[In the following essay, Goodrich states that in Le Moulin de Pologne, Giono was heavily influenced by several Shakespearean tragedies.]

In 1952, Jean Giono published Le Moulin de Pologne¹, described on its title page as “roman”, which he perhaps, as he composed it, visualized less as fiction than as drama, and most specifically as an English or Elizabethan tragedy. Despite the precision given on the title page, we are informed in the text that the work is not a “roman”, but a “drame”, more properly a “faux drame”², since it can only be read as prose fiction. Nevertheless, the life portrayed in this work is “tragique”, the people represented are “acteurs” or “personnages,” and the fabulous eighteenth-century estate called the Mill of Poland is a “théâtre”³. In addition to these textual precisions, Giono further presents us with four epigraphs which, while elucidating the significance of the novel, narrowly relate it to four tragedies written and produced in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Le Moulin de Pologne closely resembles then, as we shall see, because of its subject matter, its structure, its characters, and its story elements, a traditional, five-act tragedy. While we are familiar with novels heavily indebted to tragedies⁴, and also familiar with fiction which would be far less effective without the dramatic preparation of its epigraphs—and a notable precedent is Pushkin's Queen of Spades⁵—we must admire the practiced and subtle artistry of Jean Giono who has in this modern French novel captured the glamour of a literary genre perfected in England by William Shakespeare⁶.

Only the general plan of Le Moulin de Pologne needs to be recalled before we can pass to an examination of this work as a tragedy related to those cited in the epigraphs. Most essential is the fact that the story is told solely by an auxiliary, anonymous, and first-person narrator who is the major character. He is the legal agent of M. Joseph who by his marriage to Julie de M … becomes the owner of the estate called Mill of Poland. While M. Joseph lives, he is able to protect his wife against the hereditary curse of her family, a mysterious propensity to fatal accidents which has destroyed her ancestors for five generations and which will ultimately destroy her also, partially through the intent but entirely to the satisfaction of the narrator. Although we know very little about M. Joseph, whose past life and antecedents are shrouded in mystery, we admire his courage, his ability, and his love for his wife. We know even less of the narrator, simply that he is, according to him, an influential person in the city, a bachelor, and on occasion a nimble hunchback. At any rate his account grows more flagrantly self-congratulatory and more increasingly odious. The heroine Julie receives our sympathy at all times because of her impending fate which has caused her to be persecuted from childhood by the narrator and by the townspeople, because she is beautiful, artistic, and doomed.

Even such a bare outline of the plot alerts us to resemblances with tragedy since this novel involves a heroine who is the plaything of chance, herself helpless and innocent, but curiously and mysteriously unfortunate⁷. Acting with “une logique stupéfiante”⁸, fate dangles its sword of Damocles above this tragic young woman for whom we therefore feel all the pity, pain and fear we experience in the theater for the unmerited misfortune of the tragic victim. After Julie's disappearance, or suicide, or death, and as this novel closes, we feel, just as after a Shakespearean tragedy, sorrow for Julie, fear of the patient malevolence of the narrator, anger because of the persecutions of society, and a pervasive sympathy for the suffering of all such artistic persons. Thus, in a modern prose novel, the ancient catharsis of tragedy is effectually achieved.

From generation to generation Julie's family has waged its unsuccessful combat with destiny until only she remains alive. At this point the narrator reveals himself not as her legal agent alone, but as the sole observer, a sage spirit of evil, a superimmoralist and self-appointed instrument of her destiny. Giono terms this conflict with a malignant fate from the name of Julie's ancestor, “la bataille des Coste,” or the “bagarre-Coste,” “ce combat” with fortune into which the heroine is drawn until she arrives finally at the very “centre du destin”⁹. Julie is not ordinary, but like every “victime” of tragedy, “exceptionnelle,” likened to a bird hypnotised by the serpent-like narrator who will purvey to her his services, that sole “marchandise gratuite”,—death itself¹⁰. Julie's end will come, not from water like that of Rousseau's Julie, but from a rope in the attic. As she is the pitiful victim, so the narrator is the antagonist of tragedy, and M. Joseph the valiant protagonist.

In structure also, as well as in theme, Le Moulin de Pologne bears a strong similarity to a tragedy, or to what Professor T. W. Baldwin calls the “Terentian five-act formula”¹¹. Giono's expository Parts I and II present the major characters and recount the past tragedies of the Coste family. Part III, or the weird ball scene where Julie is willed by the townspeople to commit suicide, corresponds to Act II or to the beginning of the action. The epistasis of Act III coincides with Part IV where combat is joined in the confrontation of the narrator by M. Joseph. Act IV, during which the conflict reaches its desperate state, is represented in the Giono novel by Parts V and VI, where the death of M. Joseph and the incipient insanity of his son, observed by the narrator alone, warn the reader that presently Julie will be defenseless. The catastrophe of Act V occurs swiftly in the last eight pages of Part VII, just as the crisis-deed falls in the last scenes of Othello and of Hamlet.

Such an arbitrary division of this novel into five acts finds further justification in the five changes of scene or five places where the action occurs. The protasis falls into an apparently compact area adjacent to the lodgings of M. Joseph, the streets of the small city, and an esplanade from which one overlooks the Mill of Poland. Since Part II of the novel is purely expository, no place mentioned is actually visualized. Act II is, as we have already seen, the second major area of action which extends from the ballroom through the streets of the city to M. Joseph's lodgings again. Act III occurs in the narrator's room, and Parts V and VI of the novel (Act IV) at the Mill. Julie arrives in the last scene at the narrator's new residence from which he and she walk to the livery stable. It is presumably the same livery stable from which M. Joseph and Julie departed after the ball, and therefore within walking distance both of M. Joseph's lodgings and of the Mill of Poland. However, Giono, or the narrator, describes his house as being fifty kilometers “d'ici,”¹² the only slip of the pen, it seems, which Giono has made. Fifty kilometers is much too far for Julie to have walked, or for the two of them to have walked to the livery stable. The “ici” probably refers to Giono's own study and to his method of composition, which he has described so vividly in the first fifty pages of Noé (1947). The author observes, then, neither unity of time nor of place, only that of action, as Shakespeare did, for example, in Othello.

Not only is Othello (Act V, Scene II) invoked by Giono for his Part VII, or Act V, but also Shakespeare's Henry IV (Second Part, Act IV, Scene IV) for Part V, The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (Act V, Scene I) for Part I, and The Atheist's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (Act II, Scene I) for Part IV¹³. These epigraphs, and the particular words quoted, serve two primary functions, that of comment upon the similarity of situation between the novel and the tragedy so that the reader adds to Giono's conceptualizations the wealth of the English masterpieces thus elicited, and also that of clarifying the catastrophe by these inferences of the parallelisms of character. Giono's prime problem in composing this novel, it seems, was to admit the reader only very slowly into a guarded secret which could be pierced by careful reading, by the assistance of literary association, and finally by deduction after the book was closed. The secret was, of course, the utter unreliability and then the criminal action of the narrator whom Giono discredited only very gradually, and never completely. The catastasis-catastrophe, the death of Julie, does not actually occur in the book or on stage, as it were, but in the mind of the reader; it is therefore all the more frightening.

