SOURCE: Goodrich, Norma L. “The Autobiographical Mode.” In Giono: Master of Fictional Modes, pp. 231-71. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

In the following essay from her full-length study of the “modes” of Giono's writings, Goodrich traces Giono's autobiographical themes, comparing them to those of writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Leo Tolstoy.

Mort D'un Personnage (1949)

In Mort d'un personnage (1949),¹ where a first-person narrator tells of the aging and of the death of his grandmother, Giono performs a double feat: making an attractive old woman the central character of a novel, and recounting at considerable length the death of a mother. As he admitted to Claudine Chonez and to others,² his heroine for this novel, the Marchioness Pauline de Théus, whose youthful gallantry we have admired in Le Hussard sur le toit, having since that time loved Angélo Pardi and lost him, represents Giono's own mother...