Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (04)

This is what I completely forgot about last year, and which our guide to his home never even mentioned: Jean Giono's grave.

« OÙ JE VAIS PERSONNE NE VA,

PERSONNE N'EST JAMAIS ALLÉ,

PERSONNE N'IRA. J'Y VAIS SEUL.

LE PAYS EST VIERGE

ET IL S'EFFACE DERRIÈRE MES PAS

JEAN GIONO»

My translation: 'I am going where no one goes, where no one has ever been, where no one will go, I am going alone, the country is uncharted, and hides my footsteps behind me.'

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

The Statue Le Froid, Manosque (04)

Paul Bloche sculpted Le Froid (1901), which stands in a central position in Manosque and has done so for generations. Recently, however, the owner Le Musée d'Orsay has claimed it back – to the disgust of many inhabitants of Manosque, who have started a petition to allow the statue to remain in the town where it is.

Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque: Le Paraïs, la maison d'un rêveur (2012)

Jean Giono à Manosque is written by Giono's daughter Sylvie, and is a biography of Le Paraïs the house as much as it is a biography of her father. But perhaps surprisingly, this little book (only just over a hundred pages) is far from being a hagiography: Sylvie says her father was far from perfect, being an egotist, very proud, seeking his own pleasure above all else. This is a man who was a stay-at-home, avoiding going anywhere, far preferring to remain in his family, but even there he was self contained, creating his own reality through his fiction. In 1954 he was nominated as a member of the Académie Goncourt in Colette's place, and when asked what was the best thing about his subsequent trips to Paris, said seeing the clock of Lyon station to take the train back to Provence. And this was in spite of a 'revolution' (for Sylvie) three years before, when Giono actually went to Italy – although it took him two years to plan the journey, and even then he had to find a friend who had a car, as Giono never learned to drive.

Maybe the above paragraph sounds a little negative towards Jean Giono, but it's not meant to be because Sylvie Giono also displays a tremendous interest in and great knowledge of her father's work and obviously recognises his huge value to French literature in general, that he was of course was not simply a 'regional' writer (whatever that may mean) but of importance not only to France as a whole but to the world.

But to return to Le Paraïs, the house, I discovered much more about it from this book than the guided tour of it we had last month. It's interesting to learn that Jean's friend the poet and artist Lucien Jacques  – who was almost a member of the family and who made a fresco in 1936 which includes the family – alludes to Giono's novel Que ma joie demeure (1935) in the fresco. L'Ange, the two-metre high wooden sculpture that dominates a room in the house, has been attributed to Pierre Puget's atelier. I remember the sculpture in a peasant's barn that Giono wanted to buy and that in the end he had to buy the barn itself, although that this may have been the head of a capitol from a Roman chapel sacked in the revolution and that Giono gave back the barn to the peasant after removing the piece from the lintel on which it stood? No, I don't remember that being mentioned. All these objects in the house fed Giono's imagination, Sylvie makes clear.

Like Lucien Jacques, Jean Giono was the son of a shoemaker and an autodidact. Giono read the Greeks in his teens, read Shakespeare, loved Victor Hugo like his father (who cried on the death of Hugo in 1885) and even read detective stories voraciously, of which Gallimard sent him four a month and he would read them all in one day. Sylvie says that Fabrice de Dongo (from Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Palme) has something of Angelo Pardi (from Le Hussard sur le toit) in him, and later speaks of 'la vengeance par l'écriture' ('revenge by literature') in Giono's famous novel, in which Manosque is struck by the plague. Giono, of course, was imprisoned, as a pacifist, for not taking sides during the Second World War, and some locals hated him for it. A little book, but there's a lot in it.

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

Jean Giono in Manosque (04)

'LA MAISON NATALE ET D'ENFANCE DE JEAN GIONO

C'est dans la maison d'en face, au 14 rue grande, Jean Giono vécut toute sa jeunesse, de sa prime enfance jusqu'à son mariage en 1920. Au rez-de-chaussée, se trouvait l'atelier de sa mère, repasseuse et, au 3e étage, l'atelier de cordonnier de son père. Jean Giono décrit avec tendresse sa maison d'enfance dans beaucoup de ses écrits.'