The first epigraph quoted by Giono on the opening page of his novel is one verse which he identifies as coming from The Changeling: “A wondrous necessary man, my lord.” Now, since this expository section of the novel describes the arrival of M. Joseph, the reader presumes a priori that the “necessary man” is, indeed, the hero M. Joseph. A recollection of this English tragedy, however, demonstrates the falsity of such an assumption. In this play after Beatrice and her villainous lover De Flores have set fire to the maid's chamber, Beatrice's father Vermandero comments, speaking of De Flores:

BEATRICE:
That fellow's good on all occasions.
A wondrous necessary man, my lord.
VERMANDERO:
He both a ready wit, he's worth 'em all, sir;
Dog at a house of fire; I'd ha' seen him sing'd ere now: …

v. 91

The “necessary man” is the low-born murderer De Flores who forces his attentions upon the high-born heroine Beatrice. De Flores is a changeling in the sense of an inferior, a substitute, or an unreliable person. He describes himself as having a “swine-deformity” (Act II, Scene I), and he betrays Beatrice just as Julie asks the narrator¹⁴ if he will betray her. Thus, the first epigraph refers to the narrator and not to M. Joseph. He is the “dog” at a “house of fire,” which is our Moulin. Because the reader is fascinated by the Prince-Charming entrance of M. Joseph, he thinks of him as being the center of attention in the introductory section of the novel. There is another hero, however. The narrator had also introduced himself by a first “je” placed inconspicuously on the seventh page of the novel, and he also was doubly the “necessary” man: the antagonist and the (auxiliary) author. We are therefore to supply for the narrator precisions established concerning the vile changeling De Flores.

The second citation from an English tragedy aptly occurs before Giono's Part IV:

Walking next day upon the fatal shore,
Among the slaughter'd bodies of their men
Which the full-stomach'd sea had cast upon
The sands, …

v. 73

verses which Giono identifies for the reader as coming from The Atheist's Tragedy. These verses patently remind the reader that Part IV of the novel takes place on the “next day” after the ball, and that M. Joseph, now master of the Mill of Poland, has vanquished Julie's enemies. There are, however, other secondary implications of perhaps greater import. These verses, spoken by the murdering valet Borachio, tool of his fiendish master D'Amville, are a perfect example of the villainous and unreliable narrator since Borachio's entire story of Charlemont's death is false. As D'Amville replies to his valet, he might be describing Giono's narrator:

Thou art a screech-owl and dost come i'night
To be the cursed messenger of death.

v. 110

We may therefore add Borachio to De Flores as a second literary antecedent of the narrator, and further realize that we have to do, in this Giono novel, with a “revenge” tragedy.

Giono's Part V, which recounts an era of relative serenity after the wedding of M. Joseph and Julie, opens with verses from Shakespeare's Henry IV. Although Giono has quoted only a few words from the last monologue of the dying king as he passes on his crown and kingdom to his profligate heir:

                                                                      God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown: …

v. 313

he might also have had in mind succeeding verses to the effect that King Henry saw his reign as one chapter or scene (as in Giono), that he knew his enemies “have but their stings and teeth newly ta'en out,” and that he died hoping that his son might succeed him in peace. In any case, the epigraph which Giono selected implies the kingship of M. Joseph, reminds the reader of his dubious antecedents and of the unorthodox circumstances under which, the night of the ball, he acquired both the hand of Julie and her domain. Because of the narrator, M. Joseph's head always lay uneasily, as King Henry also said:

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.(15)

The fourth excerpt from an Elizabethan play recalled by Giono, and this time in French rather than in English, is the passage from Othello, The Moor of Venice where Cassio says as Othello falls dying upon the body of Desdemona:

This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon;
For he was great of heart …

v. 361

Coming as they do before the short catastrophe of Le Moulin de Pologne, these lines give us a final clue as to the narrator, the victim, and the protagonist: Iago, Desdemona, and the aged Othello himself. Like this almost unbearably tragic play, Giono's novel horrifies because of its many violent deaths. It also contains, like the Shakespearean play, frequent references to destiny, to fate, and to a curse which is similar to a plague. Equally conspicuous parallels, however, refer to the characterization of Iago, the most unreliable of speakers, and to Desdemona, the most helpless of victims. Like Iago, our narrator has no knowledge of love, a great greed for money; and, like the narrator, he pretends to be a faithful servant to his master Othello. The Shakespearean play ends in suicide as Giono's novel¹⁶. The main difference is that in the latter the villain, cleverly remaining within the law, goes unpunished.

