Jean-Luc Persecuted

June 1, 2020
Cheerless novel of lost love and madness in the Alps. Jean-Luc Robille is a giant of a man, blessed with a big baby who now sleeps soundly in a larch crib that Jean-Luc has lovingly crafted himself. His wife, Christine, is beautiful and willful, and no sooner is Jean-Luc out the door to visit a friend than she is canoodling with another man in their mountain village. When Jean-Luc learns of the affair, he confronts her, and she haughtily reminds him of what she said when he proposed to her: "I like Augustin better, and he's asked me too, but his father is against it because I'm too poor, and I've had enough of being a servant in other people's homes, so let's get engaged if you'd like; but if Augustin wants to kiss me, I'll let myself be kissed." Published in French in 1908, Ramuz's modernist novel was certainly shocking then, and if it seems a little staid now, it has the class-conscious bite of Marcel Pagnol's Manon of the Spring. Things get more shocking when, after time has passed and Christine has supposedly been faithful, Jean-Luc learns that the affair has resumed. He throws her out and then, with the grim logic of a classical tragedy, terrible things begin to happen. It would be a spoiler to say just what, but suffice it to say that Jean-Luc descends into alcoholism and madness, wandering into the village wearing the helmet of a papal Swiss Guard and carrying a burden that, as the gendarmes chase him into the mountains, transforms the novel into a painful tale of isolation and woe that resembles nothing so much as Frankenstein save that Mary Shelley's monster had a richer vocabulary. Plainly, even matter-of-factly written, the story is a downer but an affecting one that leaves readers wishing that Jean-Luc had had better luck. Translated for the first time in English, Ramuz's slender story will interest students of early European modernism.

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