A Writer Learns His Lesson

Posted on September 26, 2005

It was supposed to be another of those Under the Tuscan Sun/A Year in Provence kind of books. But the book that author Pierre Jourde produced about his time spent in the tiny French village of Lussaud was anything but flattering to the villagers. And when the author unwisely returned to the village where he had done his research, the residents physically attacked him. Now, everyone is suing everyone.

His book, Pays Perdu (Lost Land), paints a brutal but comic portrait of the 10-house hamlet at the end of a winding track in the hills of central France. The words "alcohol", "solitude" and "merde" all feature prominently. Written in the style of a novel but based on real characters and events, it focuses on a young girl's funeral attended by one-toothed peasants, raucous shepherdesses and village idiots.
The 25 members of the five families that live in Lussaud only read the book a year after it was published. They were outraged. Their community, they discovered, resembled "a hamlet of bandits in the Pashtoun tribal zone. Even those who live in the neighbouring village consider people here as foreigners, some kind of outlaws." Locals do indeed eye strange cars with suspicion. Just when the visitor feels like turning back, stone houses with the region's typical lava slated roofs appear. Beyond a cemetery and an ancient bread oven an old farmer tends to his flowers to the sound of cow bells, barking sheepdogs and cockerels. The smell of manure and hay is strong.
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His main crime in the village's eyes was to have recounted tales gathered from years of talking in confidence. "I naively assumed that any story told to me in such a tiny place was common knowledge," he said. But one case of alleged adultery going back 40 years was unknown to the former lovers' respective children until the book's release. Worse, the children had ended up marrying each other.

Even after writing a letter of apology to the village, he should have known better than to return there. But he tempted fate and most of the villagers turned out in force to lynch him. No one was actually killed, but charges of attempted murder have been filed and the French police are investigating the incident.

Let Monsiour Jourde's sad experience be a lesson to all writers: When writing a vicious portrait of a community where you have befriended the natives and wormed their secrets out of them, you might want to cross said village off your list of future vacation spots.