Raboliot

Since 1919, when the war that had wounded him so deeply came to an end, Maurice Genevoix had returned to live in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, where he had grown up. 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. From the moment he came back from the front, and throughout his convalescence, he took up walking again, tramping through the forests, listening to the local men, 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 about it: “I wanted to do for the Sologne what I had done three years earlier for the Val de Loire: to evoke it, to translate it in my own way, my attachment to it since childhood, my gratitude for all it meant to me.”

It was in Brinon that his uncle had acquired a hunting ground after the war, and it was there, yielding perhaps to the same pull toward nature, that Maurice Genevoix decided to settle in the summer of 1924: “One evening I shouldered my bicycle, took the little train that would carry me to Brinon. I arrived at dusk, jumped into the saddle, and after six kilometres got off 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 remarkably 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 sportsman, but a hunter by instinct, a free man, indifferent to social constraints, who answers only to his own nature and to the calls that summon and compel him: in other words, a poacher.”

Brinon was the birthplace of the man known as “the most famous, the most cunning, the most skillful, the most sensational poacher of the region: Alphonse Depardieu,” called Carré, with whom Genevoix secured an “audience” that autumn, just as the certainty of the novel and the cast of its characters were taking form. A meeting was arranged in Brinon. It never took place: suspicious, the poacher failed to appear. No matter — Genevoix, determined to shape this universal poacher by fusing several very real individuals, created “his” poacher: Pierre Fouques, known as Raboliot.

Genevoix would later recount this failed meeting with Carré-Depardieu precisely in Jeux de glaces (1961), noting that Carré “was not the last to claim, and perhaps even to believe, that he had served as my model. And truly 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 origin of his hero’s nickname: the name Raboliot — designating a young rabbit still in its nest, in the “rabolière” — came from the Sologne hunters themselves: quick, cunning, free.

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

A very fine copy on Japanese paper, remarkably bound by Alain Devauchelle. A second wrapper, illustrated with a woodcut by Gérard Cochet, was added only to copies printed on deluxe paper. It is present here, in addition to the wrapper illustrated by Deslignières.