Que ma joie demeure

An exceptional copy inscribed to Maurice Genevoix, a fellow writer and observer of the French landscape, and a fraternal witness to rural, deep-rooted France. In Regain, Giono closes his Pan trilogy (after Colline and Un de Baumugnes) with a sunlit hymn to the world’s renewal, while Genevoix, marked by the war, developed a graver but equally fraternal prose devoted to nature and to ordinary men. In these same years, Genevoix published his own trilogy — Marcheloup, Bernard, Tête baissée — collected under the title Un homme et sa vie. These three novels form a cycle following the life of a simple man confronted with private dramas, moral choices and the silence of the French countryside.

Two parallel visions: where Giono exalts the earth as a principle of renewal, Genevoix focuses on human constancy, unassuming courage and loyalty to one’s own. Their implicit dialogue takes shape here in this warm inscription, anchored “in memory of Manosque,” Giono’s chosen land and the point of their literary encounter. Giono set his novel not far from there, toward the Lure mountain, where a few months later he would discover a place that would leave a lasting mark on his life and work: the hamlet of Le Contadour, near Banon, some thirty kilometers from Manosque.