern, affects to read English, adopts American habits (including a rocking chair), and is bested by Elie. As far as bachelors in general are concerned, says Montherlant, “le monde est cette balle au bout d'un élastique: ils ont beau l'envoyer loin d'eux, il leur revient avec prestesse.” It is a world in which no one is his nephew's keeper: “ce qu'il y a de tragique chez les anxieux, c'est qu'ils ont toujours raison de l'être.” Les Célibataires of Montherlant, tragi-comic like Bouvard et Pécuchet, ignores the affirmation in Giono.

When these superb works of fiction are thus recalled together, they still seem vigorously to pursue their colloquy, with the voices of their authors asserting each his own point of view, insisting upon his own variation upon the theme: Dickens and Flaubert vs. Balzac, Balzac and Montherlant vs. Giono. The debate resumed dramatically in 1937 in the United States, and by November of that year in France, on Giono's insistent question: Am I my brother's keeper? when John Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men, translated in 1939 as Des Souris et des hommes. Thus two individualistic and powerful novelists, so similar in age, in background, in native locale (California and Provence), in interests, and particularly so similar in their sense of compassion for the unfortunate and the suffering underprivileged, meet in a similar bachelor fiction.³

Just as in Solitude de la pitié we have two bachelors one of whom protects the other, originally the memorable pair of George and Lennie in Steinbeck's masterful novel and play. As in Giono, it is the weaker one, Lennie, who appears intended as the real hero, and not George.⁴ In every instance Steinbeck narrates the book, divided into six chapters taking place (1) beside the Salinas River, (2) and (3) inside the bunkhouse, (4) inside Crooks' room, (5) inside the barn, and (6) beside the Salinas River, from a vantage point which allows him to see and to focus upon Lennie. The narrator does not, for example, follow George into town, any more than Giono followed his strong character. Only Lennie's sick mind is explored, as in Chapter VI through the vision of Aunt Clara and the giant rabbit. The narrator's pity and preference, in fact, seem lavished precisely upon those whom Curley's wife calls “the weak ones”: Lennie, Candy, Crooks, and herself.

The babyish Lennie constantly pleads to leave the ranch because it is “mean” there. He worries, like “le maigre” in Giono, for fear that George will abandon him,—not only Crooks' warning, but also that of the rabbit. Curley's wife, similar to Aurélie in Giono's story and celebrated film, La Femme du boulanger, when once the meanness, the discontent, and the ache are “gone from her face,” is finally, and to the narrator also, “pretty” in death. The prolonged episode of Candy's dog, perhaps repeated as Salamano's dog by Albert Camus in L'Etranger, serves two purposes: to create sympathy for Candy, and to underline the true character of Slim. In the end, the strong ones of the story abandon the weak ones, two of whom are killed, and two of whom plunge, in postures of self-defense, into hopelessness. Like the old dog, and like “l'autre” or “le maigre” in Solitude de la pitié, Curley's wife remains forever nameless.

As Of Mice and Men ends, we are left to continue the fiction ourselves with another pair of bachelors, George and Slim. Steinbeck's technique in the case of Slim subtly counterbalances deeds and words. The narrator tells us first that Slim is majestic, royal, masterful, capable (and “capable of killing …”), grave, profound, authoritative, hatchetfaced, with delicate hands like “those of a temple dancer.” Since Slim is so wise, his first reaction, that George and Lennie travel together because of fear, must be weighed. When the narrator turns from telling to showing, we learn how Slim drowned the puppies. To George, Slim is “God-like,” and George therefore speaks to him “on the tone of confession.” Neither George nor Lennie is intelligent, but Slim, who is very intelligent, says: “Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.” The real condemnations of Slim date from his approval of and insistence upon the death of Candy's old dog,—where he even reminds Carlson to “take a shovel.” Slim feels “horror” for Lennie after seeing how strong he is; and the next time we meet Slim, he is condemning Lennie to death. He approves the murder, invites George to set out with him afterwards, and departs with him. It is perhaps because of Slim that George fails to protect Lennie, “changes” towards Lennie, and repudiates Candy.

