SOURCE: Browning, Gordon. “Jean Giono's Un de Baumugnes: The Narrator's Inner Cistern.” Modern Language Studies 14 (summer 1984): 63-9.

In the following essay, Browning examines the metaphorical uses of the images of the well, the cistern, and the fountain in Giono's Un de Baumugnes.

The well, the cistern, and the fountain recur as emotionally charged objects in many of Jean Giono's early stories and novels. Giono himself recounts that it was the memory of his childhood terror of a 120-foot well inside the presbytery where he went for catechism that provided the initial idea for the short story “Solitude de la Pitié,” in which a man descends into a deep and crumbling well to earn a pittance for his ailing friend above.¹ “Babeau” is the story of a young man who drowns himself in the cistern of an abandoned farm while the unsuspecting shepherdess concentrates on her knitting nearby. In...