LE BONHEUR DE BARBEZIEUX: ""The Happiness of Barbezieux

Leisurely memoirs seem to be the order of the day in France, and again a novelist-philosopher makes use of the genre. Here Chardonne portrays a very uneventful, simple life in Barbezieux, a small village in a region once famous for its wines, now for its cognac. School, law, military life, and finally years of retreat due to tuberculosis. Paris, working as an editor for Stock, and bits of this and that about authors. Two things are outstanding in this rather specialized remembrance of things past, one, the picture of the village and countryside of his youth, the other his mellow, perceptive commentary on mankind, rather than any specific things he has experienced personally. He is a philosopher first, a story-teller secondly, while the reverse may be said of Carco.