Both Giono and Steinbeck in these works set a time for the elapsing of their fictions; in the earlier work the repairing of the well occurs ironically during the music lesson given by the priest to a privileged youngster. The curé, although he enjoys books and music, although he is intelligent, is devoid of compassion. In this case the narrator-author prejudicates his fictional world from the blind, dark courtyard. Steinbeck's novel begins at the Salinas River, a good place to behold visions, as Lennie does there. The narrator also, in a sense, sees visions there because Of Mice and Men comes “from out of” his head, or takes place in the author's mind between the inbound and the outbound flights of herons as a “water snake slipped along the pool, its head up like a little periscope.” Thus, we grasp in Steinbeck the logic of the change in tense after the first two paragraphs,—from the author's present to the narrative past of fiction, which, once fabricated, is wafted upwards and out just after the heron “labored up into the air and pounded down river” (see pp. 9 and 173).⁵ Giono's implied conclusion, that education and intelligence have not bred pity among the favored, is also implied by Steinbeck. Giono's original contention, I am my brother's keeper, is negated by Steinbeck. The dialogue between the two novelists, however, does not end there.

In 1951 Jean Giono returned to bachelor fiction in a novel entitled Les Grands chemins. This work is so different from what admirers of Giono expected from him in the post-war years that it has thus far passed without critical attention. Les Grands chemins is, first of all, a psychological novel, from an author otherwise unconcerned with psychology. Secondly, it is Giono's only “American” novel to date, and thus a topical novel reflecting in its vocabulary American intervention during and following World War II,—⁶ and this from an author who had been supremely content in his pre-war fiction to write glowing pastorals somewhat similar to Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. And thirdly, it is a novel virtually unrecognizable, perhaps totally unrecognizable, as having been produced by Jean Giono. The book is written neither in Giono's voice nor with his usual imagery. The story is told by a nameless bachelor, who as one of a pair, resembles Steinbeck's George. Giono's narrator is, however, an accused hedonist, an opportunist, a manipulator of people and of situations, a total cynic, who while wanting to dominate the other bachelor (l'artiste) searches for affection; and he is a murderer.

With a new and uncompromising lucidity which makes the reader very uncomfortable, and with admirable fearlessness, Jean Giono thus ventures upon the Freudian terrain of the Oedipus complex to probe beyond the George-Lennie relationship, as it can be imagined by the reader of Mice and Men. This Giono novel, then, and just as in Steinbeck's earlier work, deals with a pair of bachelors, one strong and one weak, where the stronger protects the weaker, and finally, rather than lose him, and in order to lose him, shoots him in the face. The murder takes place, with equally ironic protestations of love and tenderness, in a secluded glen or hollow.⁷ The potential murderer is also given a gun by another character, M. Albert, who here performs the function of Slim; and the murderer is disculpated, congratulated, approved by a grateful society, and therefore dismissed. The murder is, as in Steinbeck, preceded by the excited organization of a posse, or “battue,” which the murderer outdistances. The other bachelor is also summarily executed, and also presumably, because he had strangled a woman. As in Steinbeck, Les Grands chemins deals with migrant workers and/or homeless wanderers, with their relationships to other men,⁸ and with their card games. The women in the book are specifically regarded with contempt by the narrator, or seen merely as willing objects of sexual gratification; and in either case their roles are incidental.

