L’Huile sur le feu
Presentation copy inscribed by Hervé Bazin to Maurice Genevoix: “À Maurice Genevoix, en hommage amical et reconnaissant Hervé Bazin.”
A novel of the Anjou countryside and private disasters, L’Huile sur le feu transposes to the Saint-Leup of the Craonnais a series of arson attacks that fracture the community and inflame tempers: fire captain Bernard “Tête-de-drap” Colu, a war amputee, struggles as much against the fires as against the village’s vindictiveness, while Céline, his sixteen-year-old daughter and the novel’s narrator, gradually loses her innocence through contact with adult resentments.
In the background, the parental couple’s failing marriage — a humiliating mother and a wounded father who refuses separation — gives the book its character as a novel of manners and touches on Bazin’s favorite theme, the family (Hervé Bazin himself was the father of seven children): impossible arbitrations, the social shame of divorce in the early 1950s, and the fatality of a rural order and of a village where, apart from the priest, social life rested essentially on four inseparable figures: the lord of the manor, the notary, the veterinarian and the doctor.
Set near Angers — Bazin’s birthplace — the narrative offers a revealing Loire-valley affinity with the world of Maurice Genevoix, to whom this copy is inscribed. Two years later, Genevoix devoted a profile to Bazin in the journal Livres de France, then in Biblio the same year, commenting on his “strong personality, unwilling to compromise.”
From the library of Maurice Genevoix (inscription and bookplate).