• MOUNT PEACOCK
By Marie Mauron : translated by F. L. Lucas This series of brief sketches (Cambridge University Press, 6s.) sets out—with advantages, but with real advantages-, the author's experiences, as both Schoolmistress and Mayor's Secretary, in the Provençal hamlet of Mont-Paon. Unfor- tunately, the French text is not available for comparison : a French edition has not yet been made. But unless Mr. Lucas has in/proved on the original (he could : he is a stylist—in R. L. Stevenson's kind), Marie Mauron is responsible for a very fine piece of territory writing indeed. Her obvious affinity is with Alphonse Daudet, with his Lettres de mon moulin most closely : Mont-Paon lies, moreover, midway between Tarascon and The Mill. But this is the Provence of Montaigne, also, and Montesquieu and Mistral—a region where vast amounts of bad writing and song, and some good, are always being made ; and direct imitation is an irrelevant charge where regional tradition is still so strong. It is the twentieth century's rude impingement on the -daily working of that tradition, in fact, which makes up Mount Peacock's dominant (implicit) theme. In the comic interplay of pro- gressive and reactionary, in the agitation for four electric lamps to light up the streets, in quarrels between the delight- fully sluggish Mayor and anxious, bumptious Theophile, who wants to be Mayor (but is not allowed even to cure the children of worms)—we are presented, on a plane of ridiculous propor- tions, with an epitome of half the modern process (with The Problem of Russia, for instance). And we are presented with these things (and with a good deal more, in the way of humours, manners, pathos) in a delicate-fingered, sharp style which is (even in English !) French prose at its swiftest and most assured. The Latin still has his strength : what senti- mental landscape we should have had if this piece of quickened Dorfgeschichte had been done by a German— or an Englishman.
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