The virile blond narrator in Les Grands chemins, aged under 45, remarks that he has previously assisted a Paris psychiatrist to study prostitution. During the course of his relationship with the girlish, salivating “artiste” or cardsharp whom he befriends, he works at various temporary jobs. Why does he cling to the weaker man? Because of an “amitié” which he fails to comprehend, and also because “tout le monde a son type maigre” (p. 161). He sues the artiste for his company because the latter, by having cheated him at cards, has in a sense mastered him: “Si quelqu'un vous trompe et vous dupe, il est … votre maître … Il ne vous reste qu'à l'aimer ou à le tuer” (p. 159). The artiste wants no ties while the narrator, uncertain as to the mobiles behind his actions, seeks nonetheless “un peu d'amitié,” “la gentillesse,” “un peu d'attention,” “je ne sais pas ce que j'aimerais,” “quelque chose de valable, en bien ou en mal,” “un évènement quelconque,” “une certitude” (pp. 189-191). The bachelors may be friends, in the sense of traveling companions one of whom twice rescues the other, but they are also “ennemis intimes et d'autant plus inséparables.” As long as the dark, curly-haired artiste proves by strangling a woman that his injured hands have healed so that he can presumably rely again upon legerdemain at cards, his doom is sealed. Giono has made the meaning of this murder doubly significant by prefacing in an epigraph Claudius' request to Hamlet not to go to Wittenberg (i.e., if he leaves, he will be murdered).

In Les Grands chemins Jean Giono explores the relationship between two bachelors even further than Steinbeck in Of Mice and Men, inasmuch as the narrator attempts to discover what he means by friendship, why he plots to keep the artiste continually in leading strings, and also why his feelings towards the other are so ambivalent. The Giono novel is told in the first person by a narcissistic narrator whom the reader, struggling against the habits of a lifetime, must constantly remember not to admire. In fact, the reader can identify even less with Giono's narrator than with Bardamu, haunted by his mysteriously recurring Robinson, in Céline's notoriously first-person novel of 1932, Voyage au bout de la nuit. Giono seems to be saying that while there is some brotherly affection in a man which impels him tenderly to be his friend's keeper, there is, he finally concurs with Steinbeck, also another feeling, equally powerful but subterranean, the hatred which made Cain kill his brother.

As the reader fits the pieces together, it was the victim (ultimately discovered to haven been born at Algiers of unknown parentage, and named Victor André) who gambled with his own life. The artiste, who always sleeps open knife in hand, had acquired in prison the taste for playing without safety net, “sans plafond.” His “victory” lay, then, in forcing society to put an end to what he was: “C'est même une preuve qu'on ne pouvait pas mettre fin autrement à ce qu'il est” (p. 255).⁹ The narrator killed him in the daylight because “les jours d'amour sont meilleurs que les nuits d'amour” (p. 254). Thus, Giono ends the book, or the perplexing and uninterrupted flood of words¹⁰ which have attempted for 255 pages to ensnare the reader until, forgetting himself, he too condones murder as a solution. By such a narrative device Giono demonstrates again the power and the uses of modern fiction, since the reader's reaction before such trickery is one of anger, exactly what the author desired. The reader does not, in fact, lay the book aside either without theorizing that Jean Giono has again used in fiction a concrete example of our modern crisis. We follow his demonstration to its end where, abandoned by the author, we are tempted to conclude by ourselves that the narrator's victory illustrated an illusory and, surely, a temporary triumph of day over night, of the ‘blond beast’ over the dark artist, or of the Apollonian over the Dionysian hero,—or of Germany over France.

By writing Les Grands chemins Giono seems again to have recognized America and American fiction, and to have acknowledged Steinbeck's artistry in Of Mice and Men; but he seems also to have considered that this American novel required an emendation lest the reader conclude that George is the hero, and that murder is the best way to handle Lennie's case. Cain's punishment, that of wanderer and fugitive, would be no deterrent to George or to Giono's narrator, both only re-confirmed in their right to violence. Furthermore, Giono again attested to the fact that bachelors continue a proper subject for fiction, inspiring variations in theme and in technique, supplying the novelist with a pretext for querying the very nature of man with his need for responsibility and friendship, and his propensity to errantry and violence. In addition, Giono used fiction for the purpose of inducing in the reader a heightened awareness of himself, of his culture, and of his values. With Steinbeck, he has wondered whether or not our education has developed in us a sense of compassion, whether we are not all, as his narrator suggests for himself, Stanleys responsible for Livingstones.