A plaque opposite this house in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, states that Jean Giono (1895–1970) was born here, the son of a laundress who worked on the ground floor, and whose father was a shoemaker who worked on the third floor. Giono lived here until his marraige in 1920. The left panel of the plaque gives a quotation from Giono's autobiographical Provence Perdu (1967), in which he describes the house as having more than twenty large rooms with ceilings 'as high as the night'. He describes his family as free as birds, but adds that they lived in poverty, the floorboards were like a ship's deck, and the roof was like a colander, with rain falling on his bed.

1 rue torte also used to be given as Giono's birthplace, but I don't think it is any longer.

Lou Paraïs, Giono's house in Manosque, bought from the sales of his first, and obviously very successful, novel Colline (1929). He lived here from 1930 until his death in 1970, and here he wrote most of his work. His travels from here were very few* and largely mental, and he lived here with his wife Élise and his daughters Aline and Sylvie. Photography is not allowed inside. The town of Manosque now owns the house and envisages that after work it will be ready for the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2020.

*Giono used to spend his grandes vacances at La Margotte farm between Mane and Forcalquier, only about ten miles from Manosque.

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers (1929)

Un de Baumugnes (translated rather bizarrely as Lovers Are Never Losers) is the second part of Giono's Pan trilogy, and another bizarre thing is the cover of this Le Club du meilleur livre edition, suggesting a medieval setting for this book, but Un de Baumugnes – although unspecific about date – takes place when railways existed.

Disinterested friendship is of major interest in a book in which humans, as opposed to Nature in general in Colline, are the focal point of attention. (Although frequent comparisons are almost always images from the animal kingdom, such as roof tiles described as flying away like partridges, or (in the next sentence) hailstones appearing as big as hens' eggs.)

Amédée is an older man doing seasonal work from farm to farm, and meets the young Albin – who's from the fictional Baumugnes and doing the same – in a bar where they drink a great deal and Albin's tongue loosens and he tells his story of Angèle, the girl he loves, being seduced by his treacherous friend Louis, who takes her away from her family and leads her into prostitution. Albin still yearns for her.

The story touches Amédée so much that he resolves to track Angèle down, and with some difficulty manages to find work at her parents' run-down farm. La Douloire is 'run' by the miserable and easy-to-anger Clarius and his also sorrowful but more amenable wife Philomène. Also working there is Saturnin, who laughs at lot but not at all at the appropriate times.

Eventually Amédée's detective work pays off and he realises that the source of the couple's misery is Angèle, who came back to her parents, but with a baby whose father's identity she has no idea of: due to the shame, her parents hide her and her child away in a cellar so that no one will be aware of their existence.

Amédée has left Albin to work in nearby Pertuis, where Amédée used to live with a woman and where he returns to tell Albin of his findings. Eventually Albin – by means of a monica which is part of his short-tongued ancestors' history, but that's another story – establishes contact with his lover. Amédée slips her a screwdriver so she can pick the lock of her prison, and the four of them (with babe in Angèle's arms and relative ease) escape from La Douloire.

A coda to the novel is that a few years later Amédée – when walking near La Douloire – meets a young child who says she's from Baumugnes but lives at the farm and speaks of pépé, her grandfather. From this Amédée concludes that Albin and and Angèle have made it up with Clarius and Philomène. But although this is obviously a happy ending, there's no sentimentalising and Amédée decides not to pay his friend a visit: he simply tells the girl to let her father know that Amédée passed. He knows that she'll forget his name as soon as he leaves, but he's content just to know – and for Albin to know – that he's done his good deed.

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny (1929)

Born in Manosque where he also died, Jean Giono was the son of a shoemaker born in Provence and of Italian descent. He is one of the great uncompromising Provençal writers with nothing of the sentimentalism and commercialism of Marcel Pagnol. The first novel he wrote was Naissance de l'Odyssée – the title of which reveals a major source of his inspiration – although it was not actually the first novel of his to be published.

Colline (1929) – translated as Hill of Destiny (and now Hill) – was the first one published and is the first part of the Pan trilogy, the others being Un de Baumugnes (also 1929, and translated as Lovers Are Never Losers) and Regain (1930, translated as Second Harvest). Colline is set in a peasant community near Manosque in the imaginary hamlet of Les Bastides Blanches, which has just twelve inhabitants, and the novel is steeped in mythology and superstition.

Les Bastides Blanches is not a hermetic community – goods are sold to neighbouring communities and the postman and doctor make occasional visits – but it is otherwise cut off from the outside world. Here, Gondran lives with his wife Marguerite and Janet, his eighty-year-old former alcoholic father-in-law who is the éminence grise of the story; Arbaud lives with his wife Babette and two very young daughters; Maurras live with his mother; Jaume is considered as the leader of the community, and just lives with his daughter Ulalie now that his wife has hanged herself for reasons that remain completely unclear; and finally there's Gagou, the community idiot who lives in a self-made 'cabin' and who enjoys a sexual relationship with Ulalie because, well, she doesn't really have anyone else to choose.

Bedridden, Janet starts to babble and things start to go radically wrong. First, the well – the community's only source of water – refuses to work. Then Arbaud and Babette's young child Marie falls seriously ill and Jaume's copy of Dr François-Vincent Raspail's medical manual doesn't help.* It's as though Les Bastides Blanches is cursed, as if Nature is taking its revenge on the humans. And the appearance of a black cat is seen as a very negative omen. In desperation, Jaume looks to Janet for advice, but all he gets is pantheistic doom-laden words and insults.

Jaume suspects Janet is responsible for the community's misfortunes, and he believes that his theory is backed up when he notices the black cat on Janet's bed. After a fire nearly destroys the hamlet, Jaume calls the men together and tells them that the only way they can ease their burden is to kill Janet. A job which is more easily done than expected, and suddenly the well begins to work again.

A really striking aspect of Giono's dialogue writing is its directness, its trueness to life, which must have come across at the time as a little coarse?

*Boulevard Raspail in Paris is named after the amazing François-Vincent Raspail, of whom much more later this year.

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres (1953)

In 1953 the Readers' Digest asked Jean Giono (1895–1970) to write a short account about the most extraordinary person he'd ever met, and the product was L'Homme qui aimait les arbres, which I believe has been translated using several different titles in English, but the most literal one is 'The Man Who Planted Trees'.

L'Homme qui plantait des arbres is set in the harsh climate of the French Alps, where Giono's books expressed his deep concern about the depopulation of the villages. Giono – who fought in World War I and whose experiences of it led to him becoming a staunch pacifist – was born and died in Manosque, the largest town in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (04). In Giono's account, the young unnamed narrator is hiking in the area and is in need of water. He meets the much older Elzéard Bouffier, a shepherd who gives him a drink and puts him up for two nights. During this time, the narrator discovers that over three years Elzéard has planted 100,000 acorns in this austere and severely underpopulated land, expects them to yield about 10,000 trees after wastage, and has plans for growing silver birch, beech and ash. No one knows that he's doing it, and he is not seeking financial gain.

The narrator leaves for the war and finds on his return to Elzéard (who has now turned to bee-keeping) that the planting has yielded a forest whose trees are already taller than the two men. Over the years the narrator regularly returns to see Elzéard, the mushrooming forests, and the fresh growth of a happy community until the old man dies peacefully in Banon.

It was a few years before Giono confessed that this is just a story, that there'd never been an Elzéard Bouffier, but that is of no importance. Essentially, L'Homme qui plantait des arbres is a kind of parable about the regeneration of an area – without the use of any complicated technology – by the work of just one selfless man, a man living in harmony with the natural world. The ecological message is clear, as is the anti-war one.

My Jean Giono posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour