Claude Seignolle in Sainte-Montaine, Cher (18)

On the wall of the Mairie, along with a plaque of Marguerite Audoux (see below), is a plaque dedicated to another literary figure who had lived in Sainte-Montaine – Claude Seignolle (1917–2018), who lived there from 1945 to 1959, and who found the Sologne area a rich source for gleaning many of his folkloric tales. Probably his most famous novel is the fantasy La Malvenue (1952), which went through many editions and is set in the Sologne. The UCPS (Union pour la Culture Populaire en Sologne) erected this plaque in 2006.

Marguerite Audoux: Marie-Claire | Marie Claire (1910)

This edition of Marguerite Audoux's Marie-Claire (translation title Anglicised to Marie Claire) contains a five-page Preface by Octave Mirbeau, who is full of enthusiasm for the book, the manuscript of which he read after her friend Francis Jourdain recommended him to do so.

The book is a fictionalised autobiographical account of Audoux's early life up until she leaves Sologne for Paris to begin an unknown new life, at the age of eighteen, with hardly any money.

The novel is in three parts, the first of which concerns the author's life up to the age of thirteen. Her mother died when she was a young child, and her father abandoned her and her sister. She was sent to a nearby religious boarding school-cum-orphanage attached to the (unmentioned by name) Hôpital général in Bourges. There, the narrator is fortunate enough to meet Sister Marie-Aimée, who, however, is obviously distressed to learn that the Mother Superior has assigned the narrator to a family on a farm, expecting this sensitive, bookish adolescent to learn farming skills.

Needless to say this is a disaster, although not a total one. The narrator hates the work at first and just wants to escape back to Sister Marie-Aimée, although as time progresses the farming tenants Sylvain and Pauline become more humanised. The narrator is a shepherd and has to learn the art very painfully, although she is not psychologically equipped to withstand the slaughter of animals that is going on around her, and lusts after any reading material she can find. Fortunately, the farmer's brother Eugène is of a different mould altogether, has sensitivity towards animals and reads a great deal: the narrator has found a kindred spirit, another sensitive being, someone with intellectual aspirations, and there are perhaps romantic prospects? Alas, Sylvain, Pauline and Eugène are forced to give up the tenancy.

And so to the third and final part, in which the new owners, the Alphonses, are far worse than the previous farmers, and the man never speaks directly to the narrator, and the woman – gloriously called 'la bourgeoise du château' by the labourers – is only interested in textiles, embroidery, that kind of thing. Again, it's fortunate that Henri Delois,  the brother of La bourgeoise –  is around: this time, it really does look like love. But then, the narrator is forced to insult the new farmer, Henri is forced to say they are no longer friends, and the (now) eighteen-year-old flees back to the orphanage. Where Sister Marie-Aimée is no longer a nun, where she learns of Henri's marriage, and although the narrator is for a brief spell engaged as a worker in the kitchen, she soon has to leave.

Marguerite Audoux didn't write a great number of books, but this is certainly not the last one of hers that I shall read.

Alain-Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)

Alain-Fournier's only novel Le Grand Meaulnes was a relatively short time ago voted sixth most favourite book in a survey of readers on La Grande Librairie. Why? Because it's a great novel? I can't believe that, interesting as it most certainly is. André Gide thought it overly long, its first one hundred pages being the most interesting, and I have to agree. But then, in a list with Saint Exupéry's Le Petit Prince at the top, and Camus's (surely hugely overrated) L'Étranger in second position, what should we expect?

Le Petit Prince and L'Étranger, even Le Grand Meaulnes, are fascinating books, but surely in no way represent the greatest in French literature: so what's the problem? Surely it lies in the 'reading' public in general,  very much in the 'on dit' as opposed to the non-dit? How many people have re-read these books after childhood and adolescence, for how many have these been almost the only read books (with possibly the likes of Marc Levy and Guillaume Musso being the only exceptions?)

OK I'm being pessimistic, even insulting perhaps, but what has an adult to learn from reading Le Grand Meaunles? It's about childhood, or rather the gap between childhood, adolescence versus adulthood,* seen through the eyes mainly of the fifteen-year-old narrator François Seurel, who lives with his father and mother, M. Seurel and Millie, who are both school teachers living next to the school in Saint Agathe (in reality Épineuil-le-Fleuriel). The appearance of the seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaunles subverts the other pupils, especially of course the narrator, who shares a room with him.

By chance, on losing his 'borrowed' horse and cart, Meaunles stumbles on the domaine mystérieux, which seems to be run by children having a celebration for Frantz de Galais's (aborted) engagement to Valentine (a beautiful girl based on Alain-Fournier's meeting with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt in 1905). That is when Meaunles falls in love with Frantz's sister Yvonne de Galais, whom he will later marry, have a child by, and er...

There's a certain playfulness with the names: Saint Agathe is a real chapelle in the nearby village of, er, Meaunles, La Ferté-d'Angillon recalls La Chapelle d'Anguillon where Alain-Fournier was born, Vieux-Nançay obviously represents Nançay, etc. But one of the great works of French literature? One of the best remembered, yes.

*Does it really need to be said that later authors such as Alexandre Vialatte and Amélie Nothomb later ploughed a similar theme of puberty being the Fall?

Maurice Genevoix: Raboliot (1925)

On one level Maurice Genevoix's Raboliot, which won the Goncourt in 1925, is a cops-and-robbers tale, on another it's a regional novel based entirely within a small area of Sologne in the heart of the Loire valley, and on yet another it's a kind of thriller depicting flawed characters.

The word 'Raboliot' is the title character Pierre Fouques's nickname and several characters here have two names. He's called Raboliot because he's like a wild rabbit: he's a traditional poacher, and the rich, strongly evocative language is awash with descriptions of the wooded Sologne area, the various animals, flowers and vegetation in general to be found there, the different traps used to catch animals, and there are a number of footnotes translating regional words used into conventional French. Genevoix modelled Raboliot on a well-known poacher in the area called Depardieu, or Carré, a man Genevoix never met in spite of a number of attempts to do so.

Raboliot's tireless adversary is not a game warden but the gendarme Bourrel, a man so consumed by hatred in his pursuit to imprison Raboliot that he appears all over the place, and he is so deranged that he shoots dead Raboliot's beloved dog Aïcha for no reason at all. The sensitive, vegetarian reader might wish that Raboliot shared the same consideration for other animals as he does for his dog, but then this is 1925 and the story would have no existence in a vegetarian world – nevertheless, the normality of the descriptions of breaking rabbits spines to kill them (and perhaps above all one of Raboliot's poacher friends biting through a hen's skull to kill it) left this particular vegetarian reader far less sympathetic to Raboliot's plight.

But then Raboliot is in some respects far less than a hero anyway, and his three-month flight from his family, away from the psychotic grips of Bourrel – but certainly not away from the grips Flora, the outcast whose legs are seemingly forever willing to be open to male visitors – has nothing of the heroic about it.

Will Raboliot ever be able to live in peace with the family he has neglected? Not while Bourrel is alive, but then not when he's dead either, as the final paragraphs detail Raboliot smashing the life out of Bourrel and holding out his hands for his police colleagues to handcuff him and lead him away.

My verdict: it's a great shame about all those animals murdered gratuitously by Raboliot, but this is still a hell of a read, and – dare I say it – probably one of the most interesting of the forty or so Goncourt winners I've read so far?

My Maurice Genevoix posts:
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Maurice Genevoix: Trente mille jours
TMaurice Genevoix: Raboliot