L’Épervier de Maheux

When the Goncourt jury awarded its prize, on 20 November 1972, to L’Épervier de Maheux on the fifth ballot, they surely had no idea that this novel would become the best-selling Goncourt winner in history: two million copies sold and fourteen translations worldwide. It was an immense success both for its author and for its small publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, whose provocative reputation had until then kept him far from literary prizes.

The novel unfolds in an imaginary hamlet, Maheux, precisely situated in the upper Cévennes. Carrière transfigures this seemingly harsh land through a sumptuous depiction of the changing seasons, their cruelty and their beauty, conveying the weight of “mineral oppression,” silence and solitude, where men live hard lives amid a magnificent and merciless nature. The elderly die, farms are abandoned one after another, children leave the region: this is the tragic atmosphere of an anachronistic France, dying not far from us, described by a forty-three-year-old son of the Cévennes, then still little known, who had previously published only one novel, Retour à Uzès, which had gone largely unnoticed.

This regional, rural novel struck a chord with both the publishing world and the public. In Le Figaro, André Brincourt wrote that Carrière took pride in his literary lineage, placing himself openly alongside the great names of Ramuz, Giono, Bosco and Chamson (22 July 1972). Jean Freustié and Matthieu Galey, on Le Masque et la Plume of 26 November 1972, described the Goncourt winner as “a kind of metaphysical adventure,” written in a lyrical and musical style, “emphatic and beautiful,” shaping a novel that went far beyond a simple account of poverty among Cévenol families.

Yet this success, as colossal as it was unexpected, proved a “catastrophe” for its author, who sank into deep depression. The mountain-born writer could not bear being suddenly catapulted into literary stardom and having to frequent Paris, an unreal, almost fairy-tale adventure that left him only with inner unease. The following summer, the Cévennes became fashionable: hordes of curious visitors sought out the novel’s settings, and by May 1973 several hikes and a “sporting and literary weekend in the land of Maheux” had been organized. Local officials publicly voiced their displeasure, and criticism rained down on Carrière, though none of it was his doing. Deeply wounded by the harsh criticism he received from his fellow Cévenols, he stopped writing and would return to this painful episode fifteen years later in Le Prix d’un Goncourt, prefacing it with this line from Borges: “Success is a misunderstanding, perhaps the worst of all.”