The primary diversion of the bored aristocrat is hunting for pleasure, and in A King Alone, Giono has Langlois organize a highly ceremonial wolf hunt. The ritual aspects of hunting—the music of the hunting horns, the choreography of the parties of men, the trained animals—are starkly set against the spectacle of the kill. Sausage and her friend Madame Tim attend, perched in a sled in their party dresses under warm blankets, and the excited hunters illumine the night with their torches. At the base of a sheer cliff, a true dead end, they will witness “a short, silent, secret meeting between the giver and the receiver of sudden death.” The logic of sacrifice that the narrator had described earlier is linked explicitly to the rituals of communion; the gory serpentine and corkscrew decorations on the slain animals are evoked in the embroideries of the chasubles; and, ultimately, the blood on the snow suggests the writer’s marks on the white page. The ever mysterious Langlois, who states that no man is a monster, is himself a person of what seem to be compulsive repetitions. In the novel’s final pages, we find him literally reenacting the gaze of Perceval, transfixed by drops of goose blood in the snow: soon a third ritualized death will bring the story to a shocking, paradoxical conclusion.

As the reader closes A King Alone, many images will remain: the snow as “thick, frozen dust from a world that must have exploded,” the silent forests, the obdurate mountains. Yet one image will linger in particular: the magisterial beech, standing next to the sawmill, which appears on the first page of the novel. Outliving generation after generation, perhaps a witness to the region’s history of atrocities from the Cathars to modern wars, the tree holds the secret of the serial deaths. Yet it endures beyond them, unharmed. The narrator tells us from the start that the beech is dedicated to Apollo Citharoedus, the lyre-carrying god of order, light, and inspiration. In the end, the great tree invites us to ask ourselves if human beings might share in its powers: “so simple [. . .] it knows itself and judges itself.”

—SUSAN STEWART

Translator's Note

THE TRANSLATOR would like to thank the Banff International Literary Translation Centre for providing a stretch of time and a beautiful environment to begin work on this translation. In particular at BILTC, Paul Gagné and Katie Silver gave me valuable input. In addition, thanks to Donald Nicholson-Smith and Emmanuelle Ertel for putting their heads together with me over some purely Gionesque conundrums. And thanks to Edwin Frank for taking on the editing of this King, making the translation richer and wiser.

—ALYSON WATERS

A KING ALONE

Let us leave a king all alone to reflect on himself quite at leisure, without any gratification of the senses, without any care in his mind, without society; and we will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness.