LIVRE DU MOIS: Jean Giono — The Horseman on the Roof

This month’s livre du mois is The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono — Le Hussard sur le toit in the original — published in 1951 and set in 1832, across the territory we are spending May and June walking through. Manosque, the Durance valley, the hills around Forcalquier, the high country toward the Lure.

Giono was born in Manosque in 1895 to a cobbler and a laundress. He left for the war in 1914, came back from the trenches at Verdun a pacifist for life, and otherwise never left. He called himself the immobile traveler. The novel follows Angelo Pardi, a young Italian colonel on the run from Austrian agents, riding north through a Provence in the grip of a cholera epidemic — a country of locked-up villages, mob violence, suspicion, and almost unbearably beautiful landscape. Giono wrote it as an allegory for war (he had seen what fear does to crowds and was clear about not forgiving it). It is also a novel about courage and tenderness — Angelo’s care for the dying, his gradual companionship with Pauline de Théus, the woman he meets on the road.

I am about a third of the way in and reaching for it whenever I sit down. The sentences are long and unhurried. The country described is the country I just visited; I keep stopping mid-paragraph to look up a place name on a map and realise I drove through.

If you want to watch as well as read: there is a 1995 film adaptation by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, with Juliette Binoche as Pauline and Olivier Martinez as Angelo. It was shot on location in Manosque, Cucuron, and the surrounding hills. Watch it after you’ve read — you will recognise the landscape from these posts.