SOURCE: Goodrich, Norma L. “Further Investigation Concerning Jean Giono's Hussard sur le toit.” Romanic Review 59 (1968): 267-77.

In the following essay, Goodrich establishes connections between Le Hussard sur le toit, as well as an earlier novel by Giono, and several works by other authors, finding epic and symbolic implications in Le Hussard sur le toit.

In 1951, and after at least twenty-two years of writing highly praised and widely translated fiction, Jean Giono published Le Hussard sur le toit, a novel dealing with a central subject, a nineteenth-century plague, and with the adventures of a principal character, the heroic Angélo Pardi. Appearing as it did four years after the universally acclaimed plague chronicle of Albert Camus, with its epigraph relating it to Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, the Giono novel elicited significant analysis by scholars.¹ Their findings prompt further investigation concerning Le Hussard sur le toit, now...