The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono

First published:Le Hussard sur le toit, 1951 (The Hussar on the Roof, 1953; better known as The Horseman on the Roof)

Type of work: Symbolic realism

Time of work: 1838

Locale: Provence

Principal Characters:

• Angelo Pardi, the horseman of the title, a young Italian nobleman dedicated to the fight for liberty
• Pauline, Marquise De Theus, Angelo’s companion during the last part of his journey through cholera-ridden Provence
• Giuseppe, Angelo’s foster brother

The Novel

As The Horseman on the Roof opens, Angelo Pardi is riding into the Rhone valley during the summer of 1838. The heat is oppressive, and everyone suffers from thirst. Then people begin to die. At first, the deaths do not draw unusual attention, but soon it becomes clear that a cholera epidemic has begun. People become frightened, and their attempts to protect themselves make travel difficult. Angelo meets a young doctor who tries to save as many lives as he can, even to the point of searching out cholera victims who have hidden themselves away to die. Angelo helps him eagerly, though their efforts fail time after time. Finally, the young doctor himself becomes a victim. Angelo is unable to keep him alive.

He takes up his travels again after the doctor’s death. After getting past a group of soldiers and several roadblocks manned by citizens, Angelo makes his way into Manosque, where he expects to find his foster brother Giuseppe. Instead, he finds himself trapped by a mob; he is accused of poisoning the well and his life is threatened. To escape the mob’s wrath, Angelo makes his way onto the rooftops, where he lives for the next several days.

From his position above the city, Angelo watches the progress of the epidemic. In a brief expedition into one of the houses, he meets Pauline, Marquise de Theus, who—unafraid and clearly in control of the situation—makes tea for him. Angelo, frightened that he might have brought cholera into the house, leaves; he does not encounter Pauline again until much later.

When he finally comes down from the rooftops, the first person whom Angelo meets is a nun, who has taken upon herself the job of washing the dead bodies of cholera victims. Again, as with the young doctor, Angelo cheerfully and energetically accepts the role of assistant.

Soon after, Angelo leaves the streets of Manosque, which are almost abandoned, and searches the surrounding hills for Giuseppe. Angelo finds his foster brother with several people who have taken refuge outdoors to escape the cholera; for a while it seems as if they have succeeded. When cholera begins to strike the community, however, Angelo and Giuseppe decide that they should make their separate ways back to Italy. They establish a rendezvous and set out on their journeys.

Angelo reencounters Pauline when they have both been stopped by a roadblock. The soldiers have orders to keep people off the roads, in order to prevent the spread of cholera. Traveling together, Angelo and Pauline make a formidable pair, however, and they are able to outwit, outfight, and outbluff any who try to stop them. Indeed, when they are captured and put into quarantine, they escape easily, although Angelo is disappointed that he did not get to display more of his soldierly skills in the escape.

Shortly before the end of the novel, Angelo and Pauline meet a country doctor whose explanation of cholera—he connects the disease to pride—helps make Jean Giono’s symbolic intentions clearer. The two travelers, who have a great respect, admiration, and affection for each other, although they have not become lovers, set out on the final leg of their journey. Just when their spirits are highest, however, Pauline collapses: Cholera has finally caught up with her, too. Angelo ministers to her through the night, using all the skills he learned from the young doctor, and in the morning she is weak but clearly out of danger. Angelo sees that she arrives safely home, and as the novel ends, he is filled with joy that he will soon see Italy.

The Characters

There is almost no development of character in The Horseman on the Roof, nor is there any attempt at complex psychological realism. The reader’s experience of characterization, then, becomes largely a matter of getting to know the two principal figures, who carry the symbolic weight of Giono’s meaning. The main character, Angelo, is young, wealthy, charming, generous, idealistic, quick to defend himself and others from injustice, and proud of his military skills and idealistic values. His generosity is most evident in his willingness to care for victims of cholera and in his absolute lack of fear that he might die of the disease himself. On the other hand, his spirits rise highest whenever he is given an opportunity to demonstrate his horsemanship and swordcraft. One admires Angelo, but at times he seems like a proud child, eager to show off his skills. His pride is balanced throughout the novel, however, by his cheerfulness and high spirits, and in the end, he is thoroughly likable.

