Novel
Un mâle
Not translated into English
Camille Lemonnier · 1881
Opening lines
Une fraîcheur monta de la terre et tout à coup le silence de la nuit fut rompu. Un accord lent, sourd, sortit de l'horizon, courut sur le bois, traîna de proche en proche, puis mourut dans un froissement de jeunes feuilles : l'énorme silence recommença.
A coolness rose from the earth and all at once the silence of the night was broken. A slow, muffled chord came out of the horizon, ran over the wood, trailed on from place to place, then died in a rustling of young leaves: the enormous silence began again.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
A farm, meadows, a pond, and the forest all around. Cachaprès, whose real name is Hubert, the younger son of a woodcutter, is a poacher: he lives off what he takes and seems made of the same stuff as the woods. One day in May, in a lucerne field, he comes upon Germaine, the daughter of the Hulottes, who own the farm; she is surprised to find before her the poacher everyone talks about, and he falls in love with her. Everything separates them, the land and the forest, property and stolen game, the law and those who enforce it, and no one around them wants this liaison.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in the Brussels newspaper L'Europe in the autumn of 1880. It caused a scandal in Belgium and was a success in Paris. In 1883, the jury of the quinquennial prize refused to crown it and preferred not to award the prize; on 27 May of the following year, two hundred writers and artists gave the author a banquet of reparation, at which Rodenbach proclaimed him marshal of letters. He was nicknamed the Belgian Zola from then on, a label he rejected: his style, laden with rare words, sets him apart from the naturalists.
Who it is for
A novel of rural life, written directly in French, in a prose heavy with matter and colour; the text is freely available on Wikisource.
Prizes and reception
His best-known novel; its rejection by the official jury made its author the leader of a generation.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.