Journal 1887-1910 (riverrun editions)

''As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads; as poet, I prefer to see them neglected.''

Jules Renard was a French literary figure of the late nineteenth century. Not a Parisian but a committed countryman, he was elected mayor in 1904 of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote part of northern Burgundy. He had the soul of a rustic bourgeois but the ambition of a metropolitan, and his wife''s money allowed him to move in elevated circles, though he seemed an awkward customer, a badger, and looked like one. He wrote fiction, journalism and drama, very successfully, but the Journal is Renard''s masterpiece, the least categorizable work of the French fin de si¿e.

The Journal constitutes a profusion of entries, without stitching or pattern: mordant reflections on style, literature and theatre; portraits of family, friends and the Parisian literary scene; quasi-ethnographical observations on village life and notations of the