Cœurs, passions, caractères

One of sixty-three copies on Arches vellum after forty-three copies on Holland paper.

The son of an Italian immigrant, Jean Giono was born on March 30, 1895 in Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. After the war, during which he fought at Chemin des Dames, he found his job in a bank, until the success of his first novel, Colline , the story of the revenge of the land against the men who exploit it indiscriminately. In 1931, he evoked the war for the first time in Le Grand Troupeau , where he contrasted the horror of the front with the peace of the Provençal countryside. After Le Chant du monde in 1934 – one of his most beautiful books in which amorous and violent intrigues are woven around a powerful and fierce man, disgusted with life since the death of the only being he loved – Giono felt the need to renew his fictional universe and wrote Deux cavaliers de l'orage , a novel of freedom and excess where the image of blood is omnipresent. A convinced pacifist on the eve of the war, Giono was blacklisted by the National Committee of Writers in 1944. In his Journal of the time, he showed himself reluctant to make any commitment, indifferent to slander. He drew new vigor from this ordeal and composed the cycle of "Le Hussard", the story of Angelo Pardi, a young Piedmontese forced to emigrate to France. The cycle begins with Angelo , continues with Le Hussard sur le toit where cholera, a symbol of war, strikes and spreads throughout the South, and ends with Le Bonheur fou during the Italian Revolution in 1848. Masterpieces followed one after the other:  Un roi sans divertissement, Les Âmes fortes, Le Moulin de Pologne . In his last years, ill, he wrote Le Déserteur , inspired by a mysterious character whom he made into a real hero of a novel: a Frenchman who, a century earlier, had taken refuge in the mountains of Valais. His last novel, L’Iris de Suse , retraces the life of Tringlot, a thief, house raider and accomplice of assassins who takes refuge in the mountains to escape them. There, against all expectations, he falls in love with a baroness and his life will be transformed. Author of twenty-four completed novels, numerous collections of short stories, poems, essays, articles and screenplays, Giono, on the fringes of all the literary movements of the 20th century, was able to combine an extreme ease of invention with the demands of a writing style always in search of renewal. This extraordinary storyteller died in 1970.