Notes

1. Similarly, in Maupassant's story Deux amis (from Mademoiselle Fifi) M. Morisot (“horloger,” “pantouflard”) is differentiated to some extent from M. Sauvage (“mercier,” “petit homme replet et jovial”). Both are, however, “pêcheurs fanatiques” or “enragés,” “hommes doux et bornés,” with “des goûts semblables et des sensations identiques.” When M. Morisot's eyes filled with tears just before he was shot, we learn that he was the taller of the two.

2. Contes modernes, ed. Henri Peyre and Yale University (New York, Evanston, and London).

3. Of Mice and Men has been known in France since the November, 1937, review of it in the Mercure de France. It was translated by Maurice E. Coindreau (1939, 1946, 1948), who in his Introduction refers to Jean Giono. “In 1940 only the literari had known Steinbeck. In 1944 his name was a symbol of resistance and known by the average man in the street. And Gide's praise of In Dubious Battle (see Gide's entry in his Journal for Sept. 27, 1940) and comparison of Steinbeck's stories to Chekhov's had not hurt his initial reputation,” say Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner in Transatlantic Migrations (Duke University, 1955, p. 164). “The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939,” says Jean-Paul Sartre in “American Novelists in French Eyes” (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1946, pp. 114-8) “was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck.” Jean Simon in Le Roman américain au XX^e siècle (Paris, 1950, p. 169) calls Of Mice and Men “une pure œuvre d'art.” Pierre Brodin had already pointed out in Les Écrivains américains de l'entre deux guerres (Paris, 1946, pp. 247 ff.) that this work “est le livre de Steinbeck le plus connu des Français.”

   Steinbeck and Giono were again associated by Maxwell Geismar in Writers in Crisis: the American Novel between Two Wars (Boston, 1942, p. 239 ff.): “Steinbeck's To a God Unknown retrogresses to the fallacious, primitive thinking of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Jean Giono, and Sherwood Anderson.” They were associated again in 1948 by the French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny in her essay, “Steinbeck, or the Limits of the Impersonal Novel” (reprinted by Tedlock Jr., E. W. and C. V. Wicker in Steinbeck and His Critics, Albuquerque, 1957, pp. 216-227). Joseph Warren Beach in the same collection (pp. 80-91) associated Steinbeck with Maupassant, and generally with “the great tradition in European writing.” Jean Giono quotes John Steinbeck in the epigraph to a play, Le Voyage en callèche (Monaco, 1946).

   Walter Allen in The Modern Novel in Britain and the United States (New York, 1964), on the other hand, places Steinbeck rather in an American tradition, saying that Of Mice and Men “is another example of what might be called the eternal American ‘buddy novel’ with its inescapable suggestion of latent homosexuality” (p. 163).

4. R. Ganapathy in “Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: A Study in Lyricism through Primitivism” (Literary Criterion, V, University of Mysore, 1962, pp. 101-104) feels that Lennie is the hero when he says: “Our sympathies are already with Lennie, however bad and primitive he might be, and his death comes as a shock to us. … The Modern Indian … is perhaps more fortunately situated to receive Steinbeck than the Americans themselves.” See also Harry Slochower's No Voice is Wholly Lost (New York, 1945), p. 299; and Margaret C. Roane's “John Steinbeck as a Spokesman for the Mentally Retarded” (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, V (1964), pp. 127-132).

   Charles C. Wolcutt in American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (University of Minnesota, 1956) finds Lennie and George “spirit and power inchoate, mixed in chaos rather than fused in form” (p. 262). See also Warren French's John Steinbeck (New York, 1961); Stanley E. Hyman's “Some Notes on John Steinbeck” (The Antioch Review, June, 1942); Joseph W. Beach's American Fiction, 1920-1940 (New York, 1941), pp. 307-347; Joseph Fontenrose's John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1963); and such bibliographies as those of Walter Rahn (München, 1962), and Hildegard Schumann (Halle, 1958).

5. See the Random House edition (New York) with an Introduction by Joseph Henry Jackson.

6. Examples of contemporary allusions in this book (Gallimard, Livre de Poche) are as follows: “Indochine,” “Vincent Auriol,” “La Russie” (pp. 112, 142); “ravie de voter” (p. 149); “torpilleur” (p. 234), “planète Mars” (p. 161).

