The novel’s French title and closing words come from one of the most well-known pensées of Blaise Pascal: Un roi sans divertissements est un homme plein de misères. Pascal explains that a lonely king, with neither sensual nor spiritual resources, will succumb to melancholy, just as any ordinary person who grows dissatisfied with his own room, home, or neighborhood will “go to sea or to besiege a town.” Pascal’s pensée continually haunts this story where events that took place in 1843, ’44, ’45, and ’46 are narrated eighty years or so later against the continuing backdrop of the French colonial war in Algeria. Giono subtly notes that the principal figures here—the police captain Langlois and the café owner and retired prostitute nicknamed Saucisse, which is translated here as “Sausage”—are each in their own way veterans of that war: Langlois in combat with the Algerian tribes led by Abd-el-Kader, Sausage through barracks “service” with its soldiers. The two, who while away the hours together in the café discussing “the ways of the world,” are settlers in, not native to, the village, and they remain objects of fascination for their neighbors. Meanwhile, we follow Sausage’s total preoccupation with Langlois, yet we know very little of Langlois’s own thoughts.

As A King Alone begins, the narrator explains his place in the village and his belated detective work: “I say ‘we’; naturally I wasn’t there because all that happened in 1843, but I had to put my heart and soul into the whole thing and ask so many questions to get to the bottom of it that I ended up being part of it . . .” The narrator and the village remain unnamed, though they are surrounded at no great distance by real places in Haute-Provence: the towns of Chichilianne, Clelles, Mens, Prébois, Chirouzes, and Diois, and the city of Grenoble, the seat of state authority. Yet places less than a day’s walk away might as well be another country, and the village, in its isolation, is bound by iron ties of mutual dependence and kinship. The narrator introduces us at the start to Frédéric, who took over the village sawmill from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather—all Frédérics. He goes on to recount the genealogies of the village families and their intermarriages. Everyone is known; everyone accounted for.