ANGELO

Angelo Pardi, hero of The Horseman on the Roof, a dashing young Hussar colonel and expert swordsman, has had to escape into France from his native Piedmont after killing an Austrian policeman-spy in a duel. Travelling the roads of Provence in the rude disguise of a French Workman, he falls in with an eccentric old marquise, Celine de Theus, and becomes a guest at the chateau where she lives with her brother Laurent. We are in the early years of the nineteenth century; the French Revolution and the conquests of Napoleon are still sending shock waves throughout Europe. This is the era of seditious movements to unseat those in power and destabilize monarchies -- and no one nasa greater appetite for fishing in these troubled waters than Laurent, an elderly marquis whose years are belied by his youthful energy on horseback. Now the marquis has married a raven-haired beauty in the prime of her youth, Pauline, who is not indifferent to their new Italian guest. Angelo is the archetypal novel of romance and intrigue, which Jean Giono vests with a psychological depth that transcends the genre.