Even though she has an important role only in the last part of the novel, Pauline is clearly also a major character. In many ways she is like Angelo: young, intelligent, capable of taking care of herself. She is high-spirited and proud of her ability to handle the pistols she carries. Pauline appears in the other novels which make up the “Hussard Cycle,” particularly Mort d’un personnage (1949); it seems clear that Giono modeled her on his own mother.

Several minor characters deserve mention, not only because they make very effective foils to set off the character of Angelo but also because Angelo himself thinks about them during moments of crisis. Giuseppe, for example, is important because, unlike Angelo, whose idealism drives him to kill the Austrian spy Baron Swartz in an open duel, he is practical: Giuseppe would have killed the baron with hired assassins. The altruistic are also important. Angelo admires the young doctor’s zeal, his hopeless devotion to curing. He also admires the nun who takes the washing of the bodies of the dead to be her holy duty. Ironically, she seems to have no interest in saving the lives of the victims but insists instead that she is preparing their bodies for the last judgment.

Critical Context

Jean Giono projected a sequence of novels which would deal both with the Angelo of The Horseman on the Roof and with another Angelo, the grandson of the first Angelo and Pauline. These novels would establish parallels not only between the characters of two generations but also between the eras of the 1840’s and the 1940’s. This Angelo, grandson of the hero of The Horseman on the Roof, becomes the narrator of Mort d’un personnage (1949), a novel which describes the death of Pauline de Theus in powerful detail.

At the time of his own death, Giono had finished four novels in the Hussard Cycle: Mort d’un personnage, The Horseman on the Roof, Le Bonheur Fou (1957; The Straw Man, 1959), and Angelo (1958; English translation, 1960). Mort d’un personnage deals with the most recent time period, even though it was the first of the four to be published. Angelo, the last of the novels published, was, according to Giono, the first written, a quick sketch made when he first envisioned the characters of Angelo and Pauline. The Straw Man takes Angelo (the hero of The Horseman on the Roof) back to Italy, where he finds himself involved in the war with Austria. Perhaps because Giono was unable to complete the sequence as originally planned, the connection between the published novels is not always clear, nor are the plot lines consistent. Nevertheless, Giono insisted before his death that these four works be published together as the Hussard Cycle when his writings were collected.

Much of the power of The Horseman on the Roof lies in its devastatingly realistic picture of the cholera epidemic of 1838, which Giono researched thoroughly before he began work on the final version of the novel. Angelo is a compelling character: naive, accomplished, generous, always willing to help, and as devoted to liberty as he is to health. More than one critic has pointed out that for a novel filled with corpses, The Horseman on the Roof is, ultimately, a novel which celebrates life.

Part of the life of the novel is Provence itself. Giono was born and grew up in the village of Manosque. When he was able to support himself as a writer, he bought a house in the village and spent his working life there. Giono’s descriptions of the geography, the hills and forests, and the villages and towns of Provence make the region come alive for the reader. Nature in the Provencal countryside takes on almost the quality of a character. This love of the area with which he was so familiar, and his return to it in book after book, have caused some critics to accuse Giono of being a regional novelist. If he was, however, he was a regional novelist in the same way that William Faulkner was, or in the way that Herman Melville was a novelist of the sea.

Some critics call The Horseman on the Roof an epic, and in many ways it does resemble a long heroic poem. Nevertheless, Norma L. Goodrich makes a strong argument that the literary form uppermost in Giono’s mind as he worked on The Horseman on the Roof was the roman courtois, and to read the novel in the light of this suggestion makes it clear that Angelo most resembles a medieval chivalric knight. In this character, the novel celebrates the medieval ideal of courtesy as maintained by a modern hero within the context of horrifying conditions. To have created so modern a work from a form so ancient (and so ignored by most other modern writers) is a remarkable achievement. With this novel, Giono’s literary reputation seems safely established.

Bibliography

Chabot, Jacques. La Provence de Giono, 1980.

Goodrich, Norma L. Giono: Master of Fictional Modes, 1973.

Nadeau, Maurice. The French Novel Since the War, 1967.

Peyre, Henri. French Novelists of Today, 1967.

Redfern, W.D. The Private World of Jean Giono, 1967.

Smith, Maxwell A. Jean Giono, 1966.