Le Hussard Sur Le Toit

Jean Giono

Publié par Gallimard, le 12 septembre 1995

499 pages

Résumé

It is 1838, and Angelo--a handsome, naive Italian nobleman who had been forced to leave Italy because of a duel--is returning home by way of Provence. A terrible wave of Asiatic cholera has overwhelmed the region. The land is strewn with corpses. Water supplies are infected. Civil order has all but collapsed. Nearly every town in Provence is stricken, and the terrified people are burning their dead. They have set up barricades along the roads, improvising quarantines into which they fling all travelers, as well as those who bear symptoms of cholera or have been in contact with its victims.In order to reach Italy, Angelo must avoid capture, for to be quarantined is to be infected. His escapes, adventures, and heroic self-sacrifice in this hot, hallucinated landscape among corpses, criminals, rioting townspeople--when death and fear of death have overthrown ordinary restraints--make a vivid, often horrifying, but never horrible story.This is no ordinary adventure story. Jean Giono has written it with great subtlety, verve, and sparkle. His style, reminiscent of Stendhal's, is crackly and studded with epigrams.