SOURCE: Goodrich, Norma L. “Further Investigation Concerning Jean Giono's Hussard sur le toit.” Romanic Review 59 (1968): 267-77.

[In the following essay, Goodrich establishes connections between Le Hussard sur le toit, as well as an earlier novel by Giono, and several works by other authors, finding epic and symbolic implications in Le Hussard sur le toit.]

In 1951, and after at least twenty-two years of writing highly praised and widely translated fiction, Jean Giono published Le Hussard sur le toit, a novel dealing with a central subject, a nineteenth-century plague, and with the adventures of a principal character, the heroic Angélo Pardi. Appearing as it did four years after the universally acclaimed plague chronicle of Albert Camus, with its epigraph relating it to Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, the Giono novel elicited significant analysis by scholars.¹ Their findings prompt further investigation concerning Le Hussard sur le toit, now approached in its relationship to a medieval genre, in its position as at least the fourth European novel to treat a plague as central subject matter, and in its underlying suggestion of a symbolic pattern.

Le Hussard sur le toit has an interesting pre-history which it seems appropriate to recapitulate so that the work may be seen in developmental sequence. While walking along a Marseilles street in 1934, Jean Giono conceived a first notion of a fictional hero, Angélo Pardi, whose person and whose adventures during a severe epidemic of cholera provide the narrative unity and the most sustained human interest of this novel. In the six days following this initial inspiration, Giono wrote a first draft, a novel of 243 pages called Angelo. Instead of releasing Angelo, however, he put it aside for nineteen years, finding it unsuitable that his newly conceived hero should make his first appearance involved merely or “tout bêtement avec des femmes” (Preface to Angelo [hereafter abbreviated as P. A.], 9).² This period of germination indicates two problems: (1) how important Angelo was to Giono, or how much this author desired to present to the modern world a hero whose acquaintance readers could enjoy, and (2) how difficult it is for a contemporary novelist to fit his material into the most telling form. For the next eight years, or from 1934 to 1942, Giono worked on Le Hussard sur le toit, which he did not release, however, until 1951. In 1953 he published Angelo, which appeared in book form with a preface of four pages in 1958. A comparison of Angelo, then, and of Le Hussard sur le toit, furnishes valuable insights into the genesis of the latter work, which is a masterpiece.

While in the “première rédaction” (P. A., 7) Giono admittedly also saw Angelo in a trial situation somewhat similar to that of “Lucien Leuwen à Nancy (notamment chasseur vert)” (P. A., 9), he related him initially to various heroes of epic and of romance, to Saint George (Angelo [hereafter abbreviated as A.], 101, 103 ), to Orlando and to the horse Boiardo from Orlando Furioso (A., 234), to Perceval in the episode where the knight contemplates the drops of blood on white snow (A., 234), to Don Quixote (A., 153), to the Cid Campeador (A., 149), and to Roland (A., 180). Most prominent among such allusions are those to the poet Ariosto (A., 56-57, 113, 179, 219), in particular to Canto XIX of Orlando Furioso, which tells how Angelica meets Medor and heals him of his wounds. Among all such possible literary affiliations which came to mind as Giono dreamed and wrote of his new hero, of the Angelo who was to become Angélo of Le Hussard sur le toit, only those to Orlando Furioso are prominently retained in Le Hussard.³ It would seem, therefore, that Giono once considered the feasibility of writing a novel based upon a medieval epic, and such a novel, Taras Bulba, was written by one of Giono's favorite authors, Nikolai Gogol, whom Giono salutes in Les Ames fortes (1949). He may also have wanted to write a novel of epic stature, and such a novel, Moby Dick,⁴ again had signally been written by one of Giono's favorite authors, Herman Melville, whom he hailed in Pour saluer Melville (1943), after having collaborated in a translation of Moby Dick itself. And Le Hussard was finally released at the centennial of Moby Dick. Searching still for a fictional prototype, Giono, it would seem, finally settled upon the “roman courtois” as written by Ariosto; for Le Hussard itself cannot perhaps be better comprehended than through this term used in Angelo (132).

Among the reasons which may have inclined Giono towards his selection of Orlando Furioso as a model is, first of all, the fact that it is, like the hero Angélo, Italian. Secondly, there are personal considerations which bind the author to Italy and to Ariosto. Giono's paternal grandfather, with the father of Emile Zola, emigrated from Italy to France in 1832, and he served as nurse during an epidemic of cholera in Algiers. Giono's mother, who died in 1946 and whom he celebrated in Mort d'un personnage (1949), was named Pauline. Then too Giono tells us that he is fond of quoting Ariosto in the original from a volume which is a family heirloom. Aside from the fact that Ariosto is an important part of his life, Giono chose this romance for all the reasons which have made it perennially popular, not only because it is a model worthy of emulation, but because it also derives its hero from an epic, as Giono did initially in the case of Angelo. Another bond is the poetry, for Giono is not only an essayist, dramatist and historian, but also a poet who writes remarkably lyrical prose. As a matter of supposition, Angélo seems to be a masculine counterpart of Ariosto's heroine Angelica, who feels no love until she has healed Medor. Then too, there is the same pervasive irony in both Ariosto and Giono; the latter does not always treat young Angélo seriously (he is twenty-five years old [146], or twenty-six years old [350]), as, for example, when he amuses the reader by implying a literal meaning to an idiomatic expression, repeating that Angélo inclines towards “jouer la fille de l'air” (48, 62, 101, 304), or when he sees the vain, strutting Angélo as Puss-in-Boots (59), as a lion (214, 216), or even when he describes him sparingly as “maigre aux yeux de feu” (331), with “beaux cheveux bruns” (364). On occasion, Giono tolerates Angélo with what amounts to an amused and fatherly detachment. The author's irony in regard to the plague, however, what Pierre de Boisdeffre called the “macabre” elements of the novel, is both stinging and violent.

In Orlando Furioso, then, we see Giono's format of a lady (Pauline) and strange gentleman traveling through woods and forests, fantasies like Angélo's escapade on the roofs, a keen interest in places, touching scenes followed by others filled with anxious suspense, and examples of idyllic comradeship between a man and a woman. Ariosto would have approved of Giono's Pauline and would have enjoyed her company, for she is as self-reliant and as energetic a young lady as Bradimante, for example, or as Marfisa. Most important of all, however, and this seems to define both Orlando Furioso and Le Hussard sur le toit, there is the same respect, if not the same recommendation, for a life based upon love and loyal friendship through thick and thin, for courage, resourcefulness, and buoyant optimism in the face of adversities, for courtesy, assistance, respect, and honor between members of the opposite sex.

As Angelo becomes Angélo, then, and as he rides across plague-ridden Provence in 1838, he represents not so much an epic hero as a “chevalier servant” (A., 140) to the married lady, Marquise Pauline de Théus. Angélo Pardi, Colonel of Hussars, is not a warrior but an émigré, not a leader but a gallant individual, neither a representative nor an ideal of any particular group of people, but a noble idealist virtually alone in a terrible land where like Robinson Crusoe he must survive by his own courage and wits. He is not an agent deputized by a king or sent by some group to attack a seemingly invincible enemy. Nor is he expendable either, as the medieval epic hero often is. He is neither heir to a throne, nephew to a king, nor responsible for the public weal. He has escaped into France because of a political assassination in Italy, but he no longer has any license to kill. Giono has said that in Le Hussard he wished to place Angélo “aux prises avec des généralités passionnelles (choléra)” (P. A., 9). When he published such a premeditated statement, Giono seemed to be announcing a posteriori that in the novel cholera may be something else than a disease, or that it is symbolic.

While Angélo Pardi is recognizably one and the same with the Angelo of the “premier état” (P. A., 7), none of the precisions given in the primitive version relating to his escape into France, his stay at Aix, or his need for liberty is essential to an appreciation of Le Hussard sur le toit. The stories are quite different as are the two heroines, both named the Marquise Pauline de Théus, however. What was physical attraction in Angelo becomes “amour courtois” in Le Hussard. None of the other characters from Angelo appears prominently in the later novel, in which only one interpolated story is retained.⁵ While Angélo himself remains “au comble du bonheur” (398), the world in which he lives and the dangers he encounters are vastly more significant. His physical existence is, to be sure, still situated in the high Alps between France and Italy, mountains which are as powerfully present. In Angelo, however, the earth as described by the author Giono in 1934, lies under a “ciel d'azur” (A., 11), or under a rainy gray sky (A., 99) soon warmed by a “soleil de mai” (A., 55). The change from the beautiful sky of Angelo to the murderous chalk-white sky of Le Hussard sur le toit indicates again, as the fanciful title suggests, the complexity of a symbolic pattern.

It would seem now that, as Giono meditated upon Angelo, he was satisfied with his hero, or that he still wished to offer his readers a positive and an heroic view of man. He was also satisfied with the geographical theater of action, the Alpine region which he knows familiarly. Similarly he was content with the imagined circumstances of Pauline de Théus, her childhood, her physician father, her love and marriage, and with the fact that she would meet Angélo. He was dissatisfied with the type of fiction he had at one time considered, an intrigue à la Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen involving love and a courtship hopefully leading to marriage, dissatisfied also with the test which Angelo underwent in the “première rédaction.” A positive hero, so brave, so dashing, so naively young, so bent on liberty, merited a contest more challenging than seduction. Therefore Giono designed a significant world where the problem ad demonstrandum is: can Angélo survive a passage through contagion and, although plagued by evils, menaced by enemies, attacked by creatures and by men, can he retain a joy in living and continue to honor the brave lady who has offered him her hospitality and her assistance?

Angélo's principal dangers stem from two immense unknowns: the white sky and the black death. The whiteness strikes brightly and hotly from a limitless cosmos upon a disease-ridden earth inhabited by men who desire death, by carnivorous animals and birds among which the hero and the lady pass virtually unscathed. Thus, Le Hussard sur le toit is a modern parable serving both as a criticism of man and as an encouragement to him. There is, and most critics of this novel have agreed, a certain gaiety in this work despite the horrors of the plague, many pleasant days for Angélo and for Pauline. Meanwhile Giono, after eight years of reflection, develops his diagnosis of the nineteenth century; for the novel though modern in its search for a fresh novelistic technique, purports to deal only obliquely, or not at all, with the twentieth century.

Before proceeding to a progressive analysis of the symbolic pattern of this novel, where the chains of significance shift and deepen gradually before the delighted eye of the reader, we might consider briefly, in order to eliminate them as sources of inspiration, two earlier works of fiction which treated the plague before 1942, or before Giono completed “le travail des années” (P. A., 9) on Le Hussard. One is Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year already mentioned, and the other is Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi sposi (1825-26), and in particular its Chapters XXXI-XXXVII. There are four major points of dissimilarity between the English journal and the French work of Giono: (1) Defoe is discussing a largely imaginary plague, while Giono is treating a real one which devastated Provence in 1838; (2) for artistic and historical as well as for linguistic reasons, Giono has preferred the noun “le choléra,” to “la peste,” which he barely uses (pp. 267, 371, 373) throughout fourteen chapters, or 398 pages of his novel; (3) Giono, admittedly writing creative fiction, nowhere seeks the objectivity of a journalist but rather relies as sole defense upon third-person narration by an omniscient, omnipresent narrator, himself, speaking consistently in the passé défini; and (4) he declines to share the sternly punitive thought underlying Defoe's statistics, namely, that a good plague now and again would teach a salutary lesson to dissenting man.

Giono's central concern is not history, although he displays an impressive knowledgeability concerning the nineteenth century and its plague, nor politics, although Angélo like many young men of that century is preoccupied with “liberté,” nor psychology, since there is no character development in the novel. Thus, by eliminating the courtship motivation, and by subordinating history, politics, and psychology to a symbolic pattern, Giono took precautions not to remind his reader of I Promessi sposi with its simplex hero Renzo, the silk-weaver from Lecco. There are virtually no elements characteristic of the picaresque novel in Le Hussard sur le toit. It is not primarily a travel book or simple “roman d'aventures” either because Angélo's trip home to Italy, or to the place from which he came, illustrates a further symbolism which matches the pace of the narrative; as they climb the Alps, Angélo and Pauline share a difficult passage from first acquaintance to happiness, while Giono advances from the first word “aube,” itself a whiteness, to the last word of the novel, “bonheur.”

Chapter I of Le Hussard sur le toit opens upon a circular world, or serves as an introduction in a circular way. Throughout one day, from morning to evening, various people in various situations in Provence are introduced: Angélo, first of all, a shy young Italian who because he is a “soldat de métier” (p. 15) prefers a course of action. For him, the only way out is through the circle along a road personified (pp. 13, 15, 16, 25) because it is life. Several potential characters, with their “fulgurantes tranches de vie tragiques” (p. 33), are menaced by the sky, by the sun, by insects, by plants (melons and tomatoes), and by other men.

Throughout this “terrible été” (p. 27) man lives “enfermé sous un globe de pendule” (14), under a blinding light (p. 12, 13, 16, 33), at the mercy of a candent “ciel” (p. 13, 14, 15, 16, 29, 30, 31), which is as if made “de craie” (p. 13, 14), similar to “chaux vive” (p. 31), or “d'une blancheur totale” (p. 14), in a barbaric world “capable de … tuer” (p. 14), with its “golfes … plus blanches encore que le ciel” (p. 15), inhabited also by “ces bêtes (voraces) qui étaient du mavais côté” (Chapter II, 44): “oiseaux” in “nuages” or in “bourasques”; “les rats” (pp. 44, 51), “le chien” (p. 42), “les cochons” (p. 49). It is also a world of “coliques” (p. 23), “pestilence” (p. 45), “choléra” (pp. 47, 49, 50), and “contagion” (p. 58). By the time that the “bon prince” (pp. 64, 84) Angélo, due to his “magnifiques bonds de chat” (p. 59), arrives at Sisteron in Chapter III, among carnivorous foxes, “nuages de … grosses mouches” (p. 60), and “chiens enragés” (p. 60), men, this “canaillerie à deux pieds” (p. 63), are dying from cholera, their faces marked “de tant de vices” (p. 63). Why is this so? There is an “énorme plaisanterie … mêlée à l'univers” (p. 67). Angélo suffers from the burning sky full of “oiseaux … carnassiers” despite “leurs roulades … d'un vermeil extraordinaire” (p. 65), and from the “lumière du grand soleil blanc” (Chapter IV, 77). The cholera has reached epidemic proportions, but man's “fourberie” seemed to Angélo “plus inquiétant(e) que la mort” (Chapter V, 87).

By Chapter VI (pp. 96-150) Giono has established his principal themes: Angélo, cholera, animals, and the sky. It is also a “moment critique” (p. 131). Driven by hunger, thirst, and by a murderous mob, Angélo takes refuge upon the rooftops of Manosque, Jean Giono's native city, where he is attacked by a “monceau de corneilles” (p. 119) and by “hirondelles” (pp. 130-33). Below him the cholera rages (pp. 99, 102, 107, 108, 114, etc.), is an “épidémie” (p. 104) and a “contagion” (pp. 145, 149) among “cholériques” (p. 149). The gradual modification from colic to cholera to choleric confirms the reader's suspicion that there are further linguistic virtuosities to come. In this chapter where Angélo is, alas, only too briefly for the enchanted reader atop the roofs of Manosque, the grim accumulations are relieved by three whimsical passages: the hero and the “tender” gray cat (pp. 119-50), the “petite fille” seen tripping along the street in her Sunday dress (pp. 128-30), and Angélo entering the restful “grenier” (pp. 138 ff.) full of treasures from a gentler century. In this same chapter Angélo finally meets Pauline, the young Madame de Théus whom Giono selected to be his heroine, as far as the reader of this one book knows, from the various characters sketched briefly in Chapter I. From his rooftops Angélo is close to the white sky (pp. 118, 126, 141), to the white dawn (p. 132), to the “étoiles” (pp. 110, 114), to the murderous sun (pp. 116, 120, 125, 127, 133, 134, 138, 142), and to a comet (p. 132). A further suspicion, originally aroused by the phrase “canaillerie à deux pieds,” that the frequency of the animals signifies that Giono treats them indiscriminately with people occurs also in this masterful chapter.

In this city of Manosque there is no love, only a dying “corps social” (p. 167), afflicted by the “malédiction d'avant les temps” (p. 155), stricken not so much by cholera as by “la colère de Dieu” (p. 155). Once he descends from the rooftops, Angélo charitably assists a nun to collect the dead and to prepare them for burial. Her person calls to mind a bird (p. 153), a lion (p. 160), and a peacock (p. 161); she is “comme la personnification d'une très vieille sagesse.” Even when the “étoiles” are “éteintes” (p. 151), the “aurore blanche” (p. 151) presages the burning of a deadly “soleil blanc” (p. 170). By Chapter VII the view of man as an animal is well established. People remind the narrator of dogs (p. 183), hares (p. 184), eagles (p. 184), cats (pp. 186, 203), and insects (p. 193). “L'homme est aussi un microbe têtu” (p. 172). “Les hommes ne valent pas grandchose” (p. 192). Meanwhile the “maladie” (pp. 198, 200) rages under a violent sun (p. 174), a “soleil fou” (p. 176), as white as plaster (p. 182), where people are “silhouettes calcinées” (p. 181). Angélo searches for his valet Giuseppe, for whom “la mort est un échec total” (p. 230) under, in Chapter IX, “le ciel … blanc de craie” (p. 205), under an “ardent soleil blanc” (p. 214) which means death, or which brings “le mal” (p. 224). Thus, the pattern has modulated from cholera to choleric, to malady and now to “le mal.” In other words, Giono is proceeding very gradually from the concrete to the abstract, and associating with the abstract word “mal” another word: contagion (and contagious). Cholera has also become choler, and this choler has been associated with the sky and with God.

The coming happiness of Angélo and Pauline, prefigured by the colored sky during the rainstorm (pp. 219-21) of Chapter IX, a sky that is “azuré, “bleu de gentiane,” “bleu sombre,” “une teinte violette,” “lie de vin,” and “rouge comme un coquelicot,” begins in Chapter X. An isolated “gentiment” (p. 19) of Chapter I becomes in reference to Angélo a score of “le plus beau” (p. 242), “gentil” (pp. 236, 245, 254, 265, 267), and “angélique.” As the two friends approach Italy or “la terre promise” (p. 244), the dawn is red (p. 252), and the sun golden and beautiful. Men other than Angélo, however, continue to behave no better than mere animals.

At this point the author begins to circle cautiously around the problem of the symbolic pattern. At first, he uses the insinuation and adroit persuasion so characteristic of a great novelist. What was the plague, after all? The plague was perhaps a revolution or general injustice in the nineteenth century (pp. 286-87). The white sky (pp. 277, 279) was possibly only a pervasive sadness (p. 276) in the year 1838. Now relatively safe in the high Alps, Angélo and Pauline see a sun in its decline (p. 311), a blue sky, a very blue sky “pommelé de rose” (p. 315).

In Chapter XII the author consents to satisfy his reader's curiosity concerning Angélo and Pauline, or to tie the threads of the intrigue (pp. 350 ff.), and also, clearly now, to allude to the plague and to the sky in terms of a symbolism. Why do all these people die? They die, for one thing, because they want to die, Angélo learns from the clarinetist from Marseilles. This wandering musician speaks in accents very familiar to the readers of Jean Giono, or with the voice of the author himself in semi-dialogue. This is how “one” dies:

On se surprend à essayer de se déclencher les muscles des jambes comme une sauterelle tant on meurt d'envie de bondir vers cette petite bande de ciel libre, au-dessus des rues. C'est exactement ça, voyez-vous, on meurt d'envie, on meurt de toutes les envies. … Il comprit que le choléra pouvait s'inventer; que c'est ce qu'il était en train de faire; qu'il valait mieux aller chercher sur le trimard de quoi s'inventer autre chose qui fasse moins peur. … Si vous voulez mourir, mourez; si vous voulez passer, passez. … Il avait remarqué que, dans les pinèdes, où l'odeur de la résine s'ajoute au soleil pour composer une atmosphère de four, les cadavres qu'il rencontra (dont l'un était celui d'un garde-chasse) avaient surtout le mal du siècle: une certaine nonchalance d'allure et mélancolie d'attitude, l'air d'en avoir assez, une sorte de mépris de bonne compagnie. …

(pp. 334, 335)

Thus in this passage, where the change of narrative focus betrays Giono's vigorous and ironic voice, the last of the modifications concerning the plague is stated for the first time: cholera in the nineteenth century was the “mal du siècle.” It was not a somatic illness, although it was contagious, but it was rather an invented illness.

Further in this same chapter Angélo and Pauline, who journey into “un ciel sale et sombre” (p. 345), “un ciel de plus en plus couvert” (p. 346), observe the “travail noir du ciel.” The adjective black seems in this case to have been used figuratively to recall the “énorme plaisanterie … mêlée à l'univers” of Chapter III. Concurrently the former massive accumulations of “choléra” dwindle and are replaced more and more frequently by “maladie” (pp. 341, 344, 345) because “le choléra fini, il restera les miroirs à affronter” (p. 340). Death, in other words, will remain. Both man and the sky have been hostile to man.