It is interesting to note that Giono has omitted one Shakespearean play, Richard III, which would seem indicated in view of the fact that the narrator is a hunchback. It seems logical to believe that Giono, insomuch as he did not choose to refer his reader to this early play, did not see his narrator as the violent and passionate English king of drama. Richard III is a character quite dissimilar both to De Flores and to Borachio, and even more unlike Iago, as Andrew Cecil Bradley demonstrated:

Richard III, for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a far greater figure (than Iago) and less repellent … Nor is he so negative as Iago; he has strong passions, he has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is a glory of power about him¹⁷.

Aside from the four references to Elizabethan tragedies, which we have already reviewed, there are three other epigraphs in the Giono novel, the first two of which in Parts II and III are anonymous French and Italian proverbs. The former provides the apology for Giono's regression of Part II during which he details the hereditary curse of the Coste family, or their “vieux sac” of “soucis.” The well-known Italian proverb of Part III (“Herba voglio non existe ne anche nel giardino del re”), standing as it does before the episode of the ball where the townspeople believe that they have succeeded in driving Julie to suicide, is the type of admonition a parent might make to a willful child, or, in this case, the super-narrator Giono to his creation Julie. Although this victim will find refuge, so to speak, in the king's garden, or in the arms of M. Joseph, that refuge is not what she really desires. Thus Giono foreshadows the catastrophe upon which our eyes are set from the opening pages. The interpretation of the proverb's significance is further reinforced by the last epigraph.

At the opening of his Part VI, very near the finale of the novel, Giono places the following: “Préparez tout pour une grande fête. Da Ponte—Mozart: Don Juan.” Here are Don Giovanni's words as he opens Scena XIII of the eighteenth-century opera: “Sia preparato tutto a una gran festa.”¹⁸ Subsequent allusions in the text confirm this fore-shadowing: that Julie is attracted, even during the lifetime of M. Joseph, to her fate by some living power of evil, the narrator himself, who could not possess her in life. Giono's reason for having chosen the Don Giovanni of Lorenzo da Ponte rather than some other version of this legend, such as the Don Juan of Molière, for example, seems to be that in da Ponte as in Giono, the legend is interpreted as being not solely the tragedy of Don Juan himself, but also that of Julie, or of Elvira, or of Zerlina¹⁹. As Giono says:

Il s'agissait de cette Julie qui, de guerre lasse, s'était déjà donnée au mépris public et d'une générosité qu'aucune démesure ne pourrait jamais rendre suffisante en face de l'irrésistible don Juan des ténèbres²⁰.

The narrator thus becomes the jeering Don Giovanni of “Deh vieni alla finestra, / O mio tesoro.”²¹ It is also interesting to note the prominence in both da Ponte²² and Giono of the masked ball, in the palace of Don Giovanni in the former case, and appropriately near the local slaughter house in the latter case. The festival referred to in the epigraph, however, is Julie's rendez-vous with her seducer the “Don Juan des ténèbres”.

From the various epigraphs we have learned, then, a great deal more about the characters and the situations of Le Moulin de Pologne. Julie is the helpless victim of her own inner proclivities; for this novel, like a good Elizabethan tragedy, is based upon character:

Le destin n'est que l'intelligence des choses qui se courbent devant les désirs secrets de celui qui semble subir, mais en réalité provoque, appelle et séduit²³.

