Le Roman de Renard

This edition of Le Roman de Renard, illustrated by Paul Jouve and adapted by Maurice Genevoix, stands at the crossroads of medieval literary tradition, modern animal art and the great illustrated French books of the twentieth century. Genevoix had always taken a poetic view of the animal world, as shown by Raboliot, La Dernière harde and L’Hirondelle qui fit le printemps. His decision to revisit Le Roman de Renard — a masterpiece of medieval satire — belongs to this same impulse: Renard, cunning, free and irreverent, embodies a figure of resistance to imposed order that Genevoix admired.

The text is adapted into modern French, serving almost as a prelude to La Forêt perdue, published ten years later and likewise set in the Middle Ages: that initiatory novel is a key work in Genevoix’s oeuvre, in which death becomes an increasingly present theme. Shortly before his own death, he explained this preoccupation, recalling his experience of death during the Great War: “I had a very strong, very keen instinct for hunting […], but I have known since […] that the shadow of death in the eye of a killed partridge is exactly the same thing.”

The choice of Paul Jouve as illustrator was not a matter of chance but an aesthetic and moral certainty: Jouve was then the greatest animal painter of his time, celebrated for his vivid depictions of wild cats, monkeys and horses. Here he produced a rich set of 53 color compositions engraved on wood by Jacques, Camille and Georges Beltrand, together with 33 large woodcut initials, the fruit of more than ten years’ work begun as early as 1941, at a time when he had no publisher to support him in this monumental undertaking. It was the bibliophile Jules Exbrayat and the publisher Jacques Vialetay who initiated this edition and brought it to market, calling on Maurice Genevoix to establish the text.

Jules Exbrayat, president of the Société des Bibliophiles franco-suisses, unfortunately did not live to see the edition completed: he died in 1958, a few weeks before the book went to press, and it is dedicated to him.

This would be one of Paul Jouve’s last books and one of his masterpieces.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix, at “Les Vernelles” (bookplate).