The author's lesson by a first intervention in Chapter XII was not, however, sufficiently succinct for his own sense of clarity; we shall hear a second time from Giono himself, represented by the character of an Alpine physician. Whether man dies of “peste ou choléra,” he says to Angélo and to Pauline, “les dieux ont de tout temps profité” (p. 369). Cities lack more than an adequate supply of “chlore” or of “chlorure,” “en tout cas de tout ce qu'il faut pour résister à une mouche, surtout quand cette mouche n'existe pas, comme c'est le cas”; chemistry will not solve their problems. It is even less likely (pp. 370 ff.) that medicine and surgery will see anything beyond the flesh they probe. The plague, an “épidemie de peur” or a “mélancolie” is other; it is “une maladie de grand fonds; il ne se transmet pas par contagion mais par prosélytisme” (p. 376). Melancholy, the mal du siècle, causes certain societies to resemble an assemblage of living dead, “un cimetière de surface” (p. 370), driving “à des démesures de néant qui peuvent fort bien empuantir, désœuvrer et, par conséquent, faire périr tout un pays” (p. 371). Cholera is nothing more than “un sursaut d'orgueil” (p. 377). Science can dissect a human body, telling us of what the person died, but neither how nor why. In the final analysis we human beings are ignorant: “Le globe terraqué roule, on ne sait pourquoi ni comment dans la solitude et les ténèbres” (p. 378).

Therefore he (a country doctor) wanted to describe how death approached, how finally “la conscience humaine se sentait alors dépouillée de toutes ses joies” (p. 379). This is how a person died: his joys fled like birds, first the migratory, then the others. His face became stupefied. What is the matter? “Il a qu'il crève …” (p. 379). Then fled the sedentary birds (the sedentary joys: “ordures … déchets … qu'on trouve sur la place rien qu'en sautillant, …” [p. 380]). “Le cholérique … est un impatient” (p. 381) as he hastens towards the end of his “existence physiologique” (p. 384). Soon the impatient patient sees clearly on both sides, into life and into death, as he chooses lucidly. Only one thing can incline a man to the side of life, one thing alone, and that is love (p. 385). “Le meilleur remède serait d'être préféré” (p. 382). What is cholera? It is “une nouvelle passion,” which came into the world around 1838; it is the desire for death. Is this the fault of the Alpine physician? No. “Est-ce moi qui ai fait le monde?” (p. 383).

After this lecture from the author, Angélo and Pauline set out the following morning on the last lap of their journey together. Angélo is delighted with the “pureté du ciel” (p. 387). Surrounded by camellia-colored mountains, they halt at noon in a “solitude ensoleillée” (p. 389). The pure sky was treacherous, however, or had not vented all its evil. That night Angélo and Pauline wage their combat against cholera, and win. Why does Angélo win now when previously he had failed to cure persons of cholera? He won because he had treated Pauline with love, with tenderness, and with honor. Pauline lives, and Angélo does not even suffer an attack of the plague. Why? A person who practises courtesy forgets himself as he cares for others; a true healer, “quelqu'un qui s'oublie” (pp. 369-70), does not die either of real cholera or of the “mal du siècle.”

While Giono has, with the assistance of his raisonneurs, made the symbolic meanings of the plague very clear, or while he has, for his part, carefully restricted the plague to a closed symbol, he has, on the other hand, nowhere clarified his intention relative to the white sky, which grows intense as the cholera rages, is relieved by the rainstorm when Angélo finds his servant Giuseppe, and which whitens again, but feebly, in the rapid closing pages. As the book ends, Angélo rides home happily, “au comble du bonheur,” in fact. He is elated, and the reader with him, because he has courageously opposed the retribution of the blinding sun and of the white sky, which, although they initially appeared entirely hostile to man's presence upon the terraqueous surface of the globe, still did mercifully bestow beneficent rain and a superb display of colors. Angélo climbed for refuge upon roofs and mountains, for, as Pierre-Henri Simon observed in the case of Jean Giono, essentially religious people cannot live without some God. In this novel the wrath of the sky was, in other words, so appeased and so transcended that Le Hussard sur le toit stands to the modern reader as Melville's Moby Dick stood to Giono during troubled years of his own life, as “ce livre-refuge où le monde peut abriter son désespoir et son envie de persister malgré les dieux” (Pour saluer Melville [hereafter abbreviated as P. s. M.], p. 35).

Roman courtois in many aspects of its structure, parable in its determination to propose an explanation of life, symbolist in its means to that end, Le Hussard sur le toit has therefore been admiringly pondered by readers in the twentieth century to whom Angélo's journey with Pauline represented a “combat avec joie” (p. 20) against shared adversities. Giono's solution of life, his encouragement to the reader, his positive thinking, or his own determination and “envie de persister” are clear.

Giono seemingly chose his inspiration from Ariosto's roman courtois, not only because he appreciated the narrative possibilities of a romance, but also because, champion of moral women, he wished to submit for re-consideration certain human relationships best illustrated perhaps in that type of fiction. To a novelist like Giono, a father of daughters, the nineteenth century with a masterpiece like Adolphe, reached an impasse concerning the position of women. In the twentieth century admirable women have to a large degree disappeared from major fiction—with Jean Giono a notable exception. In Le Hussard sur le toit love appears a better solution than the battle of the sexes, or than war, or heroic contests. Advertently or inadvertently, Giono gave his hero both a name and a title famous in the nineteenth century, Angelo, thus paying homage to Victor Hugo, whom Giono's character, the Alpine physician, is fond of citing (pp. 371-73). Most of all, Giono persisted in his personal conviction evident from his earliest writings: despite man's human condition, but most especially because of his human condition, life can be joyous. As the first raisonneur says in Le Hussard sur le toit: “La mort n'est pas tout …” (p. 336).

Notes

1. Concerning this novel see in particular Marcel Arland's “A la hussarde,” La Nouvelle N. R. F., No. 1040 (October, 1953), 687-96; Claudine Chonez, Giono par lui-même (Bourges, 1959), p. 107; Maxwell A. Smith, “Giono's Cycle of the Hussard Novels,” French Review, XXXV (1962), 287-94, and also Giono. Selections (Boston, 1965), pp. 147-48; Pierre R. Robert, Jean Giono et les techniques du roman (University of California Press, 1961), pp. 42, 49, 97-98; Claude Michel Cluny, “Un Scandaleux bonheur,” Nouvelle Revue Française (June 13, 1965), pp. 1058-62; Odile de Pomerai, “An Unknown Giono: Deux cavaliers de l'orage,” French Review, XXXIX (1965), 78-84; Gennie Lucioni, “Le Bonheur fou,” Esprit (September, 1957), pp. 292-97; and Pierre de Boisdeffre, Giono (Paris, 1965), pp. 80-82. Concerning La Peste see Giono's remarks to Gilbert Gannes, Nouvelles Littéraires (April 1, 1965), pp. 1, 11. See also Gaëtan Picon, “Le Bonheur fou,” Mercure de France, No. 1129 (September, 1965), pp. 122-26.

2. These abbreviations, followed by page numbers, signify: A—Angelo; P. A.—Preface to Angelo; P. s. M.—Pour saluer Melville. Where no letters appear before numbers, then the page references are to Le Hussard sur le toit (132nd edition, Gallimard). The page numbers from Le Hussard are not intended as totals, but only as guides to the reader.

3. An early allusion established the fact that Angélo knows Ariosto sufficiently well to recognize a Canto illustrated on a “paravent” which “portait les guerriers empanachés et les seins jaillissants des cuirasses d'un chant de l'Arioste” (173). During a later adventure Angélo frightens himself because instead of reality he had seen through the smoke and flame of a dark night a “chant de l'Arioste” (190). It is made quite clear, as Angélo talks to himself and recognizes that he is powerless to control his own “âme folle” (365), that Ariosto represents to him a way of life: “Il me faut l'Arioste. Là, oui, je suis à mon aise.” It is a way of life, concurs the author humorously, which is applicable now: “Il [Angélo] imaginait fort bien qu'avec un peu de daube arrivant à point on pouvait dans la réalité domestiquer tous les héros et héroïnes de l'Arioste” (365).

4. For a study in depth of the relationship between Moby-Dick, Giono's collaborative translation (Paris, 1941), and Camus' La Peste, see Léon S. Roudiez, “Camus and Moby-Dick,” Symposium, No. 15 (Spring, 1961), 30-40. See also Katherine Allen Clarke, “Pour saluer Melville, Jean Giono's Prison Book,” French Review, XXXV (1962), 478-83.

5. In Angelo (pp. 173-88) Pauline tells the old Marquise the story of her childhood, her rescue of the Marquis de Théus, their courtship, and their marriage. Pauline's husband, the Marquis de Théus, is a major character in Angelo, in which Angelo himself is in love with Pauline. She tells more or less the same story, but much abbreviated in Le Hussard sur le toit (pp. 357-60), but she tells it to Angélo. In this novel, Angélo and Pauline have never met before Chapter VI, and the Marquis de Théus is not a character.