She is attracted as were Zerlina, Donna Anna and Donna Elvira. Most particularly, however, she resembles in her incapacity to resist, the infinitely pitiful and also very lovely Desdemona. M. Joseph, like Othello, is majestic, grand, and a highly romantic figure who appears from some western wonderland, as if marvelously. Like Othello he has led a charmed life and like him he is old and unsuspecting. M. Joseph has also, towards the end of his life, some of the pathetic dignity of King Henry IV as Shakespeare chose to portray him. Like that King Henry of drama, he marvels at the vicissitudes that led him to his royal estate, and like him he has a son of questionable stability. Concerning the narrator Giono allows us to glean only the barest hints, since the idea is that we must not guess his real nature until after the last page. Dressed in black, this hunchback who nimbly scaled the wall outside M. Joseph's lodgings the nigh of the ball, runs through the night like Don Juan the werewolf, imparting news of Julie's whereabouts like Borachio the screech owl. Under a semblance of honesty, like “honest” De Flores and “honest” Iago, he represents the overpowering forces of evil. Like them, he artfully misrepresents reality. Like them, and like Don Juan, he cannot experience love, and like Molière's hero also his religion is the arithmetic of money. Wordlessly he summons Julie through the night as Don Giovanni sang to Elvira: “Descendi, O gioja bella!”²⁴

Jean Giono has, in Le Moulin de Pologne, published for his readers another splendid work for which we are vastly indebted to him. He has again, while generously offering us both entertainment and instruction, demonstrated the depth of his knowledge of the human heart and the mastery he exerts over his own art. By re-creating Desdemona, Iago, De Flores; Don Juan and Borachio; King Henry and Othello,—he has acknowledged and reasserted the power of his masters and ours, as well as the permanent continuity of letters that knows no barriers of time or place. In writing fiction that is more nearly tragedy, he has shown not only his versatility but also a hesitation concerning genres that is typical of so many French writers who have been both novelists and dramatists. Thus, the English blood tragedy perfected in London in the sixteenth century underwent in 1952 a Shakespearean “sea-change” in the French Alpine city of Manosque.

Notes

1. All references henceforth are to the forty-eighth edition of this work as published by Gallimard, Paris.

2. See Le Moulin de Pologne, pp. 40 and 233.

3. Ibid, p. 22, 40, 58, 68, 76, 83, and 157.

4. See Gustave Lanson's Histoire de la littérature française, Paris, 1912, where he says on page 490 of La Princesse de Clèves: “… c'est une transposition du tragique cornélien dans le roman.” See also Maurice Rat's preface to his Théâtre complet of Racine, Paris, 1960, where he discusses the influence of Racine upon Laclos and quotes the article of Jean Giraudoux, Choderlos de Laclos, Nouvelle Revue Française, December 1, 1932. For a recommendation from another contemporary novelist see Part II (Le Probable) from L'Imaginaire (Paris, 1940) of Jean-Paul Sartre (pp. 87-88) where he says: “Lire un roman, c'est prendre une attitude générale de la Conscience: cette attitude ressemble grossièrement à celle d'un spectateur, qui, au théâtre, voit le rideau se lever …”

5. There is, beside the use of epigraphs, a further similarity between this Pushkin work and Giono's novel, their mutual use of the fairy tale, as first evidenced from the opening sentence in either work where the “jadis” of Giono corresponds to the оdnazdy of Pushkin. See The Queen of Spades by A. S. Pushkin, ed. D. Bondar, London, 1962. See also my forthcoming article on Giono's narrator in the French Review.

6. See The Evolution of Technic in Elizabethan Tragedy by H. E. Fansler, New York, 1921; and Elizabethan Drama by Janet Spens, London, 1922.

7. For a history of tragedy, a definition of English tragedy, and a complete discussion of the Shakespearean or modern conception, see Ashley Horace Thorndike's Tragedy, Boston and New York, 1908, pp. 1-18 et passim.