   Specifically American vocabulary is as follows: “un gilette” (p. 236), “New York” (pp. 149, 150), “la chute de Niagara” (p. 233), “imperméable américain” (pp. 219, 238, 251, 252), “gentleman” (p. 178), “baby-foot” (p. 147), “musique de nègre” pp. 137, 150), “hammerless” (p. 242), “cigarette américaine” (pp. 35, 106), “bombe atomique” (p. 218), “poker” (pp. 64, 107), “tracteur américain” (pp. 40, 45), “armée américaine” (p. 87), “des salopettes américaines, des canadiennes de ‘surplus’” (p. 49), “un Nègre” (p. 20).

7. See Peter Liscar's Chapter 8 (p. 135, in particular) from The Wide World of John Steinbeck (Rutgers University, 1958): “Sometimes … this retreat has explicit overtones of a return to the womb and rebirth.” Giono has capitalized upon this same significance by having his narrator cling amorously to women in kitchens, to warm cooking ranges, to food and drink, etc. See also E. C. Richard's “The Challenge of John Steinbeck” (North American Review, CCXL, 1937, p. 412). “The world of John Steinbeck's novels is a beautiful warm valley with disaster hanging over it,” observes Harry T. Moore in The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study (Chicago, 1939), p. 11 et passim.

8. Warren French (op. cit., p. 3) derives Steinbeck's theology from “that of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists such as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman who unite in asking, ‘How dare you place any thing before a man?’” This opinion might hold for Giono also, who is a translator of Moby-Dick (Paris, 1941) and the enthusiastic author of Pour saluer Melville (Paris, 1943). Claude E. Jones in “Proletarian Writings and John Steinbeck” (Sewanee Review 48, 1940, p. 452 ff.) also points out the theme of “man's love for man.” Joseph H. Jackson in his Introduction to The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (New York, 1953, p. ix) says that Of Mice and Men is “a statement of Steinbeck's drive to help one sort of man to understand another sort. …” R. W. B. Lewis in “John Steinbeck: The Fitful Daemon” (from The Young Rebel in American Literature, ed. Carl Bode, New York, 1959) speaks of a “contemporary motif” apparent also in Malraux, Silone, Camus, and Greene, which is in Steinbeck “awareness, of the fateful division between man and man; and of that division as a central feature of the mutilated life it is the novelist's business to give a direct impression.”

   Steinbeck himself says (Figaro Littéraire, July 17-23, 1967, p. 20, trans.) “que l'écrivain se sent poussé, au point d'en avoir mal, à transmettre au lecteur quelque chose qu'il ressent comme important.”

9. Having become familiar with Giono's train of thought, it is, as we could expect, of course, l'artiste whom he secretly admires. Claudine Chonez points out also that “le héros préféré de Giono adore, comme on dit, jouer avec le feu …” (Giono par lui-même, Éditions du Seuil, 1959, p. 91). Thus, l'artiste would join other heroes whom she lists: Bobi, le Roi, Monsieur Joseph, Monsieur Numance. Had Giono himself narrated the story, he would doubtless have betrayed a certain admiration for l'artiste, who resembles to some degree, then, the type of uncompromising man whom he considers heroic; since Giono could not justifiably admire a card-sharp, however, he veiled his admiration behind the auxiliary narrator's ugly voice.

10. While there are neither chapter nor part divisions in this novel, it should still be understood that the author, or super-narrator, has exercised his controlling function in structuring the book into five sections, as follows:

    • 1. Introduction (through the meeting with l'artiste, or for about 37 pages) in the autumn,

    • 2. Places upon “les grands chemins”:

    • a. The fair (to page 74),

    • b. The mill (to page 160), or winter hibernation,

    • c. The village of Sainte Jeanne (to page 192),

    • d. The village near the castle of M. Albert (to the end of the book, or page 255), during the March storm.