Raboliot

Since 1919 and the end of the war that had so deeply scarred him, Maurice Genevoix had returned to live in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, where he grew up. But after Rémi des Rauches, published in 1922, which portrayed the Loire through the eyes of a cooper, Genevoix wanted to cross the river: to the south lay the Sologne, which he had been exploring since his return to the region. As soon as he came back from the front, still convalescing, he began walking again, roaming the forests, listening to the local men and observing nature. Several stays are documented at the heart of the region, in Brinon-sur-Sauldre, Nouan-le-Fuzelier and Lamotte-Beuvron, where he steeped himself in local customs, stories and speech. He resolved to say more: “I wanted to do for the Sologne what I had done three years earlier for the Loire Valley: to evoke it, to render it as I saw it, my attachment to it since childhood, my gratitude for all it had meant to me.”

It was in Brinon that his uncle had acquired a hunting ground after the war; it was there, yielding perhaps to the same call and pull toward nature, that Maurice Genevoix decided to settle in the summer of 1924: “One evening I put my bicycle on my shoulder, took the local train that would bring me to Brinon. I arrived at dusk, jumped into the saddle, and got off after six kilometers in front of the gamekeeper Trémeau’s house” (in Trente mille jours, p. 200). It was there, facing the Étang des Clouzioux (which becomes the Étang de la Sauvagère in the novel), that his ideas took shape: “the Sologne is eminently rich in game. The hero of my future novel, a true son of this hunting country, could only be a hunter: not an occasional hunter, some ordinary Sunday shooter, but an instinctive hunter, a free man, indifferent to social constraints, answerable only to his own nature and to the calls that summon and compel him — in other words, a poacher.”

Brinon is the native village of the man known as “the most famous, the cleverest, the most skillful, the most sensational poacher of the region: Alphonse Depardieu,” called Carré, with whom Genevoix obtained an “audience” in the autumn, as the certainty of the novel and the cast of its characters fell into place. A meeting was arranged in Brinon. It never took place: suspicious, the poacher did not show up. Nonetheless, Genevoix, determined to shape this universal poacher by merging several real men into one, created “his” poacher: Pierre Fouques, known as Raboliot.

Maurice Genevoix would later recount this failed meeting with Carré-Depardieu in precise detail in Jeux de glaces (1961), noting that Carré “was not the last to claim, or perhaps to believe, that he had served as my model. And indeed I owe a great deal to this man who did not come, one autumn day in 1924, to the back room of the rustic inn where I waited for him in vain” (p. 90). He also explains there the nickname of his hero: the name Raboliot — designating a young rabbit still in the nest, in the “rabolière” — came from the hunters of the Sologne: quick, cunning, free.

Genevoix drew a great deal from Brinon-sur-Sauldre, as though from an ideal epicenter: the commune is simply the one occupying the largest territorial area in its department — even today. It covers 11,600 hectares and is crossed by some 340 km of rural paths! In 2025, only 132 communes in France cover more than 100 km².