8. See Le Moulin, p. 232.

9. Ibid., pp. 51, 144, 52-53, and 70-71.

10. Ibid., pp. 112, 35, 137, and 140.

11. See p. 497 of Shakespere's Five-Act Structure, University of Illinois Press, 1947.

12. See Le Moulin, p. 227.

13. For the exact situation of these epigraphs, see The Works of William Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 1938 (Stratford Town Edition): Othello (vv. 361-2, p. 857); King Henry the Fourth Part II (vv. 313-315, p. 477). See also The Changeling, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, London, 1958 (v. 91, p. 95); and The Atheist's Tragedy, ed. Irving Ribner, London, 1964 (vv. 73-76, p. 31). Giono's evocation of Elizabethan drama seems to coincide with, or to anticipate, a similar interest in France today, if I judge correctly from recent theater pages in Le Figaro littéraire. For The Changeling, currently playing at the Théâtre Récamier under the title Les Amants maléfiques, see the issue of September 23-29, 1965 (p. 12). Cyril Tourneur's La Tragédie du vengeur was presented at the Périgord Festival this last summer (issue of August 19-25, 1965, p. 10), as reported by Jean Prasteau. For Tamerlan, see Jacques Lemarchand's article (issue of July 15-21, 1965, p. 12); and for an interesting statement concerning Shakespeare, see Jean Chalon's interview with Yvette Etiévant (issue of August 12-18, 1965, p. 11).

14. See Le Moulin, p. 232: “Vous ne me tromperiez pas? dit-elle.”

15. See Henry IV, Act III, Scene I, v. 31.

16. For an excellent interpretation of Othello, to which I am much indebted, see Andrew Cecil Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1904, pp. 176-233.

17. Ibid., p. 207.

18. See p. 20 of Don Giovanni (1787), Book by Lorenzo da Ponte, Metropolitan Opera House, Grand Opera Libretto, New York, undated.

19. This conclusion is substantiated also by the beautiful arias composed by Mozart for Elvira and Zerlina, for example. In this connection also, it may perhaps be recalled that E. T. A. Hoffmann, an earlier Mozart enthusiast, focussed attention more on Donna Anna than upon the male hero in his Don Juan, Fabelhafte Begebenheit, etc. The Don Juan of Molière seems, on the other hand, predominantly the hero's play, although Giono's emphasis upon the narrator's nocturnal prowlings does bring to mind Sganarelle's reference to the loup-garou (see p. 761, Act I, Scene I of Don Juan in the Théâtre Complet de Molière, Vol. I, ed. Robert Jouanny, Paris, undated). It might also be argued that Giono's narrator is doucereux like Molière's Don Juan of Act V, and also that Giono derived his notion of a hunch-backed Don Juan from the opinion of some that Molière used as his model the Prince de Conti (Armand de Bourbon, 1629-1666) whose grandson, Louis-François-Joseph, before his internment at Marseilles, was connected to the Kingdom of Poland. Molière's patron, the Prince de Conti, was deformed as Jouanny says in his Notice to the play (p. 710) and as La Rochefoucauld knew (p. 83 of his Mémoire), Œuvres complètes de La Rochefoucauld, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier, Paris, 1950. Two modern French plays based upon the Don Juan legend, L'Homme et ses fantômes of Henri-René Lenormand (4 Acts, prose, Paris, 1924) and Don Juan by Henry de Montherlant (3 Acts, prose, Paris, 1956), focus their attention primarily on the hero. The latter play, however, associates this legend with the problem of the artist in the modern world, an association that seems to underlie Giono's sympathetic treatment of Julie. For two current revivals of the Don Juan legend, André Maurois' adaptation of Shaw, and Tirso de Molina's Don Juan, see Le Figaro littéraire, issues of October 14-20, 1965 (p. 13), and July 1-7, 1965 (p. 14) respectively.

20. See Le Moulin, p. 213.

21. See Don Giovanni, Act II, Scene III, p. 32.

22. In the original book the ball scene of Don Giovanni involves all the major characters and, comprising Scenes 13, 16, and 17, brings Act I of this two-act opera to a magnificent conclusion. As presented at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the ball occurs in Scenes 4 and 5 and requires twenty-two minutes of stage time. Giono places an equal prominence upon the ball scene in Le Moulin; and it also occurs, as in the opera, at the end of the first half of the book.

23. See Le Moulin, p. 218.

24. See Don Giovanni, Act II, Scene II, p. 30.