Memoirs of a Breton Peasant

by Deguignet, Jean-Marie; Rouz, Bernez; Asher, Linda

• ISBN13: 9781583226162
• ISBN10: 1583226168
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-03
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

Memoirs of A Breton Peasant combines the discovery of a fascinating document of nineteenth-century history with an extraordinary life story. As lively as an adventure novel, the account bristles with the curiosity of an alert, opinionated autodidact from the very lowest level of peasant society, as Jean-Marie Deguignet moves through the world of his time. Most records from nineteenth-century Brittany are the chronicles of and by the middle and upper classes-the formally educated, the advantaged. Deguignet is unique not only as a reading and writing peasant, but in his skepticism regarding the Church; his interest in science, astronomy, and languages; and in his keen-often caustic-observations of the world and people around him. Born in 1834 near Quimper, in Brittany, to landless farmers, the young Deguignet was sent out several times a week to beg for the family's food. After some adolescent years as a cowherd and a domestic speaking only Breton, he left the province as a soldier, avid for knowledge of the vast world. He taught himself Latin, then French, then Italian and Spanish; he read history and philosophy and politics and literature. He was sent to fight in the Crimean war, to attend at Napoleon III's coronation ceremonies, to support Italy's liberation struggle, and to defend the hapless French puppet emperor Maximilian in Mexico. He returned home to live as a tobacco farmer, falling back into dire poverty. Throughout the tale, Deguignet's freethinking, almost anarchic views put him ahead of his time and often (sadly, for him) out of step with his fellows. Deguignet's voluminous notebooks, written from 1897 to 1904, have sold over two hundred sixty-five thousand copies to date in France. Linda Asher (Translator), former fiction editor at The New Yorker, has previously translated into English Restif de la Bretonne, Victor Hugo, George Simenon, and Milan Kundera. The last book she translated for Seven Stories, Martin Winckler's The Case of Dr. Sachs, won the French-American translation prize in 2001.

Author Biography

Bernez Rouz, a member of the Arkae Association of Historical Research, has devoted his life to tracking down the complete set of the notebooks of Jean-Marie Deguignet, only a fraction of which had been on record for more than a century

Table of Contents

The Story Behind This Story	p. 11
Translator's Note	p. 19
Maps	p. 20
Chronology	p. 21
Author's Apostrophe to the Reader	p. 23
The Beggar Boy 1834-1853
That pestilent sewer, the Rue Vili	p. 28
My third accident	p. 29
Prayers and catechism	p. 34
A natural history of men and women	p. 34
Those characters we used to call wild men	p. 36
Horse-movers and wolf-killers	p. 41
Stories and legends	p. 45
The beggar's trade	p. 45
Potato death	p. 49
The legend of the Black Cat (Ar has du)	p. 50
My first Communion	p. 56
My fourth mortal accident	p. 59
The Revolution of 1848	p. 61
At the Quimper hospice	p. 63
The idler-kings of Lower Brittany	p. 68
Terrible and cruel noblemen	p. 71
The Midsummer Night's festival	p. 73
Extraordinary visitors	p. 76
At death's door for the fifth time	p. 80
A professor of agriculture	p. 84
We would have orgies	p. 87
Superstitions	p. 88
Gwerz de Ker-Is (The Ballad of Ker-Is)	p. 90
Learning to write	p. 95
A regular domestic servant	p. 98
Observing the moon	p. 101
Learning French	p. 103
The Breton saints	p. 108
The first telegraph line	p. 112
At the recruitment office	p. 113
The Soldier 1853-1868
This barracks looked less cheerful	p. 121
Tu farai un bounn soudart (You'll make a good soldier)	p. 123
All I heard was foul language	p. 126
You asked for it, so now march or die doing it!	p. 128
At the Sathonay camp	p. 133
A volunteer for the Crimea	p. 136
Malta	p. 139
Iss Sebaistoupoul!	p. 139
The terrain was strewn with shells	p. 141
The battle of Sevastopol	p. 144
Scurvy, dysentery, and typhus	p. 147
My learned teacher	p. 149
Two good enemies	p. 151
The whirlwind	p. 154
The horrible black plague	p. 155
Jerusalem pilgrimage	p. 158
Our turn to embark	p. 169
Marshal de Castellane	p. 171
Napoleon III at Chalons	p. 173
Long live Italy! Long live France!	p. 176
Viva nostri liberatori!	p. 178
Triumphal entrance	p. 181
Great battle, great victory	p. 185
The agreements between the two imperial rogues	p. 192
Demobilization at Treport	p. 194
I was discharged to Ergue-Gaberic	p. 197
I was off to see a new country	p. 200
I recited Dante's lines to him	p. 202
The Arabs caught sight of me and cried out in terror	p. 204
Now I was a schoolmaster	p. 208
Long expedition	p. 211
The fierce mountain men of Kabylia	p. 212
From Algiers to Vera Cruz	p. 219
Three thousand leagues from France	p. 220
That celestial paradise, Avilez: 1866	p. 224
Gorgeous orgies	p. 227
Social questions	p. 228
The enemy was upon us	p. 230
So we were run out	p. 233
In Mexico City	p. 238
The last of the Mexican bullets	p. 241
I started telling stories	p. 244
The Breton and the Corsican get along fine	p. 247
Promoted to sergeant	p. 249
The hermit beelover	p. 250
To my old Brittany I shall return	p. 252
"Long live the Emperor!"	p. 254
The Farmer 1868-1882
The prodigal rich man	p. 259
The great pardon of Kerdevot	p. 261
I shall set up an apiary	p. 265
She was a daughter of Kernoas	p. 271
My dreams of freedom were over	p. 281
Betrothal meats	p. 285
The sacrifice is to take place in a few days	p. 291
The wedding feast lasted two days	p. 305
A few hours of supreme happiness	p. 311
My "new-fangled ways"	p. 314
The good mother-in-law would grumble	p. 318
His little god locked up in a box	p. 323
My farming follies	p. 325
Long live the republic! Down with the priests!	p. 327
Heaven's fire	p. 334
I have fattened you for fifteen years ... and now you put me out	p. 336
The rumor of my death reached Toulven before I did	p. 339
Forty-eight years old and half-crippled	p. 344
Persecuted 1882-1905
The national insurance company	p. 353
Delirium tremens	p. 360
My tobacco shop	p. 362
The fine lady	p. 365
The big day	p. 368
So things went along rather nicely	p. 372
There probably never will be a woman without vice or fault	p. 374
This blow could only have come from the parish	p. 380
I am run out of Pluguffan	p. 381
Taking my children	p. 385
And I began to write the story of my life	p. 388
My son is buried	p. 391
The Ergue-Gaberic paper mill	p. 394
Thankless child	p. 396
That great Breton Regionalist Union	p. 400
It is the twentieth century and I am still alive	p. 401
These stupid proletarians	p. 402
A month with no food	p. 403
"Pistigou"	p. 405
I resolve to kill myself	p. 406
Declared a madman, idiot, fool	p. 409
The decree expelling the nuns	p. 413
A short treatise on beekeeping	p. 418
The drunkards' room	p. 424
At the library	p. 425
I have seen my name shining amid literary luminaries	p. 427
It is time to end	p. 429
About the Editor and Translator